Queen Cleopatra & She Had a Dream
by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
The silly outrage at, and criticism, as well as defense, of the lightweight Queen Cleopatra movie produced by Jada Pinkett-Smith has kept identity politics alive and well in the crosshairs of pundits, social media gargoyles and cultural critics goose stepping along to the beat of the American entertainment industrial complex. What’s most apparent, however, if not slightly startling, is the anger unleashed by Egyptians at the portrayal of a Black Cleopatra. The vitriol and startling racism in statements offered by Egyptologist Zahi Hawass may be factual as it pertains to history but riddled in anti-Black racism, nonetheless.
First, technically, the only reason people care if Cleopatra was Black is because modern African descendants throughout the world today – Black people – have endured the worst systematic treatment by humanity for the last four centuries alone. And due to colonialism, imperialism and any other dreadful –ism, it is obvious that the racial complex thrusted upon us as well as our own hunger to embrace anything that is affirmatively Black; what is our “own” identity versus what’s been tainted by the Transatlantic slave trade, principally, must be savored and honored.
Any oppressed peoples must decolonize themselves. Frantz Fanon wrote in Wretched of the Earth (the classic 1961 book, and perhaps only radical declaration binding Arabs and Black people in the diaspora unless you count “Battle of Algiers”, a film by a white bourgeois filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, but arguably, for some, no less impactful) “decolonization does not take place unnoticed.” And since it doesn’t, the best way for the establishment to get a handle on it and try to tame it – is to promote identity politics as some kind of new wave social consciousness that Hollywood is going to champion. The problem however is that decolonization has nothing to do with corporate movies and TV series, nor does it have an iota to do with the foolish debate on Cleopatra, who was light-skinned because she was Macedonian (Greek) and born in an African metropolis settled by Alexander the Great (after Cleopatra died, Egypt was a Roman Empire and fully colonized by the Romans). She was an interesting, educated, but overrated, overblown gentrifier. This is who we are debating? And she was both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony’s lover - another headache for a different article, but the trio were lucky Shakespeare wrote about them; in doing so – he valorized them for Western society. If Cleopatra was actually Black, Shakespeare would have made this an issue, no doubt. Despite his many faults and prejudices and dictates he received from Queen Elizabeth’s dynasty, he did have an incredible capacity to confront the dynamics of race and ethnicity in the 17th century. My own criticisms of his politics aside, I cannot honestly refute that Shylock and Othello aren’t monumental portraits of men imprisoned in a racist nightmare.
So why does a Black actress want to play a historical figure who probably looked more like Anjelica Huston as opposed to Cicely Tyson, and why does the non-Black world even care? Does it actually matter? I think the debate is funny. I only wished Pinkett-Smith was as sophisticated as the anarchic idea itself: get white folks’ knickers in a twist. Get the “Persians'' and the white-identifying Arabs to go through the roof when they see an ebony-skinned Cleopatra. (I can’t wait for some oddball genius to make an Elvis biopic – straight as a very serious drama with an obvious Black man as Elvis – with absolutely no comment, parody, or irony injected. It would be righteous. I might be the only one laughing, but could you imagine that in a movie theater? It would put the mayhem of January 6 to shame.)
Adele James in Queen Cleopatra. Photograph: Netflix
This docudrama is not even worth discussing, but the savage criticism and racist reveries Pinkett-Smith’s pet project has become a recipient of is certainly disturbing. She had to have known this was going to happen; Netflix didn’t care. They love controversy, good or bad.
Pinkett-Smith should have financed a production of Anthony & Cleopatra. At least the script would have been better and Blacks have been doing Shakespeare at least as long since Paul Robeson’s 20th century definitive Othello; in fact, much longer. Ira Aldridge was the 19th century’s Black theatrical coup de’tat. He was the first African-American actor to gain massive critical and financial success; he attained even bigger heights in Britain (the fact that there is no Ira Aldridge Black Theater Conservatory in America or England is pathetic).
