Damien Froidevaux, Death of the Serpent God, 2014. All rights reserved. At the age of 18 Koumba got involved in a fight with rival teenagers in Paris. In 48 hours, she was deported from France, where she had lived since the age of two, to Senegal, her parents’ country of origin. In her language, habits, way of living, she is French – except that she neglected to request citizenship when she turned 18. She finds herself back in her family village, a remote, rural community far from the life she had known.
The quiet violence of the French expulsion machine is deeply felt by Koumba, turning an upset teenager into an angry woman. She is angry at the injustice of her deportation; at the village folks, who scorn at her ways (some call her “White Koumba” in disdain); and at filmmaker Damien Froidevaux, who followed her quest if not for justice, at least to secure a visa and regain her life in France.
She knows that he is able to fly back to Europe – to his Paris neighbourhood, not too far from the house where her own parents and siblings still live – while she is left to deal with the birth of a first child, the death of another and increasing tension with her relatives in the village. Froidevaux’s ability to leave and come back to Senegal is used as a narrative device that allows the film to move at a brisk pace as it follows five years in Koumba’s life. But Froidevaux’s freedom of movement appears, quite rightly, as the other side of the racist and exclusionary logic that made Koumba’s situation a common occurrence in France. This is not lost on Koumba, who regularly points out that the filmmaker couldn’t possibly understand her situation.
