Theatre Review: The Brothers Size
By Wanda Sabir

In Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “The Brothers Size” we meet three black gods: Ogun, his kid brother Oshoosi and Elegba. This second play in the Brother Sister Trilogy addresses deep seated prejudice in the Louisiana Bayou where it’s hard to stay out of trouble when just one’s presence in the world is criminalized.  Darryl V. Jones directs the Theatre Rhinoceros production with a stunning lyricism enhanced by the synergy between the three actors: Gabriel Christian (Oshoosi), Julian Green (Elegba), LaKeidrick Wimberly (Ogun). A huge chain encircles the space where the brothers’ live. All activity turns 360. There is no escape. In the opening tableau, the characters dance to drums, with Ogun and Elegba vying over Oshoosi as if in a tug of war. When the day breaks we see Ogun waking his brother with breakfast. Later Elegba comes by.

Actor, LaKeidrick Wimberly’s Ogun Size is a man of few words but with a large heart, while Gabriel Christian’s Oshoosi Size has a youthful exuberance that is contagious.  We can see in Ogun’s eyes pride in his little brother who has big dreams and the intelligence to succeed in whatever he puts his mind too. As he listens to his brother speak about his dreams of travel and college, he worries about Oshoosi, what he attracts and what he can’t see in others whom attach themselves to his good nature like lint or cockleburs. Elegba (actor Julian Green), a man he met in prison is like this. Ogun tells his brother, “you don’t meet friends in prison,” yet Oshoosi doesn’t understand what his elder brother means until it’s too late.
Here, black gods are reduced to playing out their huge lives on a stage dwarfed by their magnificence. Even Green’s Elegba is larger than the town which threatens the dignity of every black resident. The one policeman, a black man, sees as his duty one of humiliation towards every black citizen. That Elegba works at a funeral home, could foreshadow the death sentence lingering in the shadows.

Brothers Size have each other. Elegba seems an outsider. He latches onto Oshoosi like a puppy eager for a home. The home he knows best is prison, while Oshoosi is free and does not plan to return. There is a subtle conditioning we see in Elegba’s aura, absent in his friend’s. It is Ogun who holds the space for his brother’s freedom, even after he gets too old for lullabies. Ogun tries to give his brother space to live his life and make his mistakes, but Oshoosi doesn’t have the luxury of living and learning. No black man does. One mistake and the living is gone. Lessons are costly for the Size brothers.
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Ogun is practical. He loves Oya ,but knows he cannot compete when she turns her gaze towards Shango. Shango is a player; he also has Oshun.  The god of iron and war, the goddess of the winds and rains, hurricanes, storms; the goddess of beauty and love . . . meet at the crossroads (Elegba). Choices have to be made. What will be the outcome for the Size men?

Directed by Darryl V. Jones, the play (performed without intermission) incorporates the rhythms and sounds of the Africa Diaspora, Louisiana, about as close to Africa one can get without leaving the county. “The Brothers Size” is up Wednesday-Sunday, through October 15 at the Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson Street, San Francisco. For tickets visit http://www.therhino.org/buy.htm or 1-800- 838-3006.

 

 

Interview with M. Gayle “Asali” Dickson, M.Div.
By Wanda Sabir

M. Gayle Dickson a.k.a “Asali” says, “There were five of us who worked on the newspaper. Between 1972-1974, I was the only female artist published in the Black Panther Party newspaper. We worked together as a team and talked over ideas to come up with what to put in the newspaper. Emory taught us how to integrate politics into the artwork. Our art was informed by the 10-Point Platform Program.” Ms. Dickson is one of artists profiled in the Oakland Museum exhibition: All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50, October 8-February 12, in the Museum’s Great Hall.

When one thinks about the power of art, especially figurative art which evokes the spirit of the people, public art featuring the faces of the disappeared, ignored or forgotten, like that found in Chicago’s Wall of Respect or on the pages of Muhammad Speaks and of course the Black Panther paper, come to mind.  On these pages we see a people a beautiful people. If nowhere else, here is a place where black is beautiful all the time in all its shapes, ages, sizes and forms. Perhaps this was the appeal of Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, a publication that traveled the African Diaspora—the first global soul train.