The heavy diversity aside at the time along the Mediterranean and sub-saharan Africa, however, is irrelevant. We still want to waste our time on iconography that the Euro-Anglo worlds have enshrined. Give them Cleopatra I say! What matters is that you may be Black and that you, now, have ideas and feelings and even stories that may be worthwhile. We cannot right (or write) the wrongs of the racist West’s history while we are still enmeshed in it. For example, a slave cannot make a movie about slavery while they are still in chains.
The delusion amongst Black multi-millionaires and celebrities in this country never ends. And Netflix is comfortably seated (and seeded) in a way that not even Amazon is. Amazon’s fiscal reach and corporate insidiousness is greater, but Netflix – that decadent hub of cultural, racial, sexual representation - is on par with any Empire’s propaganda office. The American empire is crumbling, but it will be damned if it does not continue to give wealthy Blacks enough rope to hang themselves, while tossing the rest of us out into the sea where, if lucky, we’ll either get eaten quickly by a shark or slowly by a whale. If you want to see what God thinks about money, look at who he gives it to. Not one worthy film has emanated from the inner sanctums of any of our Black Hollywood multi-millionaire celebrity producers in the past decade. Not one. This is not an opinion, this is fact.
Jay-Z and Beyonce just put down $200 million dollars on a home in California but some of the greatest known (and unknown!) screenwriters can’t pay their rent or work with a director of their choice who deserves some support. If anyone reading this honestly thinks money is our problem as Black people, or as cinema practitioners, you need to take a deep breath and consider what line of thinking you are supporting. The money is there. It’s not that Blacks don’t have it at their disposal: it’s that all the unconscious Black wealthy have the access. Does Jada Pinkett-Smith honestly believe she is doing us a favor with this cultural shell game?
Why one would dump millions of dollars into a movie about Cleopatra when there are dozens of other more pertinent, creative, and necessary cinematic works that need to be made is baffling. Pinkett-Smith wants to empower Black women? She can start by cutting checks for Julie Dash, Leslie Harris, Cauleen Smith, and at least a dozen others. It would be nice if Kasi Lemmons could work slowly on a project again with, say Lynn Whitfield or…spend time writing and workshopping with some actors to develop a new original movie. We claim we care about our Black culture, our ancestry, our representation in movies and TV, theater, etc – but I think it’s time we ask ourselves if everyone with a great deal of money purport to care – why don’t we ever create works that express this or contain that vital passionate interest that we all so quickly advertise when the Oscars come round or when another Black person is killed in a public execution?
Filmmaker Fronza Woods could certainly use some support - her artistic vision exceeds most American imaginations front and center.
Octavia Butler, a towering writer, didn’t purchase her own home until she won the MacArthur Genius award – ten years before she died. Isn’t this rather appalling? Why didn’t Oprah give her a yearly endowment - as she was not only one of our greatest modern novelists, but a radical science fiction writer, struggling to achieve a delicate balance like Samuel Delaney. Both highly regarded, cult figures, critically lauded and debated but never had any affirmative dealings with Hollywood. Nor should they. My criticism is less about Hollywood’s refusal to hire or support Black brilliant scribes, but the Black film producers who supposedly care about our images.
The debate over whether Cleopatra is Black or not has been raging before anybody reading this was ever born. Understand, if you are on the continent of Africa – it doesn’t mean you are Black. White South Africans could easily then proclaim themselves to be “African-American” if they go to America. Some even tried to do that in the 1990’s. Which is why I always prefer to say Black because it asserts race, not nationality. Still, historically – colonialist terror aside - the continent of Africa is that of the Black person. Period. And going back that far of course the racial inference is natural. There were more pat times when the notion of nationality/race were more succinct. And from what we do know about ancient Egypt, the skin tones were always varied. This is normal. That part of the world, especially – where the tan complexions could easily be deep black the next moment. Africa is the womb of humanity and also the bedrock of Blackness in all its diverse splendor. Arabs freak out when they hear this, they – being the lighter (white) brother of the Motherland – refuse kinship with their darker (richer) Black African brethren. If light skinned Africans (Arabs) hate the Black African it implies that they despise themselves.
