problems of allegory

‘Hyenas’ struck me as quite clever when I first heard the concept and I really liked a few of the scenes and symbols, such as the ‘road’- which is in fact identical to the land around it, save for the fact that it has slightly less vegetation- with a gate which everyone waits at despite the fact that there’s absolutely nothing barring them from simply going around it. It reminded me of Prof Parham’s comment in class about the ways in which the intangibles and metaphors of institution (‘grades’) actually become very real to us, so that we can rise on cue for a new class (or wait in line at a gate) at the sound of a bell, even when we know that the situation (gate that guards nothing) has changed and rendered the cue irrelevant.

But my initial intrigue about the film wore off pretty quickly, and I spent the lion’s share of my viewing trying to determine why it didn’t work for me. First, even as I understood the allegory of Ramatou as IMF leading the villagers astray, I couldn’t help but think back to the premise of the plot: namely, that Drame/Africa is actually the perpetrator of the evil done to Ramatou/IMF. (Even if we pin the ‘Africa’ symbolism on the villagers, and not Drame, Africa is still the one initially at fault. They set Ramatou on the path to prostitution and capitalism.) I found it hard to justify that, especially in a movie in which allegory is *so* prominent, and story so threadbare.

The prominence of the allegorical mechanism (at least in my eyes) made me wonder if it’s even possible to really feed allegory to adults. It’s like how no adult is capable of reading Chronicles of Narnia for the first time without being smacked in the face by all the Christian allegory, yet children don’t necessarily make the conscious connection at all. So are we even capable of ‘reading’ pure allegories as they’re intended- when the moral message filters into consciousness slowly if at all? The fact that adults have a much larger universe of reference and the awareness of multiplicities of meaning and shifting symbols means that it’s far harder to impart a clear message. They aren’t blank slates. So when marketed to adults, allegories risk being too obviously allegorical, which saps the story of real power, and also risk having said symbols misinterpreted. Context and anchoring are much more difficult. Granted, in the case of ‘Hyenas’, everyone in the class saw the IMF parallels, but that’s at least partly because the course readings and titles anchor that in our minds. I wonder whether we would have had any more divergence in our reading of the text if we watched it without the context of a) the lesson plan’s title/readings and b) the class itself.