I caught up with the artist by phone last weekend for a conversation about art and memory, legacy and spirituality. If you look at images on the back page weekly, we see a battlefield, urban warfare, black people hunted like wild game.

Coming of Age in the ‘60s

MGAD: “I came of age in the 1960s. It was the best of times and the worst of times. I was partying and wearing miniskirts with Gogo boots. Seemed like everyone was wearing Naturals. There was a sense of community in the air. We greeted each other with ‘how you doing brother,’ ‘how you doing sister.’ I took art classes at Merritt Community College from Mr. Claude Clark where I learned about African heritage. The study of African masks and other artifacts helped me appreciate my ancestry. That was the best of times, but it was also the worst of times, because between 1963 to 1969 there were 18 assassinations that I’m aware of. I call them assassinations because they were treacherous and premeditated.

1963 Medgar Evers, 16^th Street Bombing – 4 Little Girls; President Kennedy, Assassinated
1964 Four Civil Rights Workers Assassinated
1965 Malcolm X, Viola Liuzzo Assassinated
1967 Denzell Dowell assassinated in Richmond, CA
1968 Martin King and Lil’ Bobby Hutton assassinated; Robert Kennedy, Assassinated.
1969 Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, John Huggins (Los Angeles) and Fred Hampton (Chicago) Assassinated.”

She then speaks of an iconic photograph of herself at a protest at Housewives Market on Ninth Street in Oakland.

MGAD: “I call it, ‘the me I almost forgot.’ After I move to Richmond, while unpacking I discover a photo of myself boycotting something.  I am amazed that it’s managed to stay with me all this time.

“It was May 1968.  I am still 19 years old until June of that same year.  The sign I am holding reads: ‘Don’t Shop Here; Stop By and Ask.’  There is a lady standing next to me.  She is holding two signs that read: ‘Dignity or Bargains, Take Your Choice,’ and ‘Please Don’t Cross The Line And Step On Our Freedom.’  The only place I remember being boycotted from back in that day was Housewives Market.

Gayle says that even though she thinks she knows the reason why she was there, the public protest must have been covered by the local paper so she does an Internet search.

MGAD: “I look up “Boycott Housewives Market,” add, “1967” guessing by the age I appeared in the photo; then, add, “Oakland, CA.” I even put in Swans Department Store, which was connected to Housewives Market in some mysterious way for me.  All that come up were these wonderful articles talking about the prosperous period in Oakland’s history when Swan’s Department Store and Housewives Market were a busy section of downtown Oakland.  [Then] suddenly, the articles stop around the late 1950s and early 1960s, then pick up again around the 1990s when downtown Oakland is in the process of rebuilding these two historical sites; and all the money involved; and who were the investors; and what a glorious history these two stores have; and all the new restaurants located inside the market now; the meat market and how good it is doing financially now; and how that area is picking up.

“Wait a minute!  What happened between the decline and the ascent?  According to these articles, my time in history does not exist.  Vanished off the face of the earth! Erased!  You think maybe I wasn’t boycotting Housewives Market?  But that is the only boycott in my memory bank!  Am I remembering something that never existed?  What! I don’t exist? Have I been erased from history? This is disturbing. Can I possibly be that insignificant?”

When Gayle refines her search and looks at the Oakland Tribune archives, there she finds what she is looking for. Keyword searches work best when one is in the right database.

MGAD: “I resume my research with and enter, “Boycott of Housewives Market + Oakland Tribune Newspaper.” Bing-o! What I found, was the boycott was a protest for more community control of the police by West Oakland’s black community. The protest was called by an ad hoc group called Blacks for Justice Committee.