Like India’s atrocious caste system and its conscientious cruelty towards the dalits, and the West’s racial hierarchy, many Arabs cling on to their “white identity” because the kafir has to be kept intact. The akata, the nigger has to exist. It’s this reason alone that these Arabs have a strange collusion with the rabid white-led racism against Blacks: both choose to savor their pathological contempt for the “original peoples.” One of the reasons why it is so controversial to parallel the Palestinians’ oppression in Israel with the Black existence in the United States is because to do this is to admit that Blackness is also, simply, a political category, an existence fostered and created. Anyone Black is at the bottom of the barrel, without power, designated servile, forced to be wretched. The Irish radicals identified, marginally, with the Black militants of the sixties, because both were freedom fighters from the bottom. The problem however is when the Irish choose to accept that there is, in fact, a barrel to begin with. And that started in the United States well into the late 1820’s (by 1840, the Irish were about half the entire immigrant population here. And we all unfortunately know they kept racism towards Blacks in America alive and well.)
Amir Parsa, a NYU History lecturer, has tried to inform, educate and explain some of the differences in terms of how we regard race and ancestry today versus 6000 BC. It all gets very easily clinical and terribly technical (the West and Asia seem to love that) but it does not thwart the importance Black people put on our ancestry. Para provides some excellent information, facts as it were. But he dismisses any notion of race and still cannot handle the truth: everyone from Africa is Black. The late great Samuel Cotton, PhD and documentarian, and teacher of Social Welfare Policy at Columbia University, wrote in his brilliant Silent Terror about the contemporary slave trade Muslim Arabs have kept Blacks bounded under in Mauritania and Sudan. Writing in the preface, Rev. Dr. James V. Montgomery, Esq. writes that it never ceases to amaze him “how the systematic expurgation of blackness factors into the historical recording of world events. For example, to those who are wedded to the strictest of racialistic world views, Arabs themselves are bracketed in the Africoid, not Caucasoid, racial category.” Cotton’s book goes on to mourn what has happened to Africa and in a succinct 150 pages takes us into the heart of contemporary slavery of Africans by their Arab brothers.
Parsa, smugly, makes it clear that he believes that the Ancient Egyptians would not appreciate being identified as a “Black sister” (This is also a man who seriously ponders the historical accuracy of the Mad Max films, by the way, so there you go). Skin tone aside, anyone Black could and should be able to realistically portray a person from that continent. Period. What Parsa seems to use as a subtle defense is royalty. Replacing “royalty” as a class - instead of saying the Ruling Class or the “wealthy” - which we use today as a euphemism for “white” – is where he gets caught. And it’s not important to address how “mixed” (another white obsession that seems to have infiltrated everyone’s mind) they were or were not . Many Black families today have the most varied skin complexions that you will ever see - from white as snow to deep ebony. But this is not about the color line or brown paper bag test. The real problem here is that we seem to want to believe that human beings have always made their heroes in their own image – and if that is at the expense of Blackness, then it is ok (don’t forget in 1964, Blacks protested in Harlem when Liz Taylor played Cleopatra, none of this is new).
Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra shows an array of skin tones. Whoopee. I am not sure what else to say about it (twenty five years ago, it could have just been a nice Benetton commercial.)
Africa, en masse, was such a sprawling and mixed culture – in the eighth century BC, for example, Kushite rulers were crowned as Kings of Egypt, becoming Pharaohs overseeing a combined kingdom of Nubian and Egyptian peoples, as part of the 25th Dynasty. But this insistence on separating Egypt from Africa is as insane and ridiculous as one claiming that New York City is not part of New York state. Many will say it isn't. Just like we keep trying to pretend that NYC is not part of the greater USA. But it is.
