By Donnie Moreland
As a Black student of Black film history one of the most irresponsible phrases I have ever encountered is “there are too many Slave films.” It exists in some vacuum of misinformation, and cultural shame. However, I’d be dishonest to suggest I don’t acknowledge the undercurrent of validity in the intention of this argument. For some, there is a groundless overuse and objectification of our ancestral narratives, for the point of insidiously undermining the post-Slavery progressions of the formerly enslaved and their descendants.
In her article, I’m So Damn Tired of Slave Movies, Kara Brown argues, “It’s obvious at this point that Hollywood has a problem with only paying attention to non-white people when they’re playing a stereotype. Their love of the slave movie genre brings this issue out in the worst way. I’m tired of watching black people go through some of the worst pain in human history for entertainment, and I’m tired of white audiences falling over themselves to praise a film that has the courage and honesty to tell such a brutal story.”
For Brown, the Slave film is a reminder of the space Black folk occupy in the white imagination. A reminder of the implicit social hunger for the scene of Black bodies in terror. Brown’s argument is also centered around power, and who wields it. Who gets the opportunity to illustrate the image of Blackness as one of eternal servitude, or renegotiate it as one of implicit dignity à la Charles White. Similar rationalizations can be read across another border of the Black literati: Hip Hop.
On his track, Flat Tummy Tea, from the 2019 LP, Bandana, Freddie Gibbs includes these lyrics: Slave movies every year/ Yeah, the master gon’ remind us/ If we don’t take it/ We don’t deserve it back/ And six-thousand years done ran up/ The kings of the earth is back. About the lyrics, Gibbs states for Genius, “[About American films depicting Slavery] Those films definitely deserve to live, but I felt like at a point it was like ‘Damn, man, I’m seeing a slave movie every fucking week…..If you all show us the slaves every fucking year, that’s what everybody else is going to think of his ass. Just slaves. I get it. We understand there’s definitely a history there for that, but I think we need other type of shit. We need Black Panther.’”
What’s interesting is that Gibbs maintains that these films have a place in the canon, but there is an active conflation of the existence of American films depicting Slavery and the overabundance of that very product. The solution to the “problem” being an overcompensation of the antithesis of subserviency: the Black Superhero. This makes sense. Film’s depicting Slavery can be retraumatizing, culturally, if we view Slavery through the lens of Cultural Trauma Theory, established by scholar Roy Eyerman, and summarized by scholar Jeffery Alexander as something which, “[Cultural Trauma] transpires when the component of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to an awful event that leaves ineradicable marks upon their group awareness, marking their memories and changing their future individuality in basic and irreversible ways.”
Thus, this active conflation, and subsequently, the need for a hero artifact, is a matter of emotional catharsis related to temporary reprieve. Reprieve in the absence of proper reparation. The problem is that, whether it be Black Panther (2018), Three the Hard Way (1974), Django Unchained (2012) or Boss Nigger (1974), these hero artifacts, as a supplement for history, create a type of “power fantasy.” When adopted as a primary artifact of cultural identity, this eases the erasure of components of ethnic history which are associated with themes related to suffering: weakness, subserviency, vulnerability, fear, claustrophobia, etc. But suffering, or the evidence of, is something the children of Slavery cannot disengage. We must face it. We must properly defend our dead.
Scholar Christina Sharpe teaches us about facing the legacy of terror by, as she claims, “defending our dead.” She insists this practice includes hard emotional, physical and intellectual labor and religious attendance to the needs of the dead. She would argue, defending our dead means allowing the two films, Daughters of the Dust (1991) and 12 Years a Slave (2013), both about the physical memories of Slavery, to communicate with one another about the properness of illustrating the violence of human subjecation.
In her book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe addresses Director Julie Dash’s (Daughters of the Dust) and Steve McQueen’s (12 Years a Slave) approaches to reconciling said violence, of which she prefers Dash. About Dash, Sharpe eulogizes her, “…..decision to show the traces of slavery as the indigo blue that remains on the hands of the formerly enslaved people who labored and died over the poisonous indigo pits on the Sea Islands off of the coast of South Carolina.” Sharpe contrasts this directing choice with McQueen’s, of which she questions his infatuation with the “breaking point” of when to interrupt moments of suffering.
Sharpe states, “If we think Daughters alongside Twelve Years, we might ask where and when is the breaking point in the latter film, or for that matter in most contemporary films in the West, in their representations of Black suffering… The long time, the long shot, the residence time of Black life always on the verge of and in death, go on. As it appears in Twelve Years a Slave (whether in the vicious extended beating of Patsey or in the four-minute-long take of Northup’s hanging), it enters the everyday as continuous and gratuitous.” Though I may disagree about Sharpes exalting of symbolism against one-to-one illustration, she is still sharing in dialog with these films. She procures power over memory and manages to defend the dead, even by debating the merits of how we commemorate their subjectation.
As a graduate of a historically Black college (Prairie View A&M University), I strolled along the derelict bones of the deceased and forgotten every day. The school, which was once recognized as the Alta Vista Plantation, is a graveyard and the sacredness of its grounds was lost on me. If it wasn’t on an university placard then it was unseen. But it was discovering even the locations of where the slave quarters stood, in the proximity of where we studied, that I felt a great shame as to my participation in the effacement of persons whose names are already without record. It wasn’t until having graduated from the university and, subsequently, completing my graduate thesis in film studies on director Steve McQueen’s ethic of visual memorialization, that I revisited my relationship to the dead buried beneath that campus floor.
I wondered (and still wonder), if there is any manner, proper, by which to use the lens (documentaries, narrative films, video art, etc.) to preserve what must be defended. Yet, I also recognize that answering this question requires a canon of work which so many would have discarded, to lay bare their themes, symbols and ethos, even if marred by repulsive stereotype. Without them, there is no form from which to shape the properness of cinematic commemoration.
Reading Suggestions:
“In The Wake: On Blackness and Being,” Christina Sharpe
“The Devil Finds Work,” James Baldwin
“Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films,”Donald Bogle
Donnie Denkins Moreland Jr is a Minnesota based mental health advocate and writer. Donnie holds a Master’s Degree, in Film Studies, from National University and a Bachelor’s Degree, in Sociology, from Prairie View A&M University. Donnie has contributed to Black Youth Project, A Gathering of the Tribes and Sage Group Publishing.