This information ground Gayle in the knowledge that despite attempts to bury the past, the photo validates the incident and its participants. In George Orwell’s novel, “1984,” there is a ministry that erases the past if it challenges the state. The protagonist Winston works at the Ministry of Truth, where documents are altered or destroyed which contradict or challenge Big Brother.  He gets into trouble when he secretly tries to remember vanishing truths. In Oceania, Gayle’s photo would have been destroyed and with it her memories. Memories are not encouraged in a totalitarian society.

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“The trip for me is, if I had not mysteriously stumbled onto this photograph, this part of my history would have been lost, and vanished from my memory.  Yet, this memory has significance as I look back like the Sankofa bird, in search of my past, so that I may move forward.  I am a part of recorded history; I am not erased. The spirit that I had in joining the Black Panther Party can find roots in that Boycott.”

WS: Wow. What context.

In the exhibit at the OM you have art which reflects the issues you were protesting then. One drawing looks at the rising cost of living while wages stay the same, “All out War Declared in Middle East (1973) is topical, as do “Vote for survival” (1972), and “Let it Shine, Let it Shine, Let it Shine!” (1972).

In the OM store patrons can purchase the Asali collection which includes art not exhibited: A guy with his hand on his hip, a garbage can next to him entitled: “Any Town USA” and “The Prices Are Going Up, but My Pay Check Isn’t” (1973). From the police violence to economic deprivation to war to hunger, these drawings are just as relevant today.

MGAD: “An image is worth a thousand words.”

Yes, an iconic photograph says a lot about this revolutionary woman, her drawings, her ministry and the lives she has touched through her artistry and as a teacher in the Oakland Community School, and later as a minister and advocate for elders and other vulnerable populations— her legacy is a daily reminder.

At the press preview reception at the OMCA, All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50, she met a photographer from San Francisco who told her how his dad would take him to Glide Memorial for the Free Breakfast Program. I hadn’t known this about Rev. Cecil Williams’s church, but I am not surprised. San Francisco was central to the BPP. It published its newspaper in the City. There is an exhibit there presently, curated by Billy X, at the African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton Street which looks at this history.

Gayle says her family supported the Black Panther Party as the artist shares how she and her mother would be in the house listening surreptitiously to Malcolm X Speaks on a record player. “She is probably the reason I was at Housewives [that day].”

WS: You have lived a very full life. The Black Panther Party at 50—what a milestone for an organization which still resonates so powerfully in communities worldwide. You are a mother and a grandmother, you have worked and continue to work with youth. How does this generation push forward, taking the lessons of movements like the BPP in stride as they look to build a stronger movement going forward– like the Black Lives Matter Movement and other Social Justice Movements?

MGAD: “I have heard this question before. The Rev. Martin Luther King said the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. May the next generation pick up the torch of justice, passed on by the Black Panther Party and continue the journey. May they have courage, be in community and be creative.

Ashay!

Events where you can meet and hear this remarkable woman:
M. Gayle “Asali” Dickson will be in conversation with other Black Panther Party Women: Ericka Huggins, Katherine Campbell, Joan Tarika Lewis & Carol Rucker, Monday, October 17, 7 p.m., $7, at the Omi Gallery at Impact Hub Oakland, 2323 Broadway.

Sunday, October 16, 11 a.m. at Church by the Side of the Road, Rev. Dickson will deliver the sermon on the story of Tamar, entitled, “When We Make Sour Lemon Choices, God Makes Divine Lemonade.”  The church is located at 2108 Russell St, Berkeley, (510) 644-1263. This will be her last sermon. After this her palate will be her pulpit.