The first question should be: who is the actress and is she any good? The second, who wrote what and who is directing? THAT should always be the defining question with movies, even interpretive documentaries. If we were to look at music, a lot of this discussion would be different. Obviously. The oral and aural arts are something else, they work on the soul differently. The visual arts, motion pictures, and performing arts are the keys to a perception that we are chained to. For better or worse, movies are our religious texts, its creators – our gods. That alone should usher in a new wave of atheists but unfortunately it hasn’t.
Raja Amari’s She Had a Dream
Ghrofane, the star and subject of “She Had a Dream”
The current rising generation of millennials and their spawn, Gen Z, are now coming to grips with what the rest of us, and our Baby Boomer parents, unfortunately, have already known but have unsuccessfully fully metabolized: the egregious racism of Arabs against Blacks is akin to South Asia's obsession over caste, color and maintaining the untouchables and the African Indians - the Siddis - be oppressed and vilified. The racism of both Brown peoples towards their Black countrymen is on par with the Caucascian barbarity and homicidal cruelty in the West. We are losing, as Black and Brown peoples, against the Euro-imperialist empires – because we are still at war with each other. Africans, Arabs, Asians…will there ever be a time where we embrace and align our minds with one another? Even for a moment?
This past February, the African union publicly condemned the shameful racist declarations from Tunisia’s president Kais Saied. Saied is furious about the sub-Saharan migration to Tunisia, he views it as a conspiracy on the part of Blacks to alter Tunisian demographics! As if that is not vile enough, he has actually incited violence in the streets against Blacks. What is happening in America against Blacks is happening everywhere.
The Tunisian government has especially been in chaos since President Saied claimed full power. Recently, Saied’s forces arrested opponent Jaouhad Ben M’barek; he’s been rounding up his critics like Stalin once did, four years after the beginning of Amari’s documentary, She Had a Dream.
An unpretentious, straightforward portrait about a young Black woman’s journey into activist-turned lawyer, the protagonist Ghofrane sees advocacy for Black people in Tunisia as her raison d'être. With strong cinematography by Karine Aulrette and very effective editing by Sebastian de Sainte-Croix and Elise Fievet, the movie’s Francophile feel does not come off typical or as a trope. Many documentaries from Africa and Europe have dug their heels so far into the notion of simple “slice of life” objectivity, they are now easy to mock, or feel as if you are step ahead of the filmmaker themselves. It’s the same feeling I dislike when I see movies done as homages to the French new wave style, they are just ironic winks at the audience hoping they notice how clever their pastiche can be. These types of movies look easy to make but are extremely hard to do. Amari’s own style and voice is obvious. I appreciated how she introduced characters in the life of Ghofrane, gently telling us their name with simple texts, allowing the real-life individuals to almost shine in their own unique ways as characters. Because all movies are acts of creation, and all people, when included in a movie, become characters.
We are introduced to Ghofrane Nibous, a very self-aware and dynamic 25 year old community (civil) activist and member of the new secular party, Tahnya Tounes (Long Live Tunisia), a centrist political party eager to modernize Tunisia and appeal to its younger, broader make-up – non religious, the working class, etc – by tiptoeing into change. With Michelle Obama’s book at her bedside, her Pan-Africanist sensibility is energetic and honest, if not slightly bourgeois – but that is less her fault and more of the world-wide implementation of “corporate” Black representation. Ghofrane is image conscious (in all the healthy ways) and while she could be a Black Tunisian Erin Brockovich, bears a resemblance to a young Angela Bassett . But she is still caught in a strange web that most children of millennials are: They want to change the world, but look as if they are going to a board meeting to do it. In the United States, Ghofrane would most definitely be swallowed up by classic latte Liberal. It’s actually a good thing she has distance; if anyone could find something valuable in Michele Obama’s book – it would be a conscious African peering out from under the cover of a small catastrophic country like Tunisia.
