‘I am interested in forms of knowing that operate within ideas of memory and within an oracular view of history that engages with observation, intuition and self-reflexivity’ wrote Teshome Gabriel in ‘The Intolerable Gift’ (1994), an essay about the return to his homeland of Ethiopia after an absence of thirty-two years. Stuart Hall also reminds us in ‘The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual’ (Chen, 1996) of the paradoxical position and dilemma of what it means for the diasporic subject to be betwixt and between, in between spaces, never fully ‘belonging’ to either place, after he emigrated from Jamaica to England in 1951, handed over by his mother to a college scout from Oxford University:
This Jamaica (that emerged in the 1970’s) was not where I had grown up. For one thing, it had become a post-slave, postcolonial society, whereas I had lived there at the end of the colonial era. So I could negotiate it as a ‘familiar stranger’ … Paradoxically, I had exactly the same relationship to England. Having been prepared by the colonial education, I knew England from the inside. But I am not and never will be ‘English.’ I know both places intimately, but I am not wholly of either place … So you have what Simmel talked about: the experience of being inside and out, the ‘familiar stranger’… post-coloniality, in a curious way prepared one to live in a ‘postmodern’ or diasporic relationship to identity. Paradigmatically, it’s a diasporic experience. (Chen, 1996, p. 490)
In ‘Mapping Diasporic Mediascapes’ the introduction to The Media of Diaspora, Karim H. Karim astutely notes that:
the diasporic site becomes the cultural border between the country of origin and the country of residence – Homi Bhabha’s ‘third space.’ This is the zone of intense, cutting edge creativity born out of the existential angst of the immigrant who is neither here nor there. (2003, p. 5)
Diaspora and the constitution of diasporic identities is a highly contested and evolving concept in which the mapping of diasporic histories, experiences and identities have been forged and debated across numerous academic perspectives including anthropology, sociology, human geography, migration and media studies, cultural and critical race studies, transnational and post-colonial studies, political economy and communication studies, transnational feminism and queer diasporas. These multidisciplinary perspectives on diaspora further necessitates the distinction between ‘minority (community) media’ and ‘diasporic media’ and the typology of how some communications scholars (Siapera, 2010; Georgiou, 2006) delimit the parameters of what constitutes forms of diasporic media (print: newspaper and magazines, radio programmes, the internet: blogs/social networks, television, and Bollywood films). While these modes of diasporic media are integral forms and there has been much research to support these forms (Aksoy and Robins, 2000; Downing and Husband, 2005; Karim, 2003), there is however, a myopic omission in Eugenia Siapera’s mapping of a typology of diasporic media, 1 namely, her elision of alternative diasporic media productions, such as independent film, video and new media works, produced by intersectional plural identities diasporic subjects (gendered, raced and queer diasporic subjects), with unsettled relations to the heteronormative, raced and gendered constructions of the nation, nationality and migration. Too frequently, discourses about diasporic communities, identity and diasporic media operates through a heteronormative and reductionist lens, with a tendency to take up diasporic communities and the media that they produce in essentialized or monolithic ways, reducing diasporic communities and their media productions to either the concerns of the recently arrived or those who still maintain a connection to homeland (via community newspapers, the production of news and information in television and radio shows about ‘back home’ or local community matters in the ‘host’ nation. Or, for the more ‘settled’ and more recent diasporic communities, there are importations (through digital television, and ethnic cable TV entertainment shows) of Bollywood films, Mexican telenovelas and various ethnically specific and targeted entertainment shows. To a large degree these diasporic forms of media and the discourses that frame them reproduce what Gayatri Gopinath refers to as the ‘hegemonic nationalist and diasporic logic’, 2 where diasporic media and its theorizations are constituted, reproduced and articulated through hegemonic gendered and heteronormative (assumed heterosexuality as the norm) foundational constructions of nation, nationalism, family and migration. Alternative diasporic media (i.e., film, video, new media) produced and articulated by progressive first- and second-generation diasporic subjects, cultural workers and critics challenge these constructions by inserting the deployment of queer sexuality, gendered and raced perspectives to destabilize and deconstruct ‘colonial, anticolonial, nationalist and contemporary nationalist discourses’ (Gopinath, 1997, p. 469). In this regard, alternative forms of diasporic media produce an essential counter-hegemonic ‘balance’ to those values typically found in mainstream forms of diasporic media, which can simultaneously perpetuate potential archaic values from the homeland and/or un-questionably subscribe to more conservative values of the dominant culture and host country in which they now reside.
