Thicker Than Water
Before I kick off in earnest here are a few things I’ve been finding interesting or fun recently:
You and the Night [2013], wild, poetic and perplexing. Your mileage will absolutely vary.
Introvert by Little Simz - This song and music video SLAP [LINK]
I Am Not A Witch [2017] - Phenomenal and devastating, keep your eyes peeled for some future work on it from me.
Anyone who knows me knows how I am constantly talking about colonialism and the pre-colonial. I’m often butting in to talk about how actually some position or another is a product of Western ideologies and not universal (I’m usually right).
It’s also just fundamental to how I conceptualise myself as a person in the world.
Last week I watched Residue and I guess it shook loose some thoughts and insecurities I’d been having and forced me to confront them. This film follows a young filmmaker Jay as he goes back to the neighbourhood in DC where he grew up to make a film about it and sees how gentrification is taking hold.
I think what struck me about the film is the way that it questions not only the gentrifier but the prodigal son as well. Merwai Gerima knows that the audience is aware of what gentrifiers do, how they hollow out everything they touch, how they look down on the people who made these places what they are. All of that almost fades into the background and the real focus is on the protagonist and his relationship to the Black people of this neighbourhood that he grew up in. One particular line that struck me was this:
“You think you’re an archeologist? You’ve come to dig our bones up from the concrete?”
I can claim Blackness easily, that’s evident in the realities of my lived experiences, but who gave me the right to claim Africa? Nigeria? Yorubas? Blood feels like a flimsy excuse, even if it is thicker than the waters of the Atlantic.
I’ve used Yoruba words for characters but can’t even speak it. I’ve referenced Yoruba cosmology but most of my knowledge is from random disparate websites which all seem to contradict each other. It feels almost fraudulent and cynical to reach back into a heritage I barely know.
It’s also a present I don’t know either. There’s a tendency to look at these cultures in the past which ignores how people still believe in vodun, babalawos and a plethora of belief systems which the British tried to erase. They’re altered, and certainly not hegemonic anymore, but they absolutely continue to exist throughout life in Nigeria (and other colonised places). The Lost Okorishi is a film which demonstrates this with the way that spirits are on the periphery but not so strange that they’re inconceivable - not just lost to the past.
One of the central threads of Residue is that he’s looking for his childhood friend Demetrius and nobody will say where he is. At most they give non-answers about him being in Maryland and you immediately know that isn’t the whole truth. But you’re never told definitively how false that actually is and whether they even know anything about his location at all. Instead Demetrius is more of an idea than a person, a vague entity representing lost youth, who appears in Jay’s dreams but nowhere else.
The interesting thing here is that you never get the impression that people were in the wrong for not telling him.
Because why should they? What do they owe the nigga who abandoned them? How do they know that they can trust him when he’s run off and now runs back in with a camera?
I feel that deeply. What the fuck do people on the continent owe me? What do they owe to a person who grew up where the grass is greener? A person who benefits from the spoils of the very exploitation which still continues to marginalise and erase them.
I don’t know where that leaves me.
I know I don’t want to end up like the tragic lead of this story. Two white men cross the street to avoid him and he goes ballistic, chasing them down and beating the shit out of one of them shouting about how this is his home.
I know that impulse. You wanna fight and hurt people who took that shit away. I don’t think it’s morally reprehensible, if anything it’s righteous!
But who the fuck are you? You’re years too late for an act of heroism, things have moved on - people have moved on. So now you’re just another number, another violent Black body, all for a cause that has long been lost.
You weren’t even close.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.