It is not surprising to observe, further, that those filmmakers who argue for cultural authenticity also work to forge a diasporic hookup. Sembéne, for example, frequently links the Continent and Black USA; for example, through gospel music in Ceddo and with the Black GI in Camp de Thieroy. Palcy, in her screen adaptation of the Zobel novel, invents the character Medouze (who tells Jose about Africa) for the purpose of linking the Caribbean to the Continent; and for her second project, the Martinican filmmaker chose a South African work, A Dry White Season. Kwah Ansah’s Heritage Africa is one of a host of efforts to revitalize in this decade the Pan-African connection. Three works by Haile Gerima make clear his position in this global agenda of cultural defense: Harvest: 3,000 Years, set in Ethiopia, The Wilmington Ten—U.S.A. 10,000, about the Ben Chavis case in the USA, and Nanu, a work-in-progress set in the Caribbean. Two works by newcomer Zeinabu Davis demonstrate continuum. In an early short, Crocodile Tears, Davis makes a connection in content; the story is about an African-American woman of the U.S. who goes to Cuba with the Venceramos Brigade, much to the consternation of her children. By the time Davis began work on her third short, Cycles, she had begun to fashion a deliberate diasporic aesthetic. Cycles speaks a Pan-African esperanto via altars, veves, chants to the orishas, Haitian music, African music, and a speaking chorus whose individual accents blend U.S. Northern-Southern-Midwestern with African and Caribbean.
Dash’s DD evolved over a ten-year period in which independent Black filmmakers committed to socially conscious cinema were exchanging viewpoints with like-minded filmmakers throughout the diaspora, most especially in Britain and on the Continent. The diasporic links promoted in the sixties by St. Clair Bourne on the East Coast (editor of Chamba Notes, an international film newsletter) and Haile Gerima on the West Coast (organizer of the first U.S. delegation to FESPACO in Burkina Faso) continued into the eighties through the efforts of numerous programmers (for instance, Louis “Bilaggi” Bailey, founder of the Atlanta Third World Film Festival, and Cheryl Chisholm, who vastly expanded it), historians, curators, critics, supporters, and practitioners (Pearl Bowser serves to illustrate all known categories). Videographer Philip Mallory Jones’s current three-channel installation, Crossroads, at the Smithsonian is emblematic of the diasporic connection. Dash’s decision to set her feature and locate her production in the Carolina Sea Islands where African persistence is still discernible, and, further, to set the story at the turn of the century when retention was strong, enables her to situate the film in the ongoing history of the Pan-African film culture movement.
When Yellow Mary says, “You have to have a place to go where people know your name,” she underscores what some people would call the Du Bois double-consciousness theme, and what others would call the difference between true or primary consciousness and false or secondary consciousness. It is the Ibo tale which Dash employs in DD that keeps the question to the fore—Where is the soul’s proper home? DD’s is an unabashedly Afrocentric thesis in the teeth of current-day criticisms of essentialism.
NOMMO
Loss and recovery is established as a theme and an operation early on in DD. The operation begins with Dash’s retrieval of a figure; that operation then leads us to a folktale. The landscape in the opening shots is hot, green, and sluggish. A boat glides into view. Embedded in the Black spectator’s mind is that boat, those ships. As this boat cuts through the green, thick waters, we see a woman standing near the prow. She wears a veiled hat and a long, white dress. Embedded in the memory of millions is the European schoolmarm-adventuress-mercenary-disguised-as-missionary woman who helps sell the conquest of Africa as a heroic adventure. But this woman is not that woman. She’s standing hipshot, chin cocked, one arm akimbo. The ebonies send the message that this is not Brenda Joyce/Maureen O’Sullivan/Katharine Hepburn/Bo Derek/Jessica Lange/Meryl Streep/Sigourney Weaver or any other White star venturing into Tarzan’s heart of darkness to have a sultry affair with a pith-helmeted matinee idol, or with a scruffy, cigar-smoking cult figure, or with a male gorilla, in order to sell us imperialism as entertainment.