In a discussion of the ‘politics of diasporic media’, Siapera contends that there needs to be a distinction between the form and content (substance) of diasporic media:
The form of diasporic media politics refers to the ways in which the politics is conducted: the ‘how’ of the process, and the broader outcomes in terms of issues such as political participation, political integration, and the like. The substance of diasporic media politics refers to the actual political messages and positions assumed by these media. This distinction is important in understanding the politics of diasporic media because it separates the role of these media in politically engaging minorities from the specific political directions assumed by some of these media. As we shall see, while the political direction may not always be ‘progressive’ – not always concerned with issues of social justice and equality – the broader political role of diasporic media is important in enabling minority members to acquire the necessary competencies in order to have a political presence. This role is crucial in multicultural democracies, as they are based on inclusion and participation. (2010, p. 106)
In the above comment, Siapera’s monolithic, reductionist and totalizing position infers that nearly all ‘minority’ and diasporic media are produced from and with similar political intentions, which reproduces archaic traditional values from ‘the old country’, which are potentially unprogressive. The deeply problematic assumption embedded in Siapera’s position resides in the implicit pejorative conflation of all diasporic subjects or ‘minority members’ as recently arrived from somewhere else, and as such lacks the ‘necessary competencies’ to have a voice and resonance in the larger multicultural democracy. While this may be the case for recent ‘newcomers’, the argument falls short in its disarticulation of the politics of diasporic subjects (or ‘minority citizens’) who have resided in a country for multiple generations or for nearly fifty years, and have contributed meaningfully in varying degrees to the democratic operation of a civic and pluralistic multicultural nation such as Canada (albeit, this is more possible in larger urban cosmopolitan centres). Moreover, Siapera fails to recognize that diasporic communities, identities and politics are pluralistic, they are shaped and formed through difference (class, sexuality, gendered identities, linguistic, regional, religious, spiritual or philosophical and political difference (ranging from reactionary, conservative, to liberal, progressive and radical). In this manner, pluralistic diasporic identities (hybrid Caribbean identities) often produce variegated diasporic media, through the praxis, aesthetics and politics of transforming and re-imagining both the form and substance of diasporic media, activating a progressive and intersectional politics, which challenges essentialized hegemonic positions held by both the ‘dominant culture’ and ‘minority’ cultures.
Mapping Caribbean-Canadian Alternative Diasporic Media
Diasporas’ imaginings of space do not necessarily displace the dominant geography. What emerges is the coexistence of a multiplicity of cultural cartographies supported by vibrant bodies of literature and other intellectual and artistic forms. The contemporary ‘New World’ is also the site of diasporic reimaginings (Karim, 2003, p. 8).
The arrival of Caribbean people to Canada can be traced as early as 1796, when a group of 556 Jamaicans arrived in Canada after an unsuccessful British attempt to enslave them in Jamaica, … between 1800 and 1920 a small number of Jamaicans and Barbadians immigrated as laborers to work in the Cape Breton and Sydney mines. … From the 1920 until the early 1960’s immigrant was virtually non-existent. … Immigration from the Caribbean really began in the 1960’s, and there have been three major periods of immigration from the Caribbean, the [first period] from 1945–1960 corresponded with postwar economic expansion and the West Indian Domestic Scheme (1955–60) which was established, almost exclusively, for the immigration of women from Jamaica and Barbados who immigrated as domestic workers. The second period from 1960–1971, corresponded with the ‘liberalization’ of the Canadian Immigration Act. During this period Canada accepted about 64,000 people from [various] Caribbean countries. [The third period] since the 1970’s Canada increased migration as part of an international movement to slow European emigration, and Canada began to depend increasingly on labor from the developing nations. (Labelle et al., 2012)
Stuart Hall’s telling comment that the Caribbean is ‘the space where creolisations and assimilations and syncreticisms were negotiated’ (2000, p. 30) has deep resonances and implications which inform the alternative or avant-garde Caribbean diasporic media produced in the UK 3 and Canada, as evidenced in the fluid postmodern style and aesthetics that inform the intersectional politics of coloniality, post-coloniality, culture and identity, exile and displacement, sexuality, trauma and the body in two of my films, Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994) and Blu in You (2008), to be discussed momentarily.