At the 50^th Anniversary conference:
Saturday, October 22, 11-1 LIBERATION THEOLOGY—THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY & THE CHURCH
Sankofa, Looking Back to Go Forward Presenters:
Rev. M. Gayle (Asali) Dickson
Former Panther, Sycamore Community Church
Pastor Michael McBride, The Way Christian Center
Rev. Kamal Hassan, Sojourner Truth Presbyterian Church
Rev. Dr. Martha C. Taylor, Allen Temple Baptist Church

Exporting Terror: A Review of Damani Baker’s “The House on Coco Road”
By Wanda Sabir

Damani Baker’s “The House on Coco Road” (2016) opened the Matatu Film Festival this year. The award-winning director, said he’d always dreamed of having a film screen at the historic Grand Lake Theatre. It was literal homecoming with many of the Baker clan and extended family in the house that night in the sold-out main theatre.  Baker brings to his beloved Oakland, a love letter to his son, with kisses sprinkled along the path of his courageous mother, Fannie Haughton, who decides to move her two children from Oakland to Grenada in 1983.  His father, Prestin Baker, Oakland firefighter, tells the director, he had to look Grenada up on the map to see where his family was going.  When the young divorcee arrives in the black nation, she and her two children are welcomed by Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, Jacqueline Creft, and other founding members of the New Jewel Movement.

Though the story takes the personal history of the Haughtons via Damani Baker, to tell a larger story of imperialism, capitalism and a reign of terror African people continue to suffer wherever greed is more valuable than human life, the narrative is never lost nor the lesson couched within the story, which is, the importance of knowing one’s history. “Somebody forgot to tell somebody something,” Damani says somewhat like a mantra, as he sorts, catalogs and complies the boxes of cassette tapes, reels of film, to watch and listen as he searches for a through line which connects his past to his present.

The archival footage the director discovers in a box at his mother’s house is just what he needs to complete a story begun many years earlier. In the box Damani finds cassette tapes of PM Bishop’s speeches, photos of himself and his sister in Grenada, Angela Davis’s speech during Women’s History Month—the year when Fannie decided to leave America for good. It is a treasure trove, especially the photos and footage his grandfather had of Fannie as a child with her sisters and as a teen, dressed up for church and in her cheerleading uniform.

Coco Road is the street named after his great grandmother in Louisiana where her family had been enslaved. Like many freed blacks, the Haughtons stayed on as sharecroppers harvesting potatoes. In a conversation with his great grandmother the director learns the owner of the land would have the families picking potatoes 24/7. However, over the years, Damani’s kinfolk acquired land, but Fannie’s dad left the south for Los Angeles where he raised his girls.  The first black family to buy a house in their neighborhood, a KKK calling card alerted Mr. Haughton to the dangers his family might suffer. Damani’s grandmother could not stay at home when her husband went to work each day. She had to pack up the children who were not in school and go over to a friend’s house.

We listen and watch as the director explores this body of work—his mother’s life, something tangible, yet abstract.  There are silences and spaces Mama Haughton does not allow him to see. This behavior part of a historic tendency to shield one’s loved ones from what is painful. Yet, for a young man trying to collect himself, looking to fashion a body politic comprised of all his legacies, good and bad, he needed answers. At first, Baker stumbles blindly without guidance; however, as he continues along the path, Esu Elegba opens the road – from Southern Louisiana to Southern California to Northern California to St. Georges Island, Grenada back to Oakland — this literal mapping or embodiment helps Baker put his family’s story into a contextual dialogue or dialectic.
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The story of his mother’s meeting with Angela Davis, becoming her TA, the alliance between the Black Student Union and the LA Chapter of the Black Panther Party, especially when John Huggins and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter were killed, George and Jonathan Jackson, her heading up the Free Angela Campaign, travel to Cuba, COINTELPRO, a teaching career, the move to Oakland, plus the allies and comrades she met and befriended, is why “The House on Coco Road” was a long overdue reunion of friends and family opening night of the Matatu Film Festival which is October 12-15, 2016.

As we sat spellbound in the theatre participating in the harrowing events of the US bombing of the island nation—Damani and his little sister playing under a four poster bed, its mattress covering windows so the glass would not fly into the room—as they heard the sounds of bombs and heavy artillery as planes flew above. It became clear that if Reagan could fabricate events to justify the annihilation of a peaceful nation independent of the bully to the north, then all wars were suspect starting with the recently ended Vietnam War, one Damani’s father served in to his chagrin.

