in defence of 'slave films'

On "Black trauma movies" and other woes

My writing sprouts from a singular sensation—this doesn’t feel right. It beats in the heart of my literature—my fiction and my essays. This doesn’t feel right. I’m going to figure out why.

Something doesn’t felt right about the discourse around Black films—specifically “slave movies” but the catchment area extends to other depictions concerning Black trauma.

I’ve buried my sentiments under my breath like hot takes petrified in lava, crumbling into ash whenever I try to articulate them. When I’m having a conversation with other Black people who are expressing their exhaustion with how we’re seen, I know how it sounds. I’m exhausted, too. But something deeper is happening in these portrayals and discussions about “Black trauma movies”. This doesn’t feel right…

The truth is: I’m not against “slave movies”.

I am, however, averse to the stereotypical banality of their intentions.

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Hopefully, the lesson here—and what I try to convey in my speech—is that there is an audience for things that are different. There is an appetite for things that are different and a story with Black characters that's going to appeal to a lot of people doesn't need to take place on a plantation. Doesn't need to take place in the projects. Doesn't need to have drug dealers in it. Doesn't need to have gang members in it, but there is an audience for different depictions of people's lives and there is a market for depictions of black life that are as broad and as deep as any other depictions of people's lives. Does that make sense?

—Cord Jefferson’s Backstage Speech at the Oscars

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Jefferson’s sentiments are a consensus in conversations I’ve had with other Black film-lovers. There is a yearning for “things that are different”. But for a second, I want to explore the familiar.

“The plantation” was a place where Black people were. “The projects” is a place where Black people are. There are Black people who are drug dealers. I agree “wider appeal” shouldn’t need to rely on these being the only realities portrayed but at the same time, these are material realities. We should own who we are, where we are, and what we are—especially when they’re a consequence of impossible conditions that have been imposed on us.

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you’re f*cking unknowable!

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American Fiction (2023) is a modern classic and some of what I’m touching upon is stated in the brief interaction between two of the film’s characters; Monk and Sintara. What is missing—from the exchange and from the overarch of the conversation—is that desire for something different is (at least partially) borne out of a shame we need to confront if we truly want to access the calibre of depictions we deserve.

This is something I’ve been reflecting on in the context of stereotypes.

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In season 11, episode 4 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David returns home from a golf game after losing a bet with his rabbi. He walks in to find Leon, his Black housemate, acting suspiciously. With some pressure and sleuthing—Larry discovers a halved watermelon in the bin.

Leon laments, I can’t eat that shit in front of white people, man.

Larry is utterly confused. They have a brash exchange about the ridiculousness of Leon’s feelings and Larry softens, you probably love it, too, don’t you?

My favourite fucking fruit in the world. Leon confesses. Plenty of times I’ve gone to cocktail parties, I got to put the frickin’ watermelon in a little napkin and go in the bathroom and eat that shit. Or go in the fucking forest and eat that shit.

The whole thing is television at its finest. Curb Your Enthusiasm’s charm is in the comedic excavation of banal dilemmas, pulling narrative threads of mundane life until the yarn unravels into an absurd, logical end. Every day comes with the conundrums of being a person who must manoeuvre through society with other people and Curb Your Enthusiasm explores them with hysterical results. What’s the etiquette if a jewish man with dilated pupils accidentally spills coffee on a klansman’s robe? I sincerely recommend you watch the episode.

Something that Leon says to Larry stuck with me, though. “Even Black people don’t like to see Black people eat fucking watermelon.”

The disdain Leon is referencing throbs in the undercurrent of Jefferson’s speech when he says that a story with Black people doesn't need to take place on a plantation. It is the shame of being seen in a racist light that shines regardless, a shame imposed on us by stereotypes that we aren’t responsible for. When you confront how complex this process of shame actually is, you see how insidious the cogs are.

Leon doesn’t eat watermelon around white people because he feels responsible for possibility of their racist thoughts. He accounts for their potential racism and perseveres to avoid triggering their prejudice and it manifests as shame in himself—which is then extrapolated collectively with other Black people.

In How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope, William R. Black states “southern whites saw their slaves’ enjoyment of watermelon as a sign of their own supposed benevolence”.

When an Alabama overseer cut open watermelons for the slaves under his watch, he expected the children to run to get their slice. One boy, Henry Barnes, refused to run, and once he did get his piece he would run off to the slave quarters to eat out of the white people’s sight. His mother would then whip him, he remembered, “fo’ being so stubborn.” The whites wanted Barnes to play the part of the watermelon-craving, juice-dribbling pickaninny. His refusal undermined the tenuous relationship between master and slave.

— William R. Black, How Watermelons Became a Racist Trope

This is the psychopathological origin of how the two-dimensional “Black people love watermelon” stereotype began in American life—as a grotesque imposition by white people who thought themselves more benevolent and progressive than they were.