Modes of Production: Cultural Identity, the Artistic Self and Complicated Home-Be(coming)
I am a mixed race (creole or hybrid), queer diasporic woman, born in Guyana/South America (a country that is considered to be part of the English Caribbean), but geographically located in South America, a part of yet apart from the grouping of islands that form the Caribbean region. I immigrated to Toronto at the age of 12 with my parents in 1973. In 1992, I returned to Guyana after an absence of nearly twenty years to shoot the on location sequence for my hybrid experimental documentary film Coconut/Cane & Cutlass. On many levels this ‘return home’ demarcated a psychical and emotional journey ripe with contradiction, ambivalence and disillusionment, which spawned a fertile albeit ironic source of inspiration. I was a foreigner – an outsider in my homeland – a place which could not and did not embrace what I was, all that I had become.
This complicated notion of home for the queer Caribbean diasporic subjects is taken up by Jacqui Alexander in Pedagogies of Crossing, since the state and normative Caribbean community regard homosexuality and lesbianism as a ‘Western decadent incursion’ (Alexander, 2005, p. 47) ‘that they conveniently fit into their convoluted and highly paradoxical anti-colonial agenda’, as noted by Amar Wahab and Dwaine Plaza in ‘Queerness in the Transnational Caribbean–Canadian Diaspora’ (2009, p. 3). Wahab and Plaza further invoke Alexander’s argument to foreground the dualistic agenda of the heteronormative-patriarchal state:
The state works to reinvent heterosexuality by, on the one hand, creating a class of loyal heterosexual citizens and, on the other hand, by designating a class of subordinated non-citizens including lesbians, gay men, prostitutes, and people who are HIV infected, thereby reviving the myth of the apocalyptic destruction of Sodom by an oversexed band of non-procreative non-citizens. (2005, p. 29)
Moreover, this complicated ‘return to home’ and becoming was insinuated and transformed into a script of in-betweenness, where negotiation of home and space was simultaneously familiar and foreign, I had become an ‘exilic’ diasporic filmmaker, viewing the culture that I had once known with a displaced disoriented gaze, and the only place to turn was that of the creative imaginary. A space that is simultaneously mythic and manufactured, but yet grounded in some tangible moments such as: people’s faces, landscape; flora and fauna, all coalesce with the colonial history imprinted in their face, in their manner and lives. Upon my return to Toronto, sifting through the traces of my journey (in preparing the script for the film), I became intertwined in a process of deep intuitive introspection, dis-integration, re-invention and recreation, for in the cracked spaces and ruptures of memory and the psyche, the simultaneous loss and longing, born of sadness and anger, is resistance, in the work of art that it spawned. This is the profound sense of melancholy and loss that haunts Coconut/Cane & Cutlass from the opening quote by Said: ‘exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable riff forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted’ (1990, p. 357).
To articulate alternative diasporic film in conjunction with the diasporic experience necessitates the recognition that the ‘alternative mode of production is not autonomous, unified or homogeneous. It may encompass, in addition to exilic and diasporic cinema, the avant-garde, personal, diary, experimental, Third, ethnic and radical cinemas’ (Naficy, 1999, p. 130). For diasporic artists, the insertion of the self, autobiographically inscribed into fictionalized or hybrid documentary narratives forms such as film and literature, becomes integral to a production and healing process which recasts a liminal in-between space for ‘marginalized’ (otherized diasporic artists) to articulate, actualize and reinvent the disparate ‘totality’ of who we are and where we are going. In Home, Exile, Homeland, Naficy remarks that the alternative or exilic (displaced) mode of production is often characterized by a textual richness in style and narrative inventiveness which embraces discontinuity, fragmentation, multi-focality, self-reflexivity, discontinuous temporal and spatial relations, claustrophobic textuality and above all a resistance to closure of meaning (Naficy, 1999, p. 131). In other words, a distinct and radical counter to the dominant mode of production that is homogenized Hollywood mass produced and large scale.
While Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994) and Blu in You (2008) may in part embrace this style of exilic diasporic cinema, the lyrical aesthetics and post-colonial and postmodern queer body politics that inform the style and counter the hegemonic politicized content of my work is analogous to the work of Black British cinema of the 1980 and 1990s, the recent Nine Muses (2011) by John Akomfrah, and the work of Palestinian-born artist Mona Hatoum`s Measures of Distance (1989). Like Akomfrah’s Nine Muses (even though made many years apart), Coconut/Cane & Cutlass used an aesthetics of journeying through and across time and space to represent both the migration and return of the diasporic subject or exile, but there was also the colonial middle passage voyage taken across the ‘kala pani’ (black water), the journey of the indentured slave labourers, from India to the Caribbean. This is one of the nomadic representations in Coconut/Cane & Cutlass, of the physical, psychical and imaginary journeys that thematically structure and anchor the disjunctive narrative of the film. Teshome Gabriel (1990, p. 403), identifying the theme of journey in Black Cinema, states:
In black films there is often the depiction of journeys across space or landscape; viewed as a whole, a pattern seems to emerge around the journey theme: wandering, exile, migration and homeland. Journeys acknowledge encounters with others, with known and unknown forces, happy or horrendous. Whatever themes these films carry, or whatever land(e)scape they traverse, these do not seem to be the important aspect. The land ceases to be mere land, and only exists as a kind of mythic wilderness.
The opening shot of Coconut/Cane & Cutlass evokes such a strange and alien space. I, as the figure of the exile-diasporic filmmaker, walk on a jetty at low tide and the landscape appears foreign and alien, in keeping with the exile`s displacement from the hostile land(scape), which resonates in the voiceover love letter to a nation, 4 which no longer embraces the exile: ‘I have felt your absence for the past twenty years … feeling like a foreigner, in what used to be my homeland, we have both changed you and I …’ (Coconut/Cane & Cutlass). In a later scene, there is a static shot of the exile gazing across the landscape, which looks eerie and conveys the idea of surveying history (echoed by the voice-over): ‘I recall my grandfather`s haunting gaze … my eyes sweep over history to my children yet unborn …. (Coconut/Cane & Cutlass). In this manner, Coconut/Cane & Cutlass crafts a journeying or nomadic aesthetic which fragments and disrupts linear time and space crossing back and forth (or blurring), the diasporic space of the former homeland and the New Space of the adopted homeland. This is the liminal tension and in-betweeness that encompasses the diasporic experience, and why the exile can never return home, as home is never a static entity and neither is the diasporic subject.
In a recent article written about my work, 5 Tara Atluri comments: ‘the history that is being surveyed is one of deep melancholic loss brought about by colonialism, and postcolonial queer exile’ (Atluri, 2009, p. 18). She invokes the notion of melancholy and sadness as taken up by queer theorist Jose Munoz, who has argued for a reconceptualization of mourning in relation to the works of queer artists of colour, which represent a sense of collective grief that is part of marginalized subjectivity:
Melancholia, for blacks, queers, and queers of color, is not a pathology but an integral part of everyday lives. … It is this melancholia that is part of our process of dealing with all the catastrophes that occur in the lives of people of color, lesbians, and gay men. (Munoz, 1999, p. 74, quoted in Atluri, 2009, p. 18)
Atluri states:
The emotional difficulty of making a film like Coconut/Cane and Cutlass is not simply the individuated melancholia that Freud wrote of (Freud 1917, 237–258). Rather, it resonates with Munoz’s notion of collective mourning. The grief of Mohabeer’s works is a collective mourning of a queer racialized diasporic subject who does not simply mourn a nation, but an idea of home that may never have existed, that is, a home in which racial minorities and sexual dissidents are treated neither with contempt nor as invisible. … Her work negotiates both Said’s understandings of exile, that of the thoughtful and artistic reflection and that of the lived pain of being alienated from one’s home. However, for Mohabeer and her characters, alienation is not simply solved by physical return, since the returning queer mixed race body continues to be exiled by the nation state’s demands for racial purity and sexual conformity. (2009, pp. 18–19)
Autoethnography, Disidentifications and Queer Caribbean Aesthetics of Resistance
In his book Disidentifications: Queers of Colour and the Performance of Politics, queer Cuban critic and academic Jose Munoz argues that many queer artists of colour use strategies of ‘disidentification’ in their work to subvert colonialist discourses of racialization, racism and homophobia. Munoz contends that:
Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology (through the process of identification and assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counter identification, utopianism), this working on and against is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always labouring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance. (Munoz, 1999, p. 12)
Both Coconut/Cane & Cutlass and Blu in You can be read as performing disidentificatory resistance on the level of form and content, albeit in different ways. Coconut/Cane & Cutlass disrupts and counters the exoticizing ethnographic gaze in the mask sequence in its resistance to heteronormative constructions of gender, and Caribbeanness, and later, in the sex scene, ruptures a white Western eroticization and exoticization of the queer body of colour, through the gaze of objectification. The love/sex scene in Coconut/Cane & Cutlass between the two Indo-Caribbean women conjures a space of resistance for queer diasporic dissidents through its evocation of a simultaneous interior and exterior use of space which collapses (through a filmic process of front-screen projection) the imaginary possibilities of their love-making in a private space, against the harsh realities of how that love is bounded and bordered by barb wire (representing the repressions of a colonial state which polices dissident desire). However, at the end of the film, there is a colour freeze shot of the two lovers’ naked upright bodies superimposed over a black and white shot of sugar cane fields, a utopian moment of disidentificatory of resistance to colonial state repression of dissident bodies. Atluri suggests that ‘the presence of same sex desire in postcolonial space troubles dominant nationalist and neo-colonial readings of the Caribbean as a heteronormative space’ (2009, p. 19)
Countering the Autobiographical Use of ‘I’
The use of ‘I’ in Coconut/Cane & Cutlass has numerous layers of meanings in this alternative diasporic media production. The authorial use of ‘I’ as the narrative voice in the film is not solely autobiographical, it has a far more complex usage. ‘I’ is the voice of the exile, the conduit of a colonial history, it is the voice of ancestors (imagined and symbolic). ‘I’ represents simultaneously the subjective voice and the oral history narrator that guides the film.
The use of ‘I’ and the personal voice in Coconut/Cane & Cutlass does not always mean an individuated point of view for the self, but rather, it foregrounds the articulation of the social and political selves of otherized diasporic subjects, which mediated both the production and reception of the film, opening up possibilities of identification for a myriad of alternative (and possibly some mainstream) diasporic viewers who find traces of their history, their cultural uprooting and displacement. As the maker of the work, I know this to be measurably true since many audiences at film festivals that I have attended world-wide (especially in Brazil, the US, Canada and the UK) have mentioned both in question and answer post-screening, and to me in person, how overall themes or specific parts of the film resonated with them, how much they could identify emotionally with the sense of loss of home or with being a sexual dissident in their homeland or adopted country (experiences of sexism, racism, homophobia and classism).
Finally, Black film critic Manthia Diawara has also commented how the use of ‘I’ in works by diasporic or marginal filmmakers of colour further take on plural connotations, suggesting that ‘I’ is not simply used to construct personal subjectivities but is also used as a commentator, commenting on a fractured history and culture (Diawara, 1996). In this regard, the use of ‘I’ takes on a politicized project of articulation, especially for the queer diasporic subject who has been disarticulated from home–nation–state, both in the former country and in the local queer communities where dominant cultural articulations of sexuality have been persistently seen through white queer male (and, in some rare instances, female) subjectivities and lives. One only has to think of the dominant representations in mainstream culture (television and film), from Will and Grace, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Ellen, Modern Family, and The New Normal to the film The Kids Are Alright.
Diasporic Narrative Politics and Erotics: Autoethnography and Autoethnographic Turn
Placing my/Self within the filmic text of Coconut/Cane & Cutlass should not automatically connote the form of autobiography or an autobiographical documentary in which ‘I’ is the subject. The narrative politics of this inscription of my/Self represents an enactment of hybrid diasporic experiences which blurs the form and content of the work. The form of Coconut/Cane & Cutlass also informs the content (documentary narrative with oral histories using an experimental disjunctive and fragmented style to inform the content of displacement, exile and splintering of queer racialized bodies and psyche) through a postcolonial and postmodern lens. Coconut/Cane & Cutlass, is not about ‘showing’ or ‘presenting’ a ‘flat ethnographic document’ about diasporic identities, rather it is about enacting a narrative politics and erotics of resistance.
