#27/ AVA DUVERNAY’S POLITICAL COURAGE

Welcome to issue twenty-seven of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator and an artist based in Amsterdam. Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature.

🎙️ an audio version of the attention span newsletter is available on your favourite podcast app: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast…or to listen on the attention span website.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul –

Two lines from a poem by Emily Dickinson, put into music by Pete Josef, “Hope” is one of the most poignant songs I’ve ever listened to, and the context I have received it for the first time will remain forever in my memory and imagination. It was in Ava DuVernay’s limited series When They See Us, telling the story of the 1989 Central Park jogger case which has wrongfully accused five young black and Hispanic boys of raping a white woman. Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Korey Wise were aged between 14 and 16. They were exonerated after having wasted between five and thirteen years of their life imprisoned. It is a chilling account of cruelty and injustice perpetrated by systemic racism and white supremacist discourse and actions, which are very much active today (as the series shows, Donald Trump - then a New York property mogul – was convinced that the teens were guilty and reportedly spent $85,000 on four full-page adverts in New York newspapers titled: "Bring Back The Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police!"). The song “Hope” appears in one of the episodes towards the end if I remember correctly. Like a ray of light in all the violence the series was based on, hope rises from darkness.

And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

DuVernay made a powerful choice by putting this song in there, and this artistic gesture has come to define how I have received Ava DuVernay’s work as a viewer, and how I have interpreted her oeuvre as one of political courage.

Her latest film, Origin, based on the book Caste: The Origins of our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson, is a magnificent example of her powerful artistry and courage, which in my view defies the necessity to even discuss – as too many reviewers did – if this film should have been a documentary feature instead of fiction. In her book, Wilkerson writes: “And only recently have circumstances forced us, in this current era of human rupture, to search for the unseen stirrings of the human heart, to discover the origins of our discontents.” I believe DuVernay’s filmography is partly an exploration of those unseen stirrings, and Origin in particular takes us to a possible understanding of violence and division based on the concept of caste, as described by Wilkerson in her book: “Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order.” And she adds a very important nuance in her definition with regard to how we tend to look at everything through the prism of racism: “Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other.”

This is not an easy book to translate into a film, and without an artistic vision, it could have easily become a didactic adaptation stripped off its emotion and urgency. DuVernay has chosen to tell this complex narrative through the story of its author, Isabel Wilkerson (played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), and her personal journey of writing the book. As viewers, we become part of the process of Wilkerson’s research, passion, and questioning the mechanisms of how the world functions, as she goes through various layers of grief, from the personal to the collective. While writing the book, she will lose her husband, her mother, and her cousin, while American society will go through many more deaths caused by hatred and racism: from Trayvon Martin in 2012 to Heather Heyer in 2017, and so many more.

DuVernay opens her film with Trayvon Martin (played by Myles Frost) out on an evening to get himself candy and a soda. By the time he finishes his purchase, rain has started to fall, the camera captures Martin putting his hood on as he leaves towards the street, from inside the convenience store, reflecting his body blurred by the rain drops on the glass as menacing car lights start to follow him. The violent scene of his murder will come back later in the film, as we will experience it through Wilkerson, who is listening to the 911 recordings of the event. It is one of those powerful moments in the film where the intimacy of the author’s life interacts with the violence of society. Another such moment is Wilkerson lighting a candle and indulging herself in a bath, while reading Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class, a groundbreaking study conducted by a black and a white couple: Allison Davis, Elizabeth Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, whose story we also follow in parallel to Wilkerson’s in the film, as they take major risks to collect data in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era.

It’s in these most intimate moments that Wilkerson seems to experience the strongest epiphanies and where we see the spark of her intellectual brilliance. DuVernay has meaningfully captured that relationship between the private and the public gestures of what it means to be an intellectual, and an artist, who is connected to the world, truly cares about our humanity and takes responsibility with our craft – writing for Wilkerson, cinema for DuVernay. It is, I believe, necessary to see this process to understand what the book, Caste, is about, and what the film, Origin, tries to convey to the widest possible audience. This is also why DuVernay could not wait for studios to finance the film and went for an unusual route in Hollywood as she turned to philanthropists. This film had to come out before the next US presidential elections, where Donald Trump is again a candidate. (Another filmmaker with political courage, Agnieszka Holland, has shown with Green Border that cinema can have an impact on politics and society).

Our most private moments happen inside our homes, and the house is an important metaphor in the book Caste where Wilkerson describes us as “homeowners who have inherited an old house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.” Although in its foundations there’s violence and suffering we did not inflict ourselves, we must care for the house and make sure it is liveable for future generations, an imagery we see throughout the film. Right after the Trayvon Martin opening scene, we are brought inside Wilkerson’s mother’s house where we see many gestures of love and care by both Wilkerson and her husband Brett (played by Jon Bernthal) in how they kiss, embrace, how the mother (played by a poignant Emily Yancy) caresses her son-in-law’s hair as he laces her shoes and places her in her wheelchair. Those moments of tenderness become urgent in the overall narrative of hatred and dehumanisation, which Wilkerson analyses in her book.   

