Belonging and Blackness: Longing for new hope in Black British Film
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? A diaspora or its homeland? The unpretentious answer is the homeland, but perhaps questions of origin would obscure more than they could ever hope to reveal. Diaspora is a material metaphor, at once an apt signifier for the act of dispersal while also signifying how communities come to be through the dispersal/migration of a people. Diaspora, however, does not determine a univocity in being and an inquiry of chicken and egg arises: how do we determine what is unique to a diaspora, the manoeuvres that etch life into the specificities of their being? And more importantly, in what ways does it come to matter?
Through history, ethnography, and other genres of academic indelibility on our imagination, we become locked in squabbles of comparison and searches for The Ancestor while interacting with visual media about Black diasporas. As a people, victims of decades of anti-Black visual cultures and state-sponsored propaganda, notions of representation will forever be a fraught site of contestation. There is an impetus, laden with the responsibility to self and community, to challenge narratives that could potentially inflict harm through their reproduction of violent ideologies detrimental to the well-being of Black communities. Yet in raising these challenges, does our ability to evaluate our artistic productions become governed by value systems steeped in a slippery morality reflective of a dominant bourgeois Black populace overtly concerned with what representation means for their dreams of upward mobility? Perhaps that is a leap. To be less incendiary, cultural commentary at times reflects these anxieties that occupy so much space we forget to ask important questions. Specifically: how did this work of art move me? How did it make me feel? And - critically - what did it allow me to imagine?
The Small Axe Series, but specifically Lovers Rock, compelled me to ask these questions before the years of social and academic education could lead me down more traditional routes. Its spectacular dance sequences blending the secular and spiritual nature of reggae music invoked desires of times before COVID-19, of being safely lost in the bone-deep vibrations of a sound system. It made me check in on myself and the excitement washing over me every moment the lighting changed, and I glanced at Black people anew. Importantly, it compelled me to consider my own safety in this space that grants automatic pardon to the cis-men who wreak havoc on the lives of marginalized genders. This space, that when it does imagine the presence of queer Black women, grieving Black men, and young love, offers no compelling answers.
Diaspora is attendant to the similar flows of precarity, of joy, of invention, and of impossibilities that affect what we would desire to call an origin. What we share with the diaspora is not only a simple genealogy made to bear the follies of the anti-Black world, but the very ground that engenders possibility in the world for those under the sign of Blackness. So how does one watch a Black British film, on the first British-born children of the Windrush generation, as a Black Caribbean subject, not invested, in the work of representation? My answer, whilst not singular in its voice or universal in its reach, is simply: with hope. That beyond what we know and experience finds itself imagined in a place that feels familiar but is different in the gestures it enacts. The tiny moments that render a kiss between two women behind locked doors as tangible, as more than just the hushed whispers of a community that harbours ill-will.
The misfortune that awaits us is that hope is never enough. Getting lost in this film is extraordinarily simple. It is lush, it is grand, and it is deliberate in how it attracts our gaze. It snatches us from sites of unease into those of unfettered joy and ecstasy. It asks for us to hurriedly forget the wounds waiting for us at every corner as if to suggest that enduring the momentary failures of the community are necessary for the pleasure to come. In watching diaspora, there is a cruel hope for difference; you hope that there is escape, that possibility abounds and that you forget that in every other breath, familiar misery follows familiar joy.
‘The grass is always greener on the other side’ and other such trite phrases fundamentally misunderstand the issue at hand while simultaneously capturing our desires to seek otherwise realities. It was never the question of what we desire to make possible, what we hope to represent us, or what can be evoked on-screen; rather, it is the very ground we share, across oceans and continents, that stifles the possibilities of Black artistry. So it is unfair of me to look across the Atlantic, at this film that looks back to a period alien to my birth, at this community that is connected by fraught lines of tension and ask of it; could there be more? Perhaps even less so that I could forget to even hope for the impossible.
But the truth is I would never want there to be less. McQueen’s film briefly cites Perry Henzel’s The Harder They Come (1973), the most internationally recognizable Jamaican movie. The scene in question features the main character Ivan and his love interest Elsa riding off on a bicycle, which comes to symbolise one of the lighter, happier and more hopeful moments in a film that ends tragically. Through citation, McQueen borrows that scene with the lovers of his film Martha and Trenton riding off into the sunrise, symbolising the beginning of things to come. The film ends with both of them going their separate ways, but we are hopeful of some ambiguous future, established through the simple exchange of phone numbers. In those few moments, the film feels as if it is aware - that McQueen is aware - of me and many others wanting this to be the beginning. The dangling of cruel hope that baits me as a subject of the diaspora, longing for more films that make us imagine the possibility of Home.
