According to the International Organization for Migration, 2013 was the deadliest year yet for clandestine emigrants. The Pirogue is a powerful eulogy to those lost. Indeed, the film is dedicated to the five thousand West Africans who perished in their attempts to reach Europe in the wooden fishing vessels from which the film gets its name.
Despite certain clichéd story lines and characters, The Pirogue succeeds both as a film and as an indictment of the anti-immigration policies that underpin “Fortress Europe” and compel would-be migrants to risk their lives on the high seas. The film is composed of roughly four sections. The first portrays daily life in Dakar, where we meet the main characters and their families, and learn about their aspirations and anxieties concerning the looming voyage. In the opening scene the viewer is given a front-row seat to one of Dakar’s famous wrestling matches, complete with entourages and marabouts supporting their gris-gris-adorned grapplers and the roar of the crowd when one pins the other to the sandy ground. Afterward we learn the meaning of the scene: the loser may have been talented and ambitious, but he “needs more training,” just as the protagonist, Baye Laye, feels that his younger friend Abou is not ready to captain an emigrant-filled pirogue bound for the Canary Islands. Baye, as a more experienced boatman, is sought after by the neighborhood “big man” who uses Abou’s naive aspirations—stoked by the large, expat-built houses in his neighborhood—to coerce Baye into agreeing to take the trip.
During the tense negotiations, we catch a glimpse of the money and power at work in the circuits of clandestine immigration. The film, which is intentionally spare in dialogue and plot, would have nonetheless benefited from more exploration of this crucial yet invisible aspect of the migration story. Although it provides an African interpretation of the injustices associated with the global North–South divide, the role played by power relations within African communities in perpetuating that system is unfortunately left out. The film also says little about the relationship between emigration and the families left behind. Curiously, Baye’s wife does not oppose his leaving, but rather suggests that China would be a better destination than a Europe mired in economic crisis.
We meet the other passengers as well as the trip’s shifty middleman on the beach just before the group sets off with an air of optimism. The small craft bobbing in the ocean’s currents is an apt visual metaphor for the mixture of possibility and fatalism that the passengers seem to be feeling during the film’s second part. Unlikely friendships develop as one man burns his papers and another attempts to learn some Spanish phrases.
The third part of the film begins when the pirogue encounters an identical boat that is disabled and full of desperate migrants who begin leaping into the water at the prospect of being rescued. After a quick but fierce debate, Baye and the rest decide to leave the stranded boat behind and the positive mood on board is never regained. The situation quickly deteriorates as one engine breaks down, followed by a vicious storm that claims the lives of three passengers, including the young Abou, who falls overboard and is lost in the waves. The failure of the second and last motor renders this a moot point as even the stoic Baye begins to panic. As things unravel, an ethereal dream sequence unfolds that transports one Guinean passenger back to his savanna home while others reflect on what they have lost and yet still hope to gain. The group’s breaking point is reached when some passengers are caught trying to toss the sole female into the ocean after accusing her of bringing bad luck.The graphic scenes that follow—several lifeless bodies lying in the boat—provide a visceral and unforgettable sense of the true cost of clandestine migration. As the surviving members sing a dirge for the deceased, a helicopter is spotted overhead: the Spanish Red Cross.
The fourth and final part of the film begins with the emigrants being escorted barefoot into custody where the mundane details of expulsion and rejection—fifteen Euros and a sandwich—are poignantly documented. An Air Senegal plane is then seen touching down in Dakar as the survivors are whisked right back to where they started.
The beauty of La Pirogue lies in its powerful visual narrative and eyewitness account of what it really means to migrate clandestinely from Africa to Europe. The film is able to evoke much concerning the worsening problem of clandestine immigration in the world while maintaining a simplicity of form that is artistically compelling.