“Silence in the face of evil is in itself evil” Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said of bystanders, as Wilkerson quotes in her book. A statement we unfortunately see repeated today through the non action of too many people in the eyes of an ongoing genocide. This dehumanisation leading to our losing the capacity of being shocked is a central theme of Caste, which looks at three countries in particular: the United States, Nazi Germany and India. Different views have been expressed on the framework created by Wilkerson, analysing the systemic divisions in these societies based on the theory of caste and not racism. Some, like the German colleague she’s visiting in Berlin, bluntly tells her over dinner this is a flawed thesis as the systemic murder of Jews during the Holocaust cannot be compared to the millions of people who were killed by slavery. The lack of capacity or will for connecting those histories as portrayed in that scene – and in many of our discourses, is painful. Such division is an efficient way to keep the narratives far apart so that we become immune to each other’s suffering. “It’s as if you’re trying to fit a square inside a circle,” adds the German host to Wilkerson, who just told her that thirteen generation of people have lived and died under slavery. She basically silences this possibility for connection, which is uncannily similar to what is happening in Germany right now when people express solidarity with Palestine.

Such connections have many times appeared more natural to me as a literary translator who has been looking at the world through the possibility of translation and connection. The thesis offered by Wilkerson helps us understand the mechanisms of violence perpetrated by the powerful and dominant in each of these countries and contexts. It doesn’t compare or hierarchise suffering, it gives us a tool to read history and its impact on today’s world. In all these societies, we are still grieving the loss of humanity, and we haven’t healed yet. If Caste attempts to give us the intellectual tools to define and understand our grief, Origin takes us where healing could become a possibility. DuVernay portrays this by creating visual poetry, as in the scene where the grieving Wilkerson is lying on a bed of dead leaves, that keep falling over her as she loses herself in her pain. Another such instant is brought by a camera shot from under a trampoline children are playing on, with the sun piercing through the woven fabric of the dark mat. The more they jump, the brighter the light seems to become.

In one of the scenes, Wilkerson and her husband take their mother to the elderly home where she will move. The writer stands by the window in the empty room, the light brings in different pearly shades into this beautiful grainy shot. The mother is in a wheelchair, they’re by the window looking up, and she tells Isabel about a little league team and splashes in the pools that she sees portrayed in the clouds. Her daughter smiles as she says “you and your imagination”, not knowing yet at that moment that her mother was referring to the real life story of Al Bright, a young black kid who was part of the winning Little League baseball team in 1951 but was refused to join his teammates in the segregated swimming pool as they were all celebrating their win – another painful scene DuVernay has filmed with empathy and care.

Bright became a renown artist and educator, he passed away at 82 as Wilkerson tells us viewers in a voice-over, lying next to the little Al on the grass under the moving shadows of the trees. “Part of him died that afternoon of 1951” we hear her say, before she turns to the little one and speaks: “you’re going to be fine, you’re going to be just fine”. Hope is the thing with feathers, and it takes political courage to state it in one’s art as the world keeps inflicting violence on the most vulnerable among us. Ava DuVernay’s vision is not about denying this reality and hide behind a care-bear mockery of the world, no. Her work is a testimony to our capacity to move beyond hatred and find the connections so that we can heal together, and build a better future for ourselves, and the generations coming after us. It is no coincidence that the words of Primo Levi appear in the film: “It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.” We are experiencing this right now as I am typing these words, and I find courage and strength in Ava DuVernay’s vision, which reminds me we need hope and imagination to keep resisting violence and division. To allow hope to perch in our souls.

Origin is available for rent or purchase on different streaming platforms (Apple TV in The Netherlands).

Photographs: a Flamingo tree in Amsterdam, which blooms pink for a very short period of time in May. It is my favourite tree.

WATCH
Talking of artists with political courage, this is also one great example: Macklemore’s protest song: HIND'S HALL. The title is a reference to pro-Palestinian activists’ renaming of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University to "Hind's Hall" in honour of Hind Rajab, the Palestinian six-year-old killed by Israeli forces. I invite you to watch the video clip online. Not only does Macklemore speak truth, but he’s one of the rare artists with such a gigantic platform in the music industry, to openly take a stand against the funding of violence by his government. I’m not sure what the others staying silent are afraid of, since Macklemore keeps giving sold out concerts in arenas across the world. He is creating solidarity with a powerful discourse of love and demand for freedom for all, against violence and hatred, he stands against polarization (see for instance this poignant video he shared on his Instagram page). We’re hungry for such care and call to love. I wish our politicians and the media would carry discourses like this one instead of dividing us all through fear.

LISTEN
Where is your pride, a song by Moby with Benjamin Zephaniah. Writer, poet, professor and musician Benjamin Zephaniah died on 7 December 2023, at the age of 65, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour eight weeks previously. It was a terrible shock and immense loss. The suddenty of his death is a painful reminder of the fragility of life. Moby wrote a song last year together with Zephaniah, whom he says, on his Instagram page, is his favourite animal rights activist. Moby says about this song: “Where is your pride is a testament to Benjamin and an honour to his legacy.”

READ
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a philosopher at Columbia University, a marvellous thinker and philosopher of translation. I have recently come across his work, and now I am listening to every single interview he did (those on French public radio are excellent) and catching up with reading his rich oeuvre. I am currently reading De langue à langue. L’hospitalité de la traduction (From Tongue to Tongue. Hospitality in Translation). I cannot find an English translation of this book. He is also the author of an autobiography, Le fagot de ma mémoire, which I cannot wait to dive into. For those of you who don’t read in the French language, Bachir Diagne has also many books in English, and I invite you to explore his work.

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ABOUT

Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil (she/they) is a writer, literary translator and artist based in Amsterdam. They established The Attention Span website and its newsletter to publish their work independently: making the time to reflect, analyse and imagine.

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