When the director, his mother and Yvonne Belfon (who lived with the family then) return to their island home in 1999, 16 years later, he learns of the trauma his mother experienced in Grenada and in her reception back home after the US attack.  She told him of the media blackout for the first three days, which almost ensured no counter narrative. Racing for time and her children’s lives, Damani’s mother stuffs all she can carry into a duffle bag.  One of the items she saves from this period that Damani discovers (when he embarks on his treasure hunt) is the letter he wrote his father telling him about the bombing, the four mile walk to the airplane, and their escape.

Meshell Ndegeocello composed the score while Damani who wears all the hats: writer, producer, executive producer, director of photography shares the stage with long time collaborator Jon Fine (writer, editor), sister, Eisa Davis (writer), Rogelio González-Abraldes (director of photography), Cameron Russell (writer), and producers: Danny Glover, Belvie Rooks, and Max Osterweis.

“House on Coco Road” is Damani Baker’s personal and familial history, his coming of age at a time we thought the definitive story had already been written about the Cold War, but how many know what happened in Grenada? How many black men can say they met their first black president at ten (10)? That he shook his hand.— “The House on Coco Road” is invaluable for the untold stories it reveals, such as a behind the scenes look at the Free Angela Davis story.  Damani Baker lifts the voices of black women and gives them a vehicle to tell their stories: his mother, great grandmother, grandmother and black men: his grandfather and father, and where present, his own.

We are so thrilled Damani did tell somebody (smile).

 

Troubled Legacy: A Review of Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation (2016)
By Wanda Sabir

Perhaps the reason why Nat Turner is almost completely buried within documented and oral histories is connected to the fear his rebellion caused in the Southampton and by extension the southern antebellum community. Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation” visits this story as Donald Trump draws a white male constituency very much in keeping philosophically with the angry mob who tear the flesh from the iconic Prophet Nat Turner’s body. Parker’s “Birth” unearths a taboo. He pulls the sheets off mirrors and opens the doors to a Big House where he leans over vomiting out all things he has had to swallow since captivity.

Yet, with this purging comes personal consequences for the director. Nate Parker’s life is held against an ethical microscope and found wanting. Would Nat Turner object to Nate Parker’s embodiment? While an imprisoned Nat Turner is interrogated by his court appointed attorney, Thomas Gray, whose edited transcription appears as: “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (1831), another white writer takes this document and writes a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” (1967) where he inserts a fictitious white woman into the Turner narrative. This tampering with history is widely contested by the black community in the book: “William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond” (1968) by John Henrik Clarke and Lerone Bennett Jr. and Alvin F. Poussaint and Vincent Harding and John Oliver Killens and John A. Williams and Ernest Kaiser and Loyle Hairston and Charles V. Hamilton and Mike Thelwell.

All black men want white women, right? This is the dangling carrot which proved deadly to 19 year old Nate Parker.  There is no such thing as consensual sex between a black man and a white woman. If the scale tips and her consent evaporates, the Black lover is charged and imprisoned. Parker stated “[i]n his statement to [Pennsylvania] University, [that Detective] Weaver told him that he was a former collegiate athlete himself and knew the temptations to sleep with a “sports groupie.” [Parker] also claimed the detective then threatened him, “You wrestlers for the past 10 years have raped and battered this whole town. I’m going to get you.”[1]

Litigation sits at the center of both stories, miring the proposed outcome, justice and freedom for black people.

“The Confessions of Nat Turner” published after his death, is based on a “confession” Turner gave to his court-appointed lawyer, Thomas Gray, shortly before his execution. Gray later published the document. Styron wrote that the Turner he found in Gray’s text was a “dangerous religious lunatic . . . a psychopathic monster”[,] [so] rather than expand on the historical record, he chose to write a meditation on history, giving him ‘dimensions of humanity that were almost totally absent in the documentary evidence.’ In the novel, Turner is a young slave brought up as a domestic servant in the household of a wealthy, altruistic plantation owner who decides to teach Turner to read as proof that slaves are capable of ‘cultivation.’ In Styron’s depiction, Turner is pious, even saintly, with no romantic entanglements other than a chaste attachment to a young white woman who secretly holds abolitionist views.[2]

Rob Sloan, Associate Editor, reason.com writes, “[I]t doesn’t strike me as fair to blame Parker or [Jean] Celestin, [‘Birth of a Nation’ co-writer], for Jennifer’s death. The article notes that Jennifer suffered from bouts of depression even before the alleged rape took place. Before her death, she was confined to a mental institution. She alternately believed she was Satan, or Jesus Christ. She accused her sister of kidnapping her and was clearly suffering from mental illness.”

