From Nigeria to Brazil: Unravelling violent diasporic legacies
Responding to Agudas by Amber Akaunu
To view Amber Akaunu’s Agudas is to view a magnificent example of visual narration on a subject that requires as much quiet rumination as her film requires multiple viewings. Akaunu’s three-minute film explores her journey to learn more about her Nigerian ancestors’ capture, transport to, and eventual return from Brazil as enslaved people at the height of the Transatlantic slave trade. Far removed from a standard documentary or personal essay, however, this work displays an intriguing combination of poetic short filmmaking, visually splendid animation technique, archival photography, multiple soundscapes, and well-researched historical documentation.
Agudas easily proves itself an assured work of art. The gently narrated poetry and snappy montage speak to Akaunu’s eye for style. At first, we are shown footage of Black Lives Matter demonstrations and broader language referring to the travails and complexities of the African diaspora. Brief footage of a young person opening a book about Afro-Brazilians hints at where the film intends to take us. As the piece discusses the narrator’s vital questions regarding her ancestors’ experiences, the subject and context gradually come into clearer view. Agudas transitions into eye-popping, vibrant animation, before zeroing in on her personal focus: the violent legacies of the Brazilian enslavement industry, and the curious histories of those who outlived it.
Akaunu demonstrates an affecting vulnerability as both an artist conducting a bold experiment and a descendant attempting to square a particularly enigmatic circle. The effect is genuine and compelling; proof that even the most grave and complex questions of identity and reckoning need not be presented with grandiose or over-saturated heft to be nonetheless overwhelming. Agudas is meant to invite reflection rather than confusion; the answers to its lingering questions are too personal and amorphous to be straightforwardly deciphered. I found it particularly captivating that Akaunu chose to conceal the film’s eponymous term towards the bottom of the third of these clippings, such that on first viewing, it is easy to miss its inclusion altogether. Pause this frame and you will find the definition of ‘agudás’ hidden in plain sight: “African or Brazilian-born freedpeople who returned to Africa over the course of the nineteenth century.” In doing so, Akaunu almost buries the lede of her entire project, but in such a way that the experience of watching it recalls the very same myopia that the artist is so passionately acknowledging within herself.
Crisp, informative stills juxtaposed on top of a blood-red-tinted ocean speak volumes, just as a disarming cut from an aerial view of the sea plunges us below the scarlet waters, and into an underwater nightmare. Here, Akaunu’s narration both reveals and conceals a most fascinating aspect of this narrative: she intones, simply, “Nigeria to Brazil, Brazil to Nigeria”, as scans of time-weathered archives present historical evidence of something clearly significant, but obscured. The edit moves slightly too quickly for us to tell exactly what we are looking at – yet this feels wholly intentional. A flicker of revelation, wrenched away with the same instinctive fear and self-preserving reticence which so often compels our minds to reel back from fully processing or interpreting unspeakable agonies of the past.
At the root, Agudas spotlights Akaunu’s personal perspective without excluding the countless parallel experiences that many in the African diaspora have felt at one point or another: the shiver of an intangible loss, the pang of an abstract regret, the anxiety of realizing that so much has been taken from us. So much, in fact, that it is awfully tempting to define all these experiences in terms of loss and trauma – which feels all the more hopeless and traumatic than anyone could bear. In other words, as Akaunu elegantly puts it, should we be grateful or hateful? The hate can feel useful and cathartic, yet all-consuming and overly miserable. The gratefulness can feel impotent and insufficient, yet liberating and hearteningly optimistic. Agudas considers both avenues, and artfully illustrates the temptations and limitations of the two.
Yet Akaunu avoids any simplistic ‘choice’ between them. Instead of focusing wholly on the choice between embracing the lessons of the past or despising its myriad disgraces, Agudas settles upon the immutable persistence of those who never lost their sense of self, while leaning into a humanist uncertainty of life. We are constantly evolving, rethinking, reframing, relocating. We might never comfortably process what happened to our ancestors, but it is in embracing the ever-changing journey that we – as the young person does in the film’s closing frames – may walk on, in some semblance of peace.