Coconut/Cane & Cutlass enacts the poetics of a meandering fiction and imaginary, and allows for a self-reflexive performance which stages identities in processes of trans-migration, mutation and states of becoming in the Deleuzian sense. Doing what Munoz considers ‘autoethnography’:
Autoethnography is a strategy that seeks to disrupt the hierarchical economy of colonial images and representations by making visible the presence of subaltern energies and urgencies in metropolitan culture. Autoethnography worries easy binarisms such as colonized and the colonizer or subaltern and metropolitan by presenting subaltern speech through channels and pathways of metropolitan representational systems. (Munoz, 1999, p. 82)
Coconut/Cane & Cutlass embraces an inventive and disjunctive poetics of form and content, aesthetics and politics to problematicize and elasticize the racial and cultural essentialist binaries of ‘black and white’ politics (of the colonized and colonizer, home and abroad, foreigner and citizen). The film inserts homo erotics to contest the normalized fictions of the hetero-sexualized foundation of the nation and allows space for a female, feminist (and queer) Indo-Caribbean presence in the nation-state of Guyana, as embodied in the body and words of poet Mahadai Das and ‘I’ as exiles. Later, in Coconut/Cane & Cutlass there is another performative two-ness of shared fractured oral histories between the queer Indo-Caribbean diasporic filmmaker and a queer Indo-Caribbean subject (Judy Persaud), their location in Toronto, Canada, echoes other pairing of women in the film. The fragmented narrative structure and fractured aesthetics in Coconut/Cane & Cutlass eschews an easily decipherable fixed or homogeneous identity. Queer diasporic subjects are liberated in a moment of becoming in the autoethnographic production of their identities.
Stuart Hall’s comments resonates with all that I have mentioned about the production of complex hybrid Caribbean diasporic identities, histories in the form of alternative diasporic media:
We might think of Caribbean identities as ‘framed’ by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture. Caribbean identities always have to be taught of in terms of the dialogic relationship between these two axes. The one gives us some grounding in, some continuity with, the past. The second reminds us that what we share is precisely the experience of a profound discontinuity. The peoples dragged in slavery by the triangulate Atlantic trade came predominately from Africa – though when that supply ended, it was temporarily refreshed by indentured labour from the India sub-continent. (Hall, 1992, p. 72)
In many ways Coconut/Cane & Cutlass, released in 1994, prepared me as both an artist and academic for the production of Blu in You (2008).
Blu in You is a poetic-essayist rumination mediated through the lens of a female observer who watches the staged conversations between a writer (Nalo Hopkinson) and a visual arts curator (Andrea Fatona). The aesthetics and conversations in Blu in You employ a visual/aural poetics to politically challenge and disrupt early ethnographic tropes of the colonist gaze and spectacularization of the body of the Other on display. Blu in You uses an essayist form to engage a cultural history of the black female body, subjectivity and sexuality marked by violence and trauma, but also celebrated in art and culture. The probing conversations bridge a historical arc of the African diaspora beginning with the figure of Saartje Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’, to the omissions in art history of Jeanne Duval (otherwise constructed as Baudelaire’s mistress), to more contemporary cultural performers and icons such as Josephine Baker and Dorothy Dandridge.
Like Coconut/Cane & Cutlass, Blu in You was also state-funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, but it took many attempts since the essayist style of this experimental documentary form and also its subject matter with Black/African diasporic female subjectivity and identities was not easily understood by film adjudication juries who were at first culturally homogenous (although they fulfilled the criteria of regional representation and artistic modes of film production – documentary, narrative, experimental). It was on the third attempt with a jury that was comprised of female and culturally specific filmmakers that the project received funding. I mention this point of information not as a casual comment about ‘biases’ of film adjudication juries, but rather to point out that ‘challenging’ diasporic alternative media is one of the few forms that can potentially disrupt hegemonic assumptions, cultural productions and representations (produced by both mainstream culture and marginal or ‘minority’ culture), and, further, that can also affect the modes of consumption by audiences by challenging expectations and allowing the possibility for more a deeper critical awareness and appreciation of difference. Truly understanding difference and what it might entail is an essential way in which alternative diasporic media can contribute to a cultural and pedagogic project (both inside and outside of the classrooms), to broach unlearning and rethinking the implications of how far reaching the effects and pervasive power of colonialism, racism, processes of diasporization and migration, heterosexist and sexist repression can and have altered the lives of diasporic subjects in relation to dominant culture and through the production of culture.