In Turner’s “Birth of a Nation,” we watch the young, then older Nat Turner (Oct. 2, 1800-Nov. 11, 1831), witness situations where white men treat other human beings brutally.  Despite what he sees on his plantation where he is taught to read, plays with the young master, then as an adult preaches the Gospel to other enslaved Africans, it is when Turner travels to other Virginia plantations and sees the ill treatment meted out to black people that he begins to explore other texts in the bible.

Guided initially by his mistress to study specific texts to the exclusion of others, these texts ones which exhort the captives to obey their cruel masters and rejoice in their pending everlasting lives. It is when Nat reads the entire book, (which is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture) he learns that unlike the God he had previously called on, there is an aspect to this divine being he’d completely missed.

Nat Turner’s critical reading of the bible as a gospel of liberation, rather than a tool to justify his people’s enslavement, should have been cause for white Southerners to reflect on their misdeeds and perhaps end this system.  Think again. What Turner faces when brought to the gallows is rage, rage towards this black beast[3] who dared upset the power dynamic. “Enraged white militias and mobs killed more than 200 black people in the course of putting down the 48 hour rebellion,” and they are still killing us.[4]

“Birth of a Nation” comes at a pivotal time in US history: the end of the term for the first black president, President Obama’s term replete with state sanctioned violence against black citizens, similar to that experienced during Jim Crow and prior to this, enslavement.  In a “New Yorker” magazine review and on a recent “60 Minutes” segment, the director’s moral reputation is questioned, his responses inadequate thus discarded despite the case’s dismissal 17 years ago. When I decided to see the film, I hadn’t known of the compelling court documents which show the victim’s inebriated state and questions her ability to consent to a sexual act while unconscious nor had I read published statements from the victim’s brother and sister. I hadn’t known she was 18 at the time and suffered depression thereafter resulting two years ago in a successful suicide. I dismissed the unearthing of this case as mere media slander, and I still wonder at the timing—why hasn’t it come up before? I understand why the film is being boycotted by many men and women who base the film’s aesthetic merits on the ethical reputation of its lead actor and director, an unfair or unevenly applied judgement. I will let Nate and Nat battle this one out.[5]

To his credit, Turner expresses regret and compassion for his accuser when he learns recently of her suicide in 2014 at the age of 30:

“I look back on that time, my indignant attitude and my heartfelt mission to prove my innocence with eyes that are more wise with time. I see now that I may not have shown enough empathy even as I fought to clear my name. Empathy for the young woman and empathy for the seriousness of the situation I put myself and others in.

I cannot change what has happened. I cannot bring this young woman who was someone else’s daughter, someone’s sister and someone’s mother back to life…

I have changed so much since nineteen. I’ve grown and matured in so many ways and still have more learning and growth to do. I have tried to conduct myself in a way that honors my entire community – and will continue to do this to the best of my ability.

All of this said, I also know there are wounds that neither time nor words can heal.”

In the New Yorker critique, “Birth” is juxtaposed with “12 Years a Slave” (2013) and “D’Jango Unchained,” dir. Quentin Tarantino, starring Jamie Foxx (2012)—D’Jango’s a farce, with a wild wild west troupe, the other a film a documentary based on the Solomon Northup story. Its director, Steven Rodney “Steve” McQueen (British). It starred Chiwetel Ejiofor, Igbo, born in Britain. The parallels between “Birth” and either of these two films is apparent, as they both look at the story of enslavement; however, the Nat Turner Rebellion illustrated in Parker’s “Birth,” is a story of redemption and triumph. In Parker’s skilled hands as director and actor, we see a story never witnessed on screen before.

