they prefer us still
but they want us, still
If you could see the way my mind fritzed when I found out Scenes in the Square were honouring Daniel Kaluuya with a Get Out (2017) statue in Leicester Square, you would’ve thought I’d been licking batteries. I fought the urge not to write a piece about it and resigned to limit my yap-trap to a simple tweet and call it a day.
Then I saw the statue and fam.
All the respect in the world to Kaluuya. But damn. I saw it and had so many thoughts, so many colliding discomforts and reasons for them that I realised I had to write something, lest the spaghettification in my head remain ravelled and plaguing.
For context: Variety reported that, “[Kaluuya] was chosen from a poll of 5,000 British film fans as the actor people would most like to see as part of the “Scenes in the Square” trail in Leicester Square, landing one fifth of the vote.”
I’m not certain if that means they voted for Kaluuya’s role in Get Out specifically, or whether the vote was more broadly about Kaluuya’s acting career. It almost doesn’t matter, it’s just the context of this being a collaboration of public and private decision.
I reacted immediately to the optics of using one of the film’s most harrowing scenes.
Something, something, something, Black trauma being a spectacle for white consumption, okay, maybe I’m sensitive! It's actually a hill I don’t really care to bleed out on… I just think it's weird! In a “you lot don’t smell that?” kind of way.
I get it. Get Out is a pivotal moment in Kaluuya’s career and it’s reference to maybe the coolest shot in the film, cool enough for me to use it as a header for this very piece. If you have no deeper comprehension of Get Out, I can understand why you’d pick this iconic image of Kaluuya’s character falling into the infinite nothingness of the sunken place to honour the success of his career.
I suppose that’s whats getting to me. Being Black means, sometimes, you gotta forego deeper comprehension (or have none) to find things celebratory. In this case, you have to remove the imagery of Kaluuya falling from its sociopolitical context when its sociopolitical context is a part of why the film was so massively successful and pivotal for Kaluuya in the first place.
Get Out is so very conspicuously about racism, so specific about what it means to trespass the Black body and statues are profoundly political so you’d think that memorialising a Black man cascading into the sunken place would warrant some reflection, some pause.
Does the sunken place not represent the geopsychological manifestation of white violence? It is the nothingness that Black psyche’s are plunged into if/when they’re caught to be too trusting of well-meaning white supremacists, the domain expansion of a coon if you will, where Blackness retreats into itself to give way for white thoughts, white personalities, white being. The first step in the theft of the very essence of Blackness, the psychic arrival of Europeans on West African shores.
The sunken place may be an iconic visual but it’s kind of a haunting concept to “honour” Kaluuya with, especially in the heart of colonial empire. it’s eerie stuff, man.
Feels like a power trip.
But that’s me, running at my most cynical. Perhaps, it is celebratory! …In the way that offering Black people MBE/OBE’s is celebratory and–sigh–something that is still commonly offered to, and accepted by Black people in the UK despite the late, great Benjamin Zephaniah being so morally clear about its implications.
“Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought ... You can't fool me, Mr Blair. You want to privatise us all; you want to send us to war; you stay silent when we need you to speak for us.”
– Benjamin Zephaniah
All of these afterlives of slavery and colonialism that we contend with on a daily basis that make it difficult to celebrate “wins” but some wins aren’t worth the joy they’re sculpted into. I feel like a bit of a party-pooper because I can’t shake the thought out of my head: damn, this particular scene about feeling trapped by racism is getting celebrated by/in a country that can’t even name race riots, let alone denounce them… But the prevalence of that thought is not my making and nor my problem to solve. It’s directive, telling me that, man, metaphysically, this does not feel like not an honour, it feels like a public defanging. It’s warning me.
“Here’s this thing that was culturally significant to you – we’re going to warp it in your name.”
…So it’s a bizarre choice to me conceptually.
On top of that, there’s the sheer performativity of it.
Around the time of George Floyd’s killing, I had this unshakeable feeling of ennui with the trajectory of conversations around race. I almost wanted to revert to a time where it felt like I was screaming into the void about Black issues because some of the shit I had to witness, sit through, and speak about was giving me hives.
“Black people are upset, I guess its time to take Uncle Ben off the easy rice packaging.”
Demands to not be massacred by police were met with white voice actors not dubbing Black cartoon characters anymore. I felt like I was shin-deep in the worst K-hole for 2 sorry months.
It’s the trafficking of the illusion of progress. I like to say, “of mistaking movement for progress.” A Black Brit outsourced his skillset to the US and found success there. now the country wants to claim him. are you not embarrassed that your infrastructure couldn’t facilitate the realisation of his full potential? That anti-immigration sentiments are creating a suffocating environment for the Black people trying to thrive in every realm, but especially the creative space? Are you not ashamed that so many Black British talent—Daniel Kaluuya, Idris Elba, Damson Idris, Jodie Turner-Smith, Cynthia Erivo—have left this oh-so-great nation to find work because this country can’t get its shit together artistically? This statue is the equivalent of a secondary school teacher that said you weren’t gonna amount to anything sending you an email after they spot you in a national newspaper and ask if they can photograph you for the school brochure. Drop me out, Mr. Rutherford.
Hollywood might be the global epicenter of cinema but the underdevelopment of the British arts has had a chronic problem for years and rather than experiencing wondrous and endless growth like other, more boring industries—it’s been consistent declining. All my peers in the creative sector are struggling and/or scrambling for sponsorship opportunities that are becoming scarcer and scarcer. The UK’s spending on culture is among the lowest in Europe with funding falling by 18% between 2009 and 2023. The casualties to the British arts have been innumerable—what springs to mind most immediately is one of the most exciting literary publications, The White Review going defunct in 2023 due to rejected arts council funding 3 years in a row.
The horror stories I’ve heard from Black creatives trying to make distinctively Black art in this country could rival a Peele motion picture.
So celebrating the “homegrown British talent” of an American film whilst very little is being done to stimulate the success of domestic Black creativity is just smoke and mirrors.
Statues have their own philosophical dialect, their own societal intention. What is chosen to be immortalised in limestone, bronze or marble communicates what is worth being collectively revered but deeper than that, it determines what people with the power to erect statues want the masses to value. In this case, the statue of Kaluuya is a feel-good beacon of inspiration that whispers, anyone from anywhere can make it if they work hard enough. It’s one of the most reliable chauffeurs of capitalistic doctrine. a shiny, big look at the bunny distraction that glamourises individualistic triumph as the cultural foundation that make any one person’s success possible, slowly erodes. I ask myself: is it just that it’s a sunken place statue? Would I feel just as unsettled if it was Kaluuya’s Fred Hampton from Judas and the Black Messiah (2021). Maybe. Probably, actually. Perhaps I’ve learnt a core belief with this whole thing—that I reject the colonial attempts of honouring Black people in the heart of empire—especially when said empire is currently responsible for arming and supporting the Palestinian genocide and the continued extraction of wealth from Africa. The platitudes will always make me feel gross and that I’ll never be with it.
TL;DR – ‘Low the statues. Free my niggas. Fund the arts.