“In Tunisia it is all made so clear what we are losing, what we are up against, what Blacks in the diaspora must confront. ”
One observation I had, which I am not sure if it is even a criticism or not, was early in the film. Ghofrane informs us she never had a problem with racism growing up in Tunisia or in her neighborhood – but then in the same breath we learn that her grade school teacher was a nasty racist who wouldn’t call her by her name, he referred to her as “the burnt log.” Obviously that stung (and stuck) in her mind and like many Black people in the world, it became, one’s initiation into the world of White Supremacy. It gave a sense, to me, that the filmmaker’s (or Ghofrane’s?) own awareness of racism is still something new and hard to assert. However, if she had grown up with it (as she did, in school) then it would be the only thing she knows. We learn later in the film that racism is certainly alive and well in Tunisia. In Gabes, where she is from, the sixth largest city in Tunisia - right along the Mediterranean (where I am sure Cleopatra and Anthony may have had many a drunken romp on one of their faux absconsions) we are informed that the government instilled legal segregation; miscegenation laws between Blacks and White (Arabs): Marriage is forbidden.
I think Raja Amari’s own acknowledgment of what we know all too well in the USA to be racism – is still something that many young people throughout the world are still coming to terms with. I am unsure why. One reason is the radical Left’s lack of bite and grit and organization (we have been stumbling and bumbling in the dark ever since the collapse of our international militancy and internationalism in the 1970’s). The second reason is the failure of, perhaps the MTV generation or what we later became known, collectively, Gen X – we seemed to have pretended that because we grew up under the umbrella of hip-hop and made athletes and rap stars “the cool elite” – that anti-Black racism was a thing of the past, an aberration occasionally in sporadic parts of the East or the expected Southern bible belt. A cartoon racism with hoods and burning crosses that could be lampooned as easily as 1980’s Al Sharpton was in his tracksuit (which he later gave up once put on the FBI payroll, most likely!). When Obama became President, a lot of young people thought Christ had come again. And any talk of racism was a thing of the past; a troglodyte obsession. They saw all too quickly how wrong they were and how much Kool-Aid was being spilled. She Had a Dream is a quiet little movie trying to find a way to respectfully leave the table.
*
Over the course of the breezy hour and a half, Amari presents a menagerie of interludes, sketches of Ghofrane’s daily life and conversations with friends and family, and every so often punctuates the film’s unreconciled political stirrings by declaring bold truths - in snippets of dialogue or a watchful eye. Saadia Mosbah, president of M’NEMTY, an anti-racist association, is a grassroots activist representing the civilians' stake in all the social and political turmoil bubbling over in Tunisia. She is older, wiser, but never dismissive of Ghofrane’s belief in electoral politics or legislative solutions. She speaks truth and always prompts Ghofrane to dig deeper, sometimes think differently about things and how to proceed fighting the racism in Tunisia. This is particularly important because Ghofrane’s goal to be an elected official was thwarted directly after the Presidential candidate she campaigned for was swiftly defeated (although with more varied candidates and platforms than in America, it’s still rooted in extremely conservative and religious denominations).
“Politics is like the sea. Never trust the sea. A wave may come along and drown you.”
- Ghofrane Nibous, 2019
Ghofrane later attempts to run for Parliament, but doesn’t win. And she tells us that she stayed in bed, depressed, for three days, bemoaning that her “mom had dreams of me in Parliament” (Once again, we notice Michelle Obama’s book in her bed). To see and feel her mourn her loss was particularly moving, Amari contrasts it with the previous interlude of her mother declaring that Ghofrane “is achieving everything I failed to do in my own life.” Achievement or loss must never be taken for granted. After the disappointing news, Saadia Mosbah asked Ghofrane “Would you do it again?” to which she replied, “Yes” (as always, Samuel Beckett’s clarion call “fail better” rang in my ears.) One’s first major loss or wake-up call is traumatic. It has to be because even if you’re mentally prepared, your nervous system isn’t. For Black people it is all about the level of degree of trauma because we have so many “firsts.” But in the context of activism or politics or just the everyday act of igniting some kind of social or political change, even on the civilian level, one doesn’t have to just have thick skin, one must be obsessed. Driven is not the word. To affect change and advocate for the oppressed – is a calling.