Perhaps another reason this film is troublesome, according to Professor Leslie M. Alexander, Ph.D., Ohio State University, in a Nation magazine article, is “that [the director] misrepresents Turner and his rebellion, sends insidious messages about slavery and [ignores] the multifaceted roles of black women in the battle for freedom.”

The scholar specializing in 19^th century Black culture and historic accuracy in film states, “Despite Parker’s bluster about Nat Turner’s heroism and his claims to historical accuracy, he failed to provide a truthful rendering of Nat Turner’s life, his rebellion, or the experience of black people during slavery. As a result, Parker and Jean Celestin pimped black suffering for financial gain and proved that they have no respect for black history or for the people who fought for our freedom.”

The $17.5 million deal from Fox Searchlight, the largest deal at the Sundance film festival to date is a financial coup; however, at what cost, Alexander asks? How much of his soul did Parker relinquish? If we follow the money, does“Birth” leads us in a circular path which ends with black folks in chains? Maybe not.

The heroic “folk hero” Nat Turner “remained in the mouths of Black Virginians [like Cornelia Carney, b. 1838] for generations,” Michigan State historian Vanessa M. Holden states. “Carney was born seven years after the rebellion took place . . . [and] when Carney gave her interview a century after those violent days, Black Virginians were still facing awful times. A reminder that survival, resistance, and perseverance were possible must not have escaped her. Her father’s survival and Nat Turner’s successful rebellion remained married through a folk expression that an interviewer from the government would put in a book somewhere. Nat Turner, it seems, was still truant and lying out in the minds of Black Virginians.”

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Audre Lorde calls this altering historic outcomes in a way that restores one’s agency biomythology. Yet, if Parker’s revisioning of this historic scene – the taking of the armory, when in fact, the men were captured before, mere manipulation, while at the same time ignoring a network of support a revolt of such magnitude contained, the women, youth and free blacks—then one has to ask, to what end or for what purpose are such details omitted? Parker says he marketed the film “on legacy, [not necessarily Southampton legacy, according to scholar Vanessa Holden].”[6] However, the monetary legacy this film follows includes kinfolk: “Twelve Years a Slave” and “Selma” “absent of Ella Baker, Stokely Carmichael and James Forman, [the lineage a] part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, now looking to shape what the young and potential future Turners might think about rebellion.  And not one of that empire’s properties, including the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, have or will offer any assistance to or support for Turner’s political descendants still looking to finish his work” states Jared Bell, multimedia host, producer, journalist and educator, in “Rebirth of a Nation Within a Nation.

Holden says, “It is easy to list the details of the historical Southampton Rebellion that Parker did not accurately portray, and there are many such details. But what deserves more critical attention is Parker’s insistence on creating an extraordinary black male hero. By crafting of a narrative that depicts a hero made in his own image, Parker fails to explore two of the most compelling features of the historical Southampton Rebellion: the ordinariness of slavery’s evil and the vast resistive network of “heroes” needed to pull off a violent slave revolt. Slavery was awful. It was not only awful on some plantations or in some households or at the hands of a few purely evil masters. It was awful in even the most everyday moments in an enslaved man, woman, or child’s life. All of the enslaved people who survived under the slave regime did so because they resisted slavery every day. That is why Cornelia Carney saw Nat Turner in her father and her father in Nat Turner. In the folk tradition where ‘Ole Nat’ survived, Nat Turner was not one slave but every slave.”[7] He was the hope, enslaved Africans dreamed of.