After emancipation, watermelons became an object of self-sufficiency for Black people who were having great success as farmers and merchants of the fruit. This pissed off white people so much that they invented an aggressive, anti-Black marketing campaign that has become such a fundamental part of white psychic life that most white people don’t even know the origin or the evolutionary journey of the racist stereotype.

There is no way for Black people to combat stereotypes because stereotypes are not our fight to combat. Our attempts to avoid or correct them are symptoms of an out-dated defence mechanism. If every Black man became LeVar Burton overnight, perhaps every grotesque stereotype ever imposed on Black men would starve out… eventually. But that won't, can't and shouldn’t happen. We should be as complicated as we are. Thus, the discomfort falls on us. But we aren’t responsible for being narrowed into stereotypes and it isn’t our responsibility to break out of them.

Black people carry collective shame around our necks every single day, in large and miniature ways, while the average white person like Larry doesn’t even think about it, let alone understand how heavy the weight is when they’re made aware of it. But make no mistake, it is their shame we’re carrying, their prejudiced thoughts that need correction, not our actions.

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I refuse to carry vicarious shame of “the plantation”, or “the projects”, or “being drug dealers”. Fictively, I reserve my shame for the lack of imaginative intricacy inside the portrayals of Blackness—for how the lens of trauma itself is manifested.

“Black trauma” films aren’t bad because of the setting, subject matter, or the vocations of their characters. “Black trauma” films are bad because they traffic a profound lack of dignity for, and imagination about, Black life.

In Blues for Mr. Spielberg, Michele Wallace says, “there’s a gap between what blacks would like to see in movies about themselves and what whites in Hollywood are willing to produce. Instead of serious men and women encountering consequential dilemmas, we’re almost always minstrels, more than a little ridiculous.”

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My brother/sister/gender-non-conforming sibling in christ—perhaps our exhaustion with “slave films” is because they’re fundamentally not concerned about Black people.

Black people are in them. Black people lead them and even direct them. But they are metaphysically about white people. They are more intent on being instruments to incite and/or relieve white guilt; surreptitiously intent with proving how much “progress” has been made. But when you hear “progress”, there is never candour about whose. The progress is white progress, a self-congratulatory pat on the back for how superficially tolerant white society has become since it was overtly, violently and monstrously racist on a planetary scale. “Slave films” are about white rehabilitation, veiling pride for supremacist dominance, white (libidinal) economies, performances of sombreness for anti-Black violence and, most importantly, white shame. Put simply — these films centre whiteness. And we’re likely all fatigued from the psychological gymnastics of it.

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I can tell my exhaustion is not with the core concept of “slave films” because I’m actually fascinated by different imaginings of “the plantation.”

I’d be intrigued to see a kishotenketsu love story in the Antebellum South, one that doesn't rely on brutal images of subjugation and gratuitous violence being made so imperative but can render them a discomforting horror in the background of a relentless tenderness between characters. There is so much about the mechanisms of slavery that we do not try not to think about; do not even know to think about. Colonial period pieces are explored cinematically all the time, gracefully side-stepping the unbridled racism of the age (or attempting to envelope it into a modernist narrative à la 2020’s Bridgerton). “Slave” narratives are not approached with visual consideration, care or imagination despite the fact there are endless opportunities to explore the plantation in ways that are completely independent of the white psyche’s compulsive need to include an obligatory whipping and/or rape scene.

The reason these thoughts aren’t granted to these narratives is due to the white establishment’s under-developed imagination of the Black existence, which is committed to a limited, and limiting, belief system that we absorb into our own imagination by osmosis. A perfect example of this is Queen and Slim (2020)—a film dramatising a radical act of self-defence against the police state that denies even a fictional reality where Black protagonists make it out alive, let alone get to go free.

“I didn’t want to pull punches. I didn’t want to give us some fairytale because the mothers of the movement didn’t have that.”

— Lena Waithe, writer of Queen and Slim, for Refinery29

Given the rare opportunity to provide a Black audience with a bullion of hope, joy and fictional freedom, Waithe decided it was her duty to not “give us some fairytale”, humbling us instead.

Whether this choice was implored by white executives or whether it was a fate imagined by Waithe in isolation, Waithe takes responsibility by mentioning how imperative it is for the film to trigger the same hopelessness we feel when we see a Black person dying at the hands of police, or a neighbourhood watch coordinator, or an ex-marine, or whoever wants to kill us on any given day. It is necessary to give us no reprieve from the common realities of anti-Blackness—even in the imaginative realm of cinema where purple aliens can snap away half of existence and rubber car tyres can become sentient, telekinetic mass murderers—citing that because our foremothers didn’t get the opportunity to see themselves free, we shouldn’t either.