Black Cinema/Travelling Cinema 6
In a highly provocative essay ‘Thoughts on Nomadic Aesthetics and the Black Independent Cinema: Traces of a Journey’, Teshome Gabriel writes:
Black filmmakers break constraints and cross borders; they create their own Aesthetic terms in film discourse. Call them ethnobiographers, film essays, film poems, film lore or a combination thereof: they incorporate ‘in clear rhythm with Africa’ long term memories and heritages. (1990, p. 402)
Blu in You begins with a black female observer (Melanie Smith); she controls the remote and directs the viewer’s gaze to the staged art installation-conversations between Nalo Hopkinson and Andrea Fatona. This aesthetic choice foregrounds a witness to female subjectivities in the African diaspora, and the history and culture that is about to unfold.
The quote that opens the film: ‘Walter Benjamin suggests that film is comparable to surgery, the instrument allowing the operator to penetrate the body of the subject while, paradoxically, maintaining his or her distance’, further attests to her role as observer and operator of the film with the remote control in her hand. We begin the journey of Blu in You and its visual conversations that dissect historical and contemporary representations of the black female body as spectacle, as commodity, as exotic/primitive other, as cultural icon, as enigma, as freak, as aberrant. The conversationalist explores black female subjectivity and sexuality by looking at a cultural history of violence and spectacularization (embodied in the figure of the ‘Hottentot Venus’), which is symbolically evoked through a poem and through the abstract construction of digitizing an image of a rope tied as a noose submerged in water (imagery suggesting the lynching of the black body) that is manipulated and altered to evoke the body of the Hottentot Venus. The fetishized image of Baartman’s body is never reproduced as spectacle but its ‘primitivist’, racialized and gendered representation is evoked in the abstract imagery. Strategies of disruption and destabilization of the images are used throughout Blu in You to, at times, buttress and echo the conversations about the ethnographic display and discourses of the body of the black female Other, or to evoke the trauma and legacies of slavery displayed and displaced onto the black female body.
Blu in You evokes the trauma and melancholia of slavery through the elongation and shuffling/jumbling of time; through its expansive historical arc, Blu in You jumps across time periods. Time and history are key structuring motifs in Blu in You; it speaks of how history has been mis-represented, mis-interpreted, and how much has been lost, or left to peoples’ imagination, to interpret, left to conjecture, to analyze. Atluri comments that through the use of history and time in Blu in You provides:
a rich filmic genealogy of how Black female bodies are rendered as spectacle. Juxtaposing images of the Hottentot Venus with modern images of Josephine Baker (and Dorothy Dandridge), to contemporary representations of Black women in hip hop, we see how traces of colonial fetishism haunt the Black female body. … Mohabeer uses techniques of film to trouble notions of linear time that not only informed colonial epistemologies, but informed how these histories were told (Bhabha 1993).
The rupturing of time also elucidates the psychic effects of colonization on its subjects. Again, Mohabeer makes reference to Fanon, stating that ‘Fanon is very interesting in this regard because of how he invokes trauma, how he invokes memory – there is a certain kind of real lifeness. He invokes real life situations and then turns them and does an analysis of it’ (Mohabeer 2009). Here, Mohabeer reflects on how Fanon takes seemingly innocuous experiences such as the racism of a child [‘look a nigger’]… and points to their colonial resonance (Fanon 1967). He invokes the past to explain how racialized psyches are traumatized not simply by immediate experiences of racism, but by the historical trauma that these instances evoke. The buried trauma of colonialism is a collective melancholia that haunts the body of postcolonial subjects. (Atluri, 2009, p. 20)
Afterthoughts and Effects
One might wonder if a work such as Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (1994), made by a queer diasporic Caribbean Canadian filmmaker and academic, is still relevant after all of these years, and my response is a resounding ‘Yes it is!’ It allows for the possibilities to access these works as pedagogic tools of critique and unlearning in a classroom setting, at film festivals, and in critical discourses of diasporic media. Works such as Coconut/Cane & Cutlass and Blu in You situate alternative diasporic media (film), its audiences, education and culture beyond the mainstream, opening up dialogues in spaces inside and outside of the classroom, such as alternative film festivals (that cater to various communities’ ethno-racial, gender and sexuality), alternative screening venues and galleries, theatres and cultural community centres. The language, aesthetics and forms of communication and address by alternative diasporic media to its audiences are different than both mainstream and diasporic community-based media, which in many ways mimic the mainstream or dominant media (Naficy, 1999). This is the need for alternative diasporic media, as well as, the criteria used to analyze, assess and situate all forms of diasporic media, its audiences and communities.