The film moves quickly and is rich with moments that become great anecdotes, perennial symbols of a system that doesn't seem to be losing its luster, regardless of how badly rotten it is inside. America is crumbling too, but not its racism or effectiveness at curating oppression; it’s simply lost its ability to pretend that the bureaucracy cares. Everyone knows the only thing worse than an elected official who doesn’t care about you now, is the non-elected ones who run the administration’s daily operations. There used to be a pretense, it’s gone now. It no longer shocks you to call an office and have the phone ring all day or simply be told, “No one can do anything for you. Goodbye.”
During Ghofrane’s campaigning in a marketplace, seeking votes and introducing herself to fellow working-class Tunisians, a woman, appalled at how expensive everything is, cries: “With prices like this, I won’t vote for anyone!” Similarly, a street vendor who can’t afford to buy yogurt for his daughter, says “ What use am I? I might as well kill myself.” Amari sprinkles the film with just the right amount of balance for the picture – it is about Ghofrane’s journey after all – but class, poverty, unemployment – are part of the mosaic that racism will always be entangled with.
Zakaria, an Arab friend of Ghofrane is a seemingly benign hustler and is always getting arrested. He’s like a character out of a Jean Genet novel, mixed with a kind of Moliere sensibility. He’s of the underclass that sees himself in Ghofrane, supports his Black sister and while he helps to eclipse the film’s precious politics, he does so with humor and love and with the deftness of a court’s holy fool. But, being a criminal to survive, he is unreliable. He does not show up to help Ghofrane when she does her street canvassing.
There are tangents one could easily cling to and follow through on, the film is peppered with enough to mull over; from the woman who pleads for someone to “sort out the kids smoking joints all day and the dead people at sea” to Ghofrane’s sad concession that Blacks can’t get cabs (the misanthropic angel on my shoulder shouted, ‘might as well be in New York then!’) to the aftermath of a June 2019 terrorist bombing (“It’s always the poor who pay!”) to the dreadful pallor following the Arab Spring. In 2011, there was a certain degree of hope and passion exuded and executed from the youth and exasperated citizens of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain – but revolutionary spirit has to be a continuum, it can’t ebb and flow. Riots can, protests can. But revolution must always be working. There is no one single “revolution,” and if so, it is extremely rare. Castro and Che taking over Cuba with less than 50 men on the final day of Batista’s reign is one thing - and rare at that. We live in an age now, however, where there is never truly a present because a second before is somehow deleting the second now – social media is a clever trap. At breakfast you’re already thinking about what to post for dinner.
She Had a Dream makes enough space for conflicting ideas and political ideologies or points of view - one of her friends, a passionate anarchist type, is convinced abstention should be the next political act (I liked him and wished we’d seen more of this discussion) and mentions of the shutdown street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi who set himself on fire when the government refused to talk to him – igniting the Arab Spring is honorable, however spare, this is something the film should have mined deeper. If there are elephants in Tunisia’s room it is both Bouazizi and anti-Black racism. It would have been profound if the movie connected the self-immolation to the act of revolutionary resistance against racism. Ghofrane may not burn up, but her spirit will if she continues to not confront and be able to counter her country’s racism.
Cutting back to the mellow contradiction in the film: The haunting irony of seeing Blacks and Arabs youth sing Tunisian anthems made me wrestle with the irony that it is only the Black Americans who can - and believe in - the United States of America’s national anthem. In all my life, I have never heard a white person sing as devoutly or gravely as our Black citizens have. Not everyone can be a Whitney Houston, but I still find it chilling that I have never even heard a White, Asian, or Latino kid in school sing it like the Black students (who may not have even cared about it themselves). Seeing Ghofrane sing, “Let us die so the Fatherland can live” is enough to chew on was disturbing to me because I simply don’t believe in any kind of nationalism, but I couldn't help but see the gravity of the argument that while people certainly have lost “faith in (political) parties, they still have faith in certain individuals.”
