A love letter is a tired metaphor, but this is the first thing that comes to mind when one tries to describe Jessica Beshir’s 2021 film “Faya Dayi.” The film is a black-and-white sensory experience that takes you to the highlands of Harar, holding your eyes and ears captive for two full hours. This love letter, or indeed, when one considers the central role sound plays in this film, love song, doesn’t shy away from voicing the problems and frustrations that the lover feels but returns to the causes of the attraction all the same. We understand that these highlands envelop you in all kinds of ways, and Beshir seems to be trying to make the audience understand the hold that this place has on her.
The film opens with a group of men harvesting the narcotic leaf khat, the bane of Ethiopian social and economic life. From the very start, Beshir inculcates a cognitive dissonance in the viewer: The shots are beautiful, the men are working in harmony, the leaves are rustling mesmerizingly. It is as if you are having a bit of khat yourself! But the minute you come back to your senses you realize you are watching the harvest of a product that has caused such misery to so many people in the country.
Just as the black-and-white images feel like an extension of the dark theater you are sitting in, you feel surrounded by the sounds coming from the screen: the leaves, people’s hands on mud walls, women adjusting fabric. You feel you have entered an ASMR universe. The camera keeps focusing on different surfaces and shapes, and either gives you what kind of sound that surface would make, or encourages you to imagine the sound you would make if you were there. In this respect, the film feels like a virtual reality session – your senses have been stimulated to the point of inhabiting the space the camera is showing you.
In this virtual world, your guide is a woman’s voice, telling you the story of Dhu al-Qarnayn, a character from the Quran that is much embellished upon, differently in different Muslim cultures. He is a figure of great power, and in the story that our guide tells, he is looking for the “water of life,” in the film symbolizing no doubt the resources and the willpower Ethiopia needs to muster up to provide a better future for its sons and daughters. We listen to khat workers who dream of saving up enough money to leave the country, and also follow the fortunes, as much as the film’s montage allows us, of a boy whose father is addicted to khat. The voice-over stories don’t always match the faces that we see presented to us, further blurring the boundaries of documentary and feature film.
At the end of the story our guide is telling us about Dhu al-Qarnayn, he is gripped by the fear of being forgotten when he dies and God tells him that whoever eats khat will remember him. Placing khat in this mystical narrative seems to give its consumption some legitimacy, suggesting that Ethiopians are somehow acting out a ritual of remembrance ordained by God. Or maybe we are supposed to see this dependence on khat as Dhu al-Qarnayn’s curse that afflicts people hundreds of years into the future.
One of the voiceover stories is a boy who tells us how his father becomes different people during different times of day, according to whether he has had his khat or not. We listen to him as we watch a man lounge on a sofa in a vest, listening to a Walkman, and leafing through the leaves of a small khat branch. It is mesmerizing to watch him, and other Ethiopians in this film, flick at certain leaves, pick at certain others, performing a mysterious selection process as to which leaves are fit for chewing.
The father is then brought to the presence of sheiks for a cure for his addiction, but it is difficult to say what these sheikhs think when it comes to khat, for another figure we visit quite often in the film is a man with a hundred wrinkles on his face, lounging, and not listening to the Walkman but reading the Quran, while enjoying the state of mind khat brings.
Khat permeates the whole film, and can be said to be a filter through which we are watching these moving black-and-white images. Is Beshir suggesting that khat is a stimulant that transforms the world we see and experience, just like cinema? That the addiction to khat could be comparable to the addiction we seem to have for these transformed, moving images? I may be reading too much into the “message” of the film, but it certainly creates a heightened awareness in the viewer, and so invites parallels with other heightened experiences. The argument can go the other way around too: Why resort to khat when we already have the medium of film that, as in “Faya Dayi,” can work such wonders on the senses?
