This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection: Staying Power

In the opening, the aloneness of the denizens of the tavern, even in the midst of company, is also haunting: a man stands alone against the wall drinking a quart of beer directly from the bottle and nodding absently to the music; two lovers sit on a bench with their backs to each other; another lone man smokes a cigarette and blows a cloud of smoke; a woman dances alone, languidly flapping her arms like a drunken bird to the music of the lesiba. Indeed, everything is languid and lonesome here, including the music. A lesiba is a mouth-resonated wind instrument played by the Basotho and the Khoikhoi peoples, with a flattened quill attached to a string stretched over a long stick. Its notes are often accompanied by guttural grunts made by the player. In this scene, these sounds enhance the ethereality of the ambience.

The lesiba player here is also the film’s narrator. He is portrayed by the well-known South African actor Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha. He gives a virtuoso performance without moving an inch throughout the movie. Only his face, as seen in the tavern, and his elegiac voice carry the gravitas of the narration. His pace is slow and deliberate. He introduces us to Mantoa’s village: the old people called it Phula ea Meokho, which literally means the Valley of Tears but is translated as Plains of Weeping in the movie for, I think, poetic reasons. When French missionaries came to Lesotho in the 1830s, they renamed the village Nasaretha, after the biblical Nazareth. The narrator tells us, “They say in Nasaretha, if you place your ear to the ground, you can still hear the cries and whispers of those who perished under the flood, their spirits hallowing from the deep.”

From this, it becomes clear that setting is very important in This Is Not a Burial. The landscape itself tells the story. It is a character in its own right, not just a place where the story happens because a story must happen somewhere. It even speaks and cries for what the villagers have lost and what they are about to lose.

The village is self-sufficient, though its resources are meager. This is a valley of death, yet it is also a healing valley, where flowers and herbs that cure different ailments grow in abundance. Mantoa yearns to sleep and never wake up again. Yet she continues to help the sick get well with herbs from the mountain and valley, and to engage in life-sustaining activities in communion with the rest of society, winnowing corn and washing clothes in the river even while yearning for death. At one point, she tells the village pastor, “There is no meaning to my husband’s death . . . Yes, that’s grief.” She arranges her own funeral—let the dead bury their own dead, the narrator rejoins—giving instructions on how and when it should be carried out, who should sing Sesotho traditional music there, and what kind of coffin should be used.

She spends her time listening to obituaries on the radio. She warms the batteries of her radio in the sun on the windowsill to prolong their life. It is a telling symbolic act. She shows a flicker of a smile as she waltzes alone in the room, in the arms of an imaginary lover. The narrator admonishes her: “Lament, old widow. Weep. Weep. For death has forgotten you.”

She wears perpetual mourning clothes even as she visits neighbors, giving them life by helping those who are sick; she spends the late afternoons preparing the site at the graveyard for her own grave. When the villagers refuse to dig her grave, she digs it herself.

But for now, we leave her there, digging. We go back to what we started with: how exquisitely this movie has been made, and how effectively it transmits the meaning in a simple story by defying a lot of established conventions of contemporary cinema.

First of all, Lesotho cineaste Mosese—who wrote, directed, and edited the film—gives a unique kind of narration to the poetic and musical narrator, drawing very much from such Sesotho performance modes as tšomo (written in South African Sesotho orthography as tshomo), a classical oral tradition that is still in use, especially among families in rural Lesotho. The expository nature of tšomo lends itself excellently to the filmmaker’s style. He confirmed in an interview on South Africa’s Radio 702 that he sees his film as “almost a folklore narrative.”

This is truly a Lesotho movie, not only because of its setting and the fact that it was created by a Lesotho artist—born and raised in Hlotse, Lesotho, Mosese now lives and works in Berlin—who is drawing from a deeply Sesotho aesthetic. Almost all the actors—including Makhaola Ndebele, who plays the pastor; Mofokeng Wa Makhetha, whom I have already mentioned, as the narrator and player of the lesiba lamentations; and Silas Taunyane Monyatsi, the bureaucrat and politician—have Lesotho roots. This may come as a surprise to followers of the South African film and television industry, as these are familiar faces there. Of the principal cast, only the South African Twala Mhlongo is an import.

The most important convention that Mosese defies here, a choice that could have endangered the reception of his film if he had failed to handle it with panache, is that of beginning one’s film in medias res. The modern reader and viewer expects exciting action from the word go. Yet this movie starts languidly and depends not only on the lesiba and narration but also on an emotional ambience that foreshadows the texture and the tenor of the story. It is fortunate for the director that he was not dependent on South African funders; they would likely have insisted that the first thirty minutes of This Is Not a Burial be chopped off, to accord with the only formula of storytelling they know—which they often refer to as the tried-and-tested Hollywood formula. These film-development mandarins would have been riled up: “What’s exposition doing in this screenplay?”

It would have been a sad loss. It would have messed up this work of art.