At the intersection of trauma, precarity, and African cinema: A reflection on Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s grigris

In order to test the limits and possibilities of trauma theory’s applicability to films by African directors, and also to examine how trauma, woundedness, and precarity are projected in film, this chapter contemplates trauma, woundedness, and precarity in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s 2013 film Grigris. It starts with the premise that when blows to the body and the psyche are insidious, and when security and health must be purchased at an overwhelming price, trauma is not a reliving of a prior, shattering event as if it is occurring in the present, but a continuous puncture, an entrapment in a genre marked by the anticipation of future blows. Possibilities for escape, in this film, are imagined through poetic, somatic interludes. Traumatic looping is encoded in the eponymous Grigris’s body, and then transformed through dance.