In this film, that hipshot posture says, Africans will not be seen scrambling in the dust for Bogie’s tossed-away stogie. Nor singing off-key as Hepburn plunks Anglican hymns on the piano. Nor fleeing a big, black, monstrous, white nightmare only to be crushed underfoot. Nor being upstaged by scenery in a travelogue cruise down the Congo, part of a cluster of images that invite but don’t commit. Nor being a mute and static backdrop for White folks’ actions in the foreground, helping to make that passive/active metaphor of the international race-relations industry indelible. Nor being absent as cast members, ghosts merely in back-projected ethnographic footage purchased from a doc-umentarist trained to go to people of color to study but not to learn from. Nor being absent altogether so as to make Banana Republic colonial-nostalgia clothing for a price clean-kill innocent.
The figure is claimed for an emancipatory purpose. The boat steers us away from the narrows of Hollywood toward salt-marshy waters that only look like the shallows. Bobbing near shore is a carving, the head and torso of an African rendered in wood. From the shape of it, we surmise that it was a “victory,” a figure that rode the prow of a slaving ship. (In a later scene, Eli, husband of Eula, will baptize the “victory” and push it out into the depths.) The boat docks in an area richer still in meaning. A title comes onto the screen: “Ibo Landing, 1902.” The date is important. The people whose stories will be told are one generation out of bondage. The date lingers on the screen six beats longer than the date in the 1985 Hollywood/Spielberg version of Alice Walker’s film The Color Purple, which is set in the same period.
In Purple, “Winter, 1909” flashes over Celie bolting upright in bed in the extreme foreground, screaming, in terror, in labor. The flash of the date fails to orient sufficiently. The spectator needs a moment to assemble the history: chains, branding irons, whips, rape, metal depressors on the tongue, bits in the mouth, iron gates on the face in the cane brakes that prevent one from eating the sweetness and prevent one from breathing in the sweltering blaze that scalds the mask that chars the flesh. The brutalized and brutalizing behaviors of Purple’s main characters have a source. That Spielberg did not appreciate the import of the date is our first clue that Purple will be hobbled in fundamental ways—the cartoon view of Africa, for example, which is in keeping with the little-bluebird journey of the flyer that covers the passage of years and announces that Shug Avery’s hit town. Purple, nonetheless, was/is of critical importance to at least one sector of the community who draw strength from it—incest survivors who need permission to speak of intracommunity violation.
The place name in DD, Ibo Landing, conjures up a story still told both in the Carolina Sea Islands and in the Caribbean. In Toni Morrison’s 1981 cautionary tale, the novel Tar Baby, set in the Caribbean, it becomes the story of the hundred blind Africans who ride the hills. On deck, barely surviving the soul-killing crossing from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Horse Latitudes, the Africans took one look at the abomination on shore and were struck blind. They flung themselves over the side, swam to shore, climbed the rocks, and can be heard to this day thundering in the hills on wild horses. Haunting hoofbeats are a reminder to cherish the ancient properties and resist amnesia/assimilation/fragmentation. Paule Marshall also uses the tale to warn us not to bargain away wisdom for goods and “acceptance.” The functioning of the Ibo tale in Marshall’s 1984 novel Praisesong for the Widow is more precisely parallel to its role in DD.
Praisesong invites the reader to undergo a grounding ritual via Avey Johnson. A middle-aged widow living in White Plains, New York, Avey has all the trappings of success—stocks and bonds, wall-to-wall carpet, car, house, matching luggage. She’s planning a trip to the Caribbean. She suffers, though, from a severe sense of loss. It registers as more than the loss of her husband. Like Jardine in the Morrison novel, Avey and Jay have been in flight; the fear of poverty and humiliation drove them to jettison cultural “ba
ggage” for a fleeter, unencumbered foot up the ladder. Avey receives visitations from her dead elder, Great Aunt Cuney, who directs her to remember. Avey’s journey toward wholeness begins with remembering the story of the Ibos as handed down through generations in the Carolina Sea Islands where she spent her girlhood summers. In short, in order to move forward, Avey has to first go backward.
