This is a weird one to start with, because 1) literature is the medium that I’m the most familiar with, not film, and 2) issues of race are something I’m always wary about discussing. But I figure it’s always better to talk about an issue, providing it comes from a place of respect, than to shut down all discussion because errors might be made.
First, some general comments about the film: I really enjoyed it. The aesthetic of the film is really strong in terms of camera shots, the weird motifs (the deer, the tea cup) which recur throughout, and the portrayal of middle-class whiteness in the Armitage household was done really well, in my opinion. I thought it was aware of itself as commenting on an important issue, but it wasn’t overdone so as to make it inaccessible to a white audience; but neither did it seem to titillate a white audience too much. I found it didn’t last too long, it wasn’t overcomplicated, but the somewhat simple plot was very powerful and so it didn’t lose anything because of this. (You can probably tell that I’m not accustomed to commenting on films. Hopefully I’ll get better in the future.)
Now, the big issue: blackness. I’m white, and that makes it difficult to talk about being black. What I think the film showed really well was the frustrations that occur when black and white people interact; it showed that although different races ought to interact, not all interaction is good when it comes from a place of ignorance, and not all attempts from white people at including black people are noble in their own right. Example: all white people mentioning a black celebrity (usually Barack Obama) that they like, as if to prove that they are racially enlightened. Obviously I can’t know exactly what this is like, but I think my position as a queer person makes it possible for me to understand this frustration. I think the point is that when you occupy a position taken as universal (i.e. white), everyone is able to discuss that culture because it is accessible to everyone, in comparison to occupying a marginal position in which people who claim to understand the culture do so on a very superficial level, so you end up discussing the same handful of topics again and again.
What is to be learned from this? I’m thinking about whether it tries to be didactic. Is it trying to teach white people how to interact with black people? I think that would be doing the film an injustice. I think it was more a tongue-in-cheek recognition of these frustrations of attempts at interaction; white people seek to show how socially conscious they are by engaging with black people, but in doing so reveal how out-of-touch they are with the experiences of black people. White people and black people cannot relate to one another on the basis of race, so it is not necessary to do so.
I’m noticing myself kind of struggling to express myself here, and I think it raises important issues about white people talking about race. I don’t consider myself ignorant, but I’m encountering this difficulty in articulating myself because the issue is such a contentious one. But I think it’s important to talk about this stuff. I was in a tutorial today on Americanah, and the class is such that the majority are white, and there was not very much productive discussion of race. How, as white people, are we supposed to approach these issues? I think the first step is to take a back seat. All I can really do is use the voices of others because it is not a voice I have myself. Part of me wants to try to find ways in which I can relate my own experiences of oppression to oppression due to race, and I think that can be a useful way to conceptualise what it is like to experience racial discrimination, but it is also necessary to acknowledge the ways in which each ‘category’ of oppression operates differently, in different locations and in different ways. It’s somewhat reductive to try and relate everything to one’s own experience, but I think it is kind of required because as human beings we are limited to our own experience and this is how we view the world. I don’t think there’s much productive to be said for a white man discussing race; I’m not bringing anything new to the discussion, and no one is going to take me as an authority. But to exclude white people from discussions of race is not useful either, because black and white people are always going to interact with one another, and discussion of contentious issues is important. Adichie has spoken of the western world’s obsession with comfort; we feel discomfort when approaching contentious issues, and so refrain from getting nearer to them. Maybe it’s better to say something harmlessly useless than to say nothing at all. I don’t know. It’s difficult.
Back to the film: the other main thing that I found interesting was its metaphor of hypnotising and brainwashing. I think it literalised the idea of how subject positions are conditioned by ideology, how people are made to think and behave in certain ways by institutions of power. So the powerful whites are able to brainwash the powerless blacks into adopting a white consciousness. As fiction it was extreme, but I found it an extension of how this can be a reality in the real world. It’s image of white supremacy was horrifying but not too much of a stretch. I’m not sure how useful the ending was: it seemed to position white and black people in positions of violent tension, and didn’t seem to offer a way out of this. But perhaps it’s worth remembering that Chris was not fighting all white people but rather white supremacy, and his triumph was over that, which perhaps makes the ending make sense. And it is as much the job of white people to eliminate white supremacy. It is easy to watch the film as a white person and feel like, I’m not one of those white people, it isn’t speaking to me. But I think all of us are to some extent those white people; it’s not a extreme state, there are shades of white supremacy. Perhaps it’s about recognising the problematic supremacist parts of the self that stem from being white.
I’ve likely missed a lot of important things from the film – there are no doubt interesting discussions to be had about its relationship with cloning, for example. But these are the thoughts that I had.
WRB
W. R. Bywater 