The Specular Experience of Migration in Mati Diop's Atlantique

Mati Diop describes her film Atlantique as a story of "la jeunesse fantôme, disparue en mer," referring to the Senegalese migrants who return as ghosts to regain contact with their loved ones and seek justice after their death. Drawing from Achille Mbembe's theory of "specular experiences" and Derrida's work on mourning, I argue that the ghosts do not solely communicate the haunting sense of loss felt by the characters who remain in Senegal, but also the condition of both the migrants and the migrants' loved ones. Migration creates an extreme form of human life characterized by movement, metamorphosis, a lack of control, and an indefinite present. The migrant's traumatic condition fabricates a situation of living death that is expressed literally through Souleiman's spectral return but is also visible in the instability and rupture that transform the life of his lover, Ada. Atlantique suggests, however, that this instability in turn allows Ada to re-invent herself, to adapt to her tragic circumstances, and even to gain a certain degree of autonomy. It is in this complex interplay between ghosts, death, and loss that we can recognize the hidden potential for agency in situations of migration.