When I say, “Black trauma” films are bad but because they traffic a profound lack of dignity for, and imagination about, Black life—Queen and Slim is a quintessential example, a psychologically betrayal that tried to court accolades for being a work of radical Blackness but ended up being bog-standard copaganda. It presents our violent demise at the hands of the state as an inevitable consequence of Blackness, not understanding that a film that transcends this narrative is far more powerful than a film that nihilistically reproduces it. It astounds me that, throughout the production process, nobody suggested, “Why don’t you end the film with them on the plane? They can look at each other with glee and relief and then off into the distance like Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross at the end of The Graduate (1967), pondering the dense uncertainty at their future? The fact they both have to leave America, the only home they’ve ever known, as a relative strangers to one another is already tragic. They’ll already pay a steep price for their ‘freedom’. Why do they have to die so brutally?”

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When so much of life is organized around dodging male violence, it’s nice to relax with a movie in which the only source of violence is a woman, and the only target is a man, or many men.

— Ayesha A. Siddiqi, A Promising Young Woman and the End of the Girlboss Era

In the female revenge thriller genre, it is clearly understood that white female rage is therapeutic—restitutional even—and thus we root for the white woman to live at the end. We expect it, actually. The audience recognises (or it is shown brutally) that the world is fatal place for women and once the woman makes the choice to take brutality into her own hands, we do not question the ethics of her decision. We simply conditioned to think, “how is this dainty damsel going to make it out alive?”. Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004) would absolutely suck if Beatrix Kiddo died at the end and Quentin Tarantino said in an interview, “yeah man, that’s patriarchy for ya.”

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What I’m saying is not particularly about Black revenge, however the cinematic rendering of Black revenge is one of the best vehicles to illustrate my point. I’m paraphrasing RaMell Ross here when I say there has been a lens of trauma fundamentally attributed to the portrayal of Blackness for the entire history of image-making. Black life has been captured photographically and cinematographically without dignity and so Black people exist in the visual psyche as entities more worthy of mutilation, gratuitous violence, endless tragedy and death than we are deserving of cartharsis, revenge or freedom. It doesn’t matter how many Black firsts, Black leads, Black film-crew members, Black executives populate the construction of a film—unless we fundamentally understand this truth, we will all keep enduring “Black trauma” films that continue to render us unrecognisable to ourselves.

The refurbishment of our inner relationship to “Black trauma films” would require us to not internalise the insidiousness of stereotypes and shift our concern towards portrayals of Black dignity. This requires us to look at films with lenses un-tinted by the shame of what we are and have been. A bigger part must come from filmmakers re-conceptualising the architecture of film when it comes to the Black narrative.

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Fundamentally, Jefferson is right. There is an appetite for things that are different. But I don’t much care about “whats going to appeal to a lot of people” (code for white people) at the expense of our dignity. I care about us and the way we see ourselves. I’m not sick of “drug dealer” films because without the “drug dealer”, we wouldn’t have They Cloned Tyrone (2022). I’m not sick of films in the “the projects” because without “hood films” we wouldn’t have Moonlight (2017).

There are so many imaginative ways to narrativise our experiences that are digestible in a way that doesn’t induce anti-Black nausea. It is important that, in resisting the racism of the traumatising lens that we don’t overcorrect and deny the reality of our pain altogether. Suffering is an inevitable part of life and an unavoidable ingredient of how we construct and subsume stories. Heroes needs adversities to overcome. But an anti-Black world that does not fathom Blackness as human, let alone heroic, will struggle to fathom the moral cardinal directions of its Black fictional characters. This means fathoming ourselves, not through the vicarious shame of others, but with a convinced moral compass of our own personhood that points towards a clear destination of dignity that we must form clarity on and protect for ourselves. In the Black spiritual tradition of creativity, it may mean inventing a brand new dialect of filmmaking—and film-watching—altogether.

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Friend: I’m just… so tired of slave films, bruv.

Me: (Squirming)

Friend: …What is it, Inigo?

Me: Well… Did you like Get Out?

Friend: Yeah, Get Out is lit.

Me: …Get Out is a “slave film” ✋🏾😟🤚🏾

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Recommendations:

The Fits (2016)

Moonlight (2017)

Mami Wata (2023)

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023)

Bruiser (2022)

They Cloned Tyrone (2023)

Saloum (2021)

Mignonnes (2020)

Hawa (2022)

The Sea Beast (2022)

Nickel Boys (2024)¹

1. I scheduled this article three weeks before I saw Nickel Boys. A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being invited by a dear friend to an advance viewing with a post-screening conversation with the director, RaMell Ross. In the post-film talk—it was eerie how much he articulated the spirit of what I’d written in this essay and imbued them in his film. Nickel Boys is perhaps a perfect representation of the dialect of filmmaking that is necessary. It is a zeitgeist shifting work. If there’s any film that I’d prioritise on this list, it’d be this one. It’s out January 4th.