The Ibos, brought ashore from the ships in a boat, stepped out on the land, saw what the Europeans had in store for them, and turned right around and walked all the way home to the motherland. Once just a tale, fantastic in its account of people in irons walking thousands of miles on the water, the account of the Ibos’ deep vision becomes an injunction to Avey. She must learn to see, to name, to reconnect. Great Aunt Cuney used to say of her grandmother, who handed down the tale, that her body might have been in Tatum, South Carolina, but her mind was long gone with the Ibos. Avey finds strength in the tale and continues her journey; its success rests on her ability to read the signs that speak to the persistence of the ancient world(s) in the so-called New World. This practice of reading and naming releases nommo—that harmonizing energy that connects body/mind/spirit/self/community with the universe. Avey “crosses over” to her center, her authentic self, her real name, and her true work. As Avatara, she assumes the task of warning others away from eccentricity. She stands watch in luxury high-rises for buppie types with a deracinated look. She collars them and tells her story.
In DD, the Ibo tale is both rejected and accepted by various characters. But the film’s point of view is that it has protective power. In his nonlinear narrative Ashes and Embers, Gerima argued that folktales have healing power. The story of a ’Nam vet who has to come to grips with his positionalities as a Black man in the imperialistic U.S., Ashes and Embers moves back and forth between the past and present, and between the city and the countryside. Nate Charles Garnett (named for Nat C. Turner) is still haunted by the war eight years later. Wired (“like a ticking time bomb,” a Korean vet he meets says of them both) and belligerent, he intentionally repels and attracts those who love him—his Gran, his lover Liza (played by Kathy Flewellan, a dark-skinned “actress who plays a featured role, rare; a woman with independent radical politics, rarer; which she studies within a group and acts on in the community, most rare on screen. She’s also the featured actress in Davis’s Cycles) and her son, and a neighborhood elder who runs a TV repair shop.
The drama gathers momentum when the elder tells Nate what his options are: “Keep running, go hide in the movies, lobotomize yourself with that escapist stuff or draw strength from the strong men. They’re your models—Du Bois—Robeson.” The elder’s speech on the strong men (as in the poem by Sterling Brown, subject of a 1985 film by Gerima and his students) propels Nate back to the ancestral place by train. Cross-cutting between Nate on the train and Gran by the fire with Liza, Gerima heightens the drama. Remembering the handed-down tale Gran used to tell him, Nate experiences from it the clarity and coherence necessary to “cross over.” Gran is relating the very same tale to Liza, a tale passed down through the family since the Denmark Vesey uprising. “Listen to what I’m telling you and don’t forget. Pass it on. Pass it on.” It is a compelling account, passionately rendered, expertly paced.
“Crossing over,” a term steeped in religion, as in crossing over into Jordan (Baptist and other), crossing over into sainthood (Sanctified, Pentecostal), crossing to or coming through religion (Country Baptist and AME Zion) crops up frequently in the speech of those on Ibo Island. Used by Haagar, the daughter-in-law eager to get her family off the island to more sophisticated environs, it suggests that she may fall victim to the worship of Mammon. Used by one of the men trying to persuade Eli, the distraught husband of Eula, to stay and be an antilynching activist, it equates responsibility with sacred work. The phrase “making the crossing,” spoken by several characters, carries two meanings: being double-crossed, as in being rounded up for the Middle Passage; and being Ibo-like by sending the soul home to the original ancestral place, Africa.
“Crossing over” also calls to mind the contemporary phrase “crossover” as in “Whitening” a Black film project, or yoking a Black box office star to a White one in order to attract a wider, or Whiter, audience. DD is not a crossover project.
EMPOWERING SIGNS
The TV experiment All in the Family proved that commercial success was/is in the offing for those who would pitch to a polarized national audience. White and other bigots were affirmed by the prime-time Archie Bunker show. White and other liberals read the comedy as an expose and applauded its creators for their wit. Black and other down-pressed folks, eager for any sign of American Bunkerism being de-fanged, tuned in to crack.
There is no evidence in DD of trying to position a range of spectators, as many filmmakers find it expedient to do. DD demands some work on the part of the spectator whose ear and eye have been conditioned by habits of viewing industry fare that masks history and addicts us to voyeurism, fetishism, mystified notions of social relations, and freakish notions of intimate relations. Most spectators are used to performing work in the dark. But usually, after fixing inconsistencies in plot and character and rescripting to make incoherent texts work out, our reward is a mugging. DD asks that the spectator honor multiple perspectives rather than depend on the “official” story offered by a hero; it asks too that we note what particular compositions and framing mean in terms of human values. The reward is an empowered eye.
