“I had a farm in Africa,” Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke tells us over and over in Out of Africa. In addition to this farm around which much of the film revolves, Karen also considers herself the owner of a slew of furniture pieces, knick-knacks, and one fancy cuckoo clock that absolutely fascinates the native children who live on the farm. To put it mildly, Karen has a lot of possessions that she highly values. Upon her arrival in Africa, she is astonished (and super stressed out) that the local people would even consider sitting and walking on top of the crates that contain her Limoges and her crystal. Sarcastically, Denys Finch-Hatton, a big-game hunter and lover of Africa (and later of Karen) reassures her that the men “didn’t know it was Limoges.” This exchange becomes a pattern for the rest of the film: Karen often evincing a love of and desire to possess something and Denys trying to convince her that most things (if not everything) cannot actually be owned by anyone. The possession motif lends itself to everything from Karen’s farm and physical belongings to the land and people of Africa–as well as to Denys when he and Karen share a romantic relationship and Karen wishes that they would marry.

Karen and most of the other Europeans have come into Africa and taken charge as if it had been their land from the beginning–displacing the indigenous people, using up their natural resources, and slaughtering the wildlife. Denys laments the fact that much of what he loves about Africa (the wide open plains and towering mountains, the waters and the animals) will soon be gone as more and more Europeans invade the continent in search of wealth and power. Denys sees himself as similar to the land prior to the arrival of droves of Europeans: untamed and free. He refuses to marry Karen–and thus puts quite a damper on their relationship–because he feels marriage is restrictive (i.e., that Karen wants to own/keep him like one of her other precious belongings). This disagreement, of course, kills the relationship.

Ironically (spoiler alert!), Karen’s attempt at farming in Africa turns out to be an economic disaster, and she is forced to sell nearly all of her belongings (even the cuckoo clock) at the end of the film. By this point in the movie, though, Karen has experienced so much–a world war, the infidelity of her husband, a life-threatening illness, the love of her life, the end of that love, and the failure of her beloved farm–that other “things” have become more important to her. She has discovered a love for Africa and its people that has nothing to do with owning a piece of that land or controlling those people. She has found that things don’t matter as much as experiences, memories, and love. And this new life perspective applies to her feelings for Denys as well. At his funeral (so sad!), Karen reads from a poem about a young man dying before his time and then remarks that everyone loved Denys well, but “he was not ours. He was not mine.” Denys dies free–of everything and everyone–and Karen leaves Africa, never to return again.

For Me Then…

There are many aspects of Out of Africa that lend themselves to discussions of the movie’s significance, but the idea of possession–who owns what and how and why–particularly struck a chord with me last week. Like thousands of others, a couple of months ago I discovered Nexflix’s Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (if you haven’t watched this short series, you should totally check it out!); and now my apartment is a disaster of sorting piles. The chaos of going through all the stuff that has piled up for decades is both traumatic and therapeutic. Lots of unneeded clothing and books have been moved on to lives with others who need them/will use them, and hopefully more such donations will be coming in the near future.

But similar to delving into a film for indications of what is important in a culture, wading through what one owns also lends itself to soul-searching, to showing us who we are by what we hold on to and what we value. For Karen in Out of Africa, possessions are a comfort, a connection to a previous home and life–and symbols of her European culture’s attempt to take over the home and culture of another people. When Karen relinquishes her belongings and humbles herself in front of the other aristocrats to beg for land for the African people on her farm, she rejects her society’s view of ownership (and the power it supposedly brings) and accepts the beauty of the freedom of choosing people over possessions, souls over things. Her speech at Denys’s grave reinforces this idea: no one can truly own anything–not items, not land, not people. Like Job says in the Bible, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart.” Things are temporary; possession is an illusion.

“I had a farm in Africa,” says Karen. She possesses the farm like she possesses the Limoges, the African locals, and Denys. They belong to her in her mind until she loses each of them. Before leaving Africa forever, Karen gives Farah, her closest African servant a compass that Denys had given her and tells him, “This is very dear to me. It has helped me to find my way.” In a nutshell, Karen encapsulates the purpose of the possessions she formerly loved: they are here to enable us to “find our way,” to accomplish the purposes that God has given to us. They are not eternal, and they are not really ours. Out of Africa, then, is a film about freedom–the freedom of a continent and of a man and a woman, but freedom also from ourselves and the burden of loving what we only think we own.