Another glaring moment was purely visual – I noticed a young Arab man wearing a Washington Redskins t-shirt. It was a subtle reminder of the power of American hegemony. I doubt the racism of the shirt or its history alone is even realized. Most people don’t care about American history. They only want its culture. It’s trappings of sports or pop music. To that, I think we all can agree: for better or worse, the Black man, especially, is always a kind of natural resource for everyone else…in the world. I have only realized this through the eyes of Black women who have traveled high and low, always keen to keep their radar sharp.
If we’d seen the Arabs trying to “act like Black American ghetto street toughs” or spewing “nigga” - like they do as if they’d overdosed on every single white-corporate-sponsored and manufactured gangsta-rap album or minstrel show – we’d really have seen the result of the colonized grip and hegemonic ferocity. I am curious what Ghofrane feels about this, about the violence and misogyny alone that’s been glorified in airwaves. In 2023, I can state without a fact that the most damaging consequences of white-financed “minstrel” rap is to be seen and heard in the Latino and Arabs youths, who say “nigga” as if they too are expecting to get a dollar every time they do. In NYC alone, it is appalling how bad this one situation has gotten. (A Yemeni woman in Jackson Heights once told me it was the first and only word her son seemed gleeful to say when he arrived here six years ago. He is now 25. The difference is that while he will always view Blacks as amusement, the white boy who needs the vile racist hip-hop to soothe his own violent and anti-Black pathologies, will be the first to get a gun and decimate everyone at school. There is a generation coming up now that will have to deal with all this as Ghofrane is being forced to deal with the realities of her own country’s vileness.)
When Ghofrane tells her 13 year old sister that things will be better in another “ten or fifteen years,” I bristled at the naivete, even at her own decision to try to even say something so foolishly pat as this – but I caught myself. She is right to have said that. That is how one survives. Now survival is certainly overrated, if anyone wants to know about survival ask a Black person. We are the definition of survival; it’s become perfunctory, for we don’t even question or think about resilience (The only time I ever heard a person question or mention resilience was a white person, shortly after the pandemic took over the world. They claimed they were “tired of being resilient.” I didn't know whether to laugh or choke the person.) Ghofrane is not easily scared or threatened. But she is not going to give up on changing Tunisia, on challenging its racism. Her sister threatens to leave in the future, to which Ghofrane straightens her out lovingly, “The country is sick (like a person). You don’t just abandon it!”
Small countries, in particular, are a bundle of nerves, a matrix of over-stimulated ideas, a hotbed of conflict right in your face. So when there is cruelty or empathy, love or hate, it’s not that it’s more real but that it seems more deeply felt.
America is a freak-show under a circus tent in a moving parade. Like a shark, it can not stand still. It must eclipse yesterday while commodifying both nostalgia and dissent and forever promises tomorrow. The present tense is always looking just barely towards time to clock-out. It cannot face itself so to get through the sun-drenched afternoons it exalts in all kinds of treachery and insanity. I don’t know why filmmakers who love war stories never do one about America – the longest war ever known in modern the world. In Tunisia it is all made so clear what we are losing, what we are up against, what Blacks in the diaspora must confront. When Black Americans get upset about not winning an Oscar or being “acknowledged” by the establishment, it makes my heart sink. The establishment recognizes Black people a lot – usually in the form of a bullet. I wished we wouldn’t be acknowledged at all by the white establishment so that maybe we’d spend more time recognizing each other, our neighbors and eventually see our spiritual doppelgangers in other places. We could start with the fifty states of America…then eventually make our way to Tunisia.