In DD, the theme of cultural resiliency determines composition, framing, music, and narrative. In conventional cinema, symbol, style, and thematics are subordinated to narrative drive; except, of course, that an ideological imperative overrides it all: to construct, reinforce, and “normalize” the domination discourse of status quo that posits people of color as less than (“minority,” as they say).
Snead the photographer is a reminder of how ritualized a form of behavior taking pictures is, and that it need not be aggressive. His character changes in the course of the film. Initially bemused, curious about the backwoods folk Viola regards as heathens, he becomes the anthropologist who learns from “his photographic subjects.” After interviewing people on the island, Snead discovers a more profound sense of his own self. The photographer character, the camera, the stereopticon, and kaleidoscope function in DD as cameras and video monitors do in The Passion of Remembrance by the Black British collective Sankofa. The film-within-a-film device, as Maggie Baptiste works in front of the monitor, accomplishes in the independent Black Brit film what shifting sight lines and the behavior of Snead do in DD—to call attention to the fact that in conventional films we’re seduced by technique and fail to ask what’s being filmed and in whose interest, and by failing to remain critical, become implicated in the reconstruction/reinforcement of a hierarchical ideology.
Dash not only expresses solidarity with international cadres whose interrogations have been throwing all codified certainties about film into crisis for the past twenty years; she also contracted as director of cinematography a filmmaker who questions even the 24-frames-per-second convention. In the early forties, when Dizzy Gillespie announced that 3/4 and 4/4 time signatures were not adequate for rendering the Black experience, bebop was ushered in. It didn’t arrive in a tux. It came to overhaul the tenets of Black improvisational music-making and music-listening. Arthur Jafa Fiedler, as his film shorts such as P.F. indicate, is announcing no less.
Frame rates, the speed at which the sprocket-driven gears push film stock through the chamber of a camera, include, among others, 16 frames per second, 18, 24, 25, and so on. Of these technological possibilities—and even these are fairly arbitrary—24 has been the standard since the “talkies,” not, apparently, because the synchronization of sound and visuals requires it, but because findings in the fields of kinesics and psychophysiology suggest that the 24-frame rate gives a pleasurable illusion of reality. In P.F., by orchestrating frame rates, Fiedler gives us something else; he multiplies the possibili
ties for multiple-channeled perception on the part of the spectator. For a project, namely DD, that asks the spectator to do as Avey did, read the signs, Fiedler is the perfect practitioner.
By the by: a number of Black psychologists and forensic lawyers are working in the combined field of kinesics and psychophysiology to explore the virulent and criminal impact of racist stressors (a sense of entitlement, belief in Black inferiority, a predisposition to hog space, to break through a line, presume, engage in demonic-oriented Black/White discourse, complain about the music, set the pace) on Black individual and communal health.
One of the “signs” is signing, which the children do in games, and which Eli and several men do to talk across distances. The film poses the question asked of inventor Lewis Lattimore by Pan-African-minded folks at the turn of the century: How shall a diasporized people communicate? Answer: independent films. Trula Hoosier (Yellow Mary’s woman friend) from Charles Lane’s independent silent film Sidewalk Stories (mother of the little girl) has very few lines in DD but is in a great many scenes. Her silence is initially disconcerting but then seems functional, drawing attention to both the Gullah language and signing. In the woods where Eli (played by Adisa Anderson, the boyfriend from A Different Image) and his cousin (played by Tony King who, in Sparkle, beat up on Lonette McKee, who later starred in Dash’s Illusions) silently perform an African martial art known in Afribrasilia as capoeira (the subject of a film by Warrington Hudlin, founder of the Black Filmmaker’s Foundation, which distributes, among other films, A Different Image and Illusions), cousin Peazant’s reading of the signs of the time is what prompts him to speak, in order to persuade Eli to stay and be an activist. “They’re opening up Seminole land,” Cuz says, “for White settlers and Northern industrialists, not for we”: a sure sign that there’ll be an escalation of White-on-Black and White-on-Red crimes. Geraldine Dunston, who plays the mother of the Christianized Viola, is an actress who appeared in Iverson White’s independent film about lynching, resistance, and migration, Black Exodus. Her presence adds weight to the antilynching campaign argument of Eli’s cousin. The presence of a Native American in the cast, lover of one of the Peazant’s granddaughters, drives home the multicultural solidarity theme, earlier sounded in Dash’s Illusions.
Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions Page 9
