Becoming Vera

State of Suspension

Separations

Aleksandr Pushin, Eugeni Onegin

Introduction: Citizenship Political, Colonial, Cultural

A few years ago, when I showed the documentary Becoming Vera to an international audience in Germany, a French viewer-participant expressed his astonishment that we had made such a ‘French’ film. The remark clearly went beyond the obvious, namely that the child who is the film's main character is, in fact, French. She was born in Paris, although brought over from Cameroon for the occasion; her mother is primarily French, although of Russian descent. Vera goes to school in France, and hence, she is in the process of being shaped by that forceful school system I admire and find confining at the same time, even if she spends much of her summer holidays in Fumban, the capital of Bamun, in Cameroon. All these forms of Frenchness are subject to some qualification, but then again, these are minor.

That colleague's remark was also more than the expected French-centredness of the French. But to get that, I had to ‘become French’ myself: identify with a French look at the film. After a while of that exercise it dawned on me how much of the portions of the film that are not devoted to Vera's life in Paris are also strongly coloured by Frenchness. That must have been what he meant! Going through some of these, I will try to point out what ‘cultural citizenship’, as I call it to distinguish it from both nationality and identity, can mean, and how it is constructed and transmitted. The case of a young child, still blissfully unaware of the pressure of cultural identity that our time exerts on its citizens, seems to lend itself quite well to such an inquiry. Therefore, I will focus on her dawning, or ‘becoming’, cultural citizenship, and the various framings that contribute to it.

A clear case is the Palestinian who speaks in our 2005 documentary Access Denied. This man, Ihab Saloul, says two things during that film. One is that, as a Palestinian, he has no passport, hence, no national identity. He is a citizen of a non-existing country; falling under Israeli dominance and yet deprived of that identity as well.