Fuelling Bodies: Movement, embodiment, and climate crisis in Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi

Abstract

In this article, I offer a reading of Wanuri Kahiu’s short film Pumzi (2009), which depicts the aftermath of a devastating water crisis that forced human communities in East Africa underground in order to survive. Following scholars such as Ritch Calvin, Kirk Bryan Sides, or Mich Nyawalo, who have dissected the film in the context of its treatment of environmental issues and its Africanfuturist leanings, I aim to foreground the function of the body in the film, identifying the peculiar nature of Maitu community’s displacement (vertical rather than lateral, confining them to a space which cuts them off from the environment) as the reason for the rise of new forms of bodily exploitation. In my reading of the film, I want to argue that the corporeal hierarchies established within the community facilitate the emergence of what I term “fuelling bodies”, forcibly turned by the authoritarian governing body into sources of energy as the last existing natural resource to be exploited. Drawing on the theory of science fiction, Hagar Kotef’s writing on movement, and postcolonial theory, I close-read the film to explore the relationship it establishes between displacement and the bodily hierarchies that exist in the community. In turn, I argue that the nature of the Maitu community’s displacement gives rise to hindered freedom of movement, bodily oppression, and loss of communal ties and consequently prevents the community from addressing the legacy of the climate crisis, which has arrested them in stasis, leaving them unable to dream of better futures. As I demonstrate, it is only once Asha rejects and actively rebels against the imposed inhibitions of movement and leaves the spaces of containment that make up the Maitu community that she can realise the utopian post-apocalyptic process of renewal and rejuvenation, both for the natural environment and the human communities.