In an age when historic realities can be doctored and/or created in the studio or on a laptop, then presented as fact, it makes one question the validity or usefulness of staging Nat Turner’s story in 2016 inaccurately when a more accurate depiction might have been more powerful, but maybe not marketable in a white supremacist marketplace. Lots of black people suffer in Parker’s “Birth,” the victory short lived in comparison. The moment of glory fleeting – a signature American flag at its close with child who betrays Nat Turner now a Union soldier battling against the system of slavery. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation makes insurrection legal now. Is Parker saying with this ending to a spliced epic—it’s okay to revolt when the government is on your side? Look how long this union lasted. The ink had barely dried on the page before Reconstruction was over and the soldiers in the South returned to the north and slavery returned in the guise of Black Codes and Jim Crow.

Black men are shown in “Birth” caring for their families, yet, unable to protect them from violation. When Nat has to resist an urge to avenge his wife’s violation, his restraint shows a larger vision for an emancipated or free people. Revenge would have briefly satisfied just one man, and benefited him alone not all his people.

“Bruce Turner, a retired computer analyst, says Nat Turner, his great-great-great grandfather is a hero because ‘he saw an opportunity to try to correct something that was an extremely bad evil.’ He believes Nat Turner was a freedom-fighter who started a movement that helped end the institution of slavery. ‘Prior to the insurrection, slave owners actually believed that the slaves were happy in their condition,’ he says. ‘Nat Turner changed that.’”[8]

All it takes is one. Turner’s brief yet effective counterargument made slave owners insecure and nervous for the rest of their days. In 48 hours, more white people were killed than at any other time in antebellum history.

The director stirs latent genetic memories with the work. “Birth” is not a pleasant somatic excursion. There is nothing redemptive about this period. Slavery was violent. This country founded on such violence continues to sample this song and this story. “Strange Fruit” takes on eerie and prescient meaning in “Birth.”  The atrocities then and now are connected to the absence of agency granted to black bodies.  This troubles the young Nat,[9] but he is well-trained, so he continues to turn the other cheek and close his mind’s eye to these viscerally painful contradictions. He is mute when a friend asks, “Where is your God now?” when the man’s (actor Coleman Domingo) wife is raped by his master’s guest. Turner later trembles when he cannot protect his own wife, yet bows his head and continues to obey. We wonder where this fortitude is located.  Yet, once Nat realizes that his faith was not absolute, that he’d been standing on half-truths and lies—he begins to remember the dreams and nightmares from childhood, and the predictions regarding his greatness and the prophecy waiting to be fulfilled, what his father told him about greatness. So Nat (31) calls a meeting, then waits for a sign. The bloody corn on screen, the solar eclipse and other details highlighted in the film figure authentically in the historic story.

I do not think it a coincidence that Nate Parker (36) would direct this film which stars black American actors. It is an important story only a man who grew up in a community not far removed from the events of this story could tell, and tell well.  Parker’s young mother (17) might have also contemplated what kind of life her son would inherit, when she decided to keep him.  The same is true of the actual Nat Turner’s mother who had decided not to bring a child into captivity.

There is a spirit that resides in place which haunts these spaces when unresolved issues remain unaddressed.  It is not by chance that all the slave shacks were burned down following the insurrection, the county seat Jerusalem renamed, yet the sight of a beheading of a rebellious African remains. “[T]he street located outside Courtland, Virginia, bears the name Blackhead Signpost Road.[10]The only trace of Nat Turner is a small sign on a road.  His silencing was nearly completed, yet with a film whose title conjures D.E. Griffith’s 1915 Clansman renamed Birth of a Nation, Nat Turner is back. A conversation about black resistance can and does challenge black victimhood. Parker’s “Birth” could be seen philosophically as a rebirth, a rebirth of a black nation still connected to its African heritage and to a legacy larger than this temporary episode called slavery.

“Birth” is a reminder of humanity’s capacity and right to freedom at all costs.  Parker’s film is counter narrative or aesthetic response, and its tremor certainly shifts the scale. His Birth is a revolutionary story. The symbol or principle the rebel represents is justice or Maat.  At a time when black men are being gunned down indiscriminately or captured then enslaved, at a time when the front runner for presidential officer has a white supremacist as chief advisor, at a time when the largest prison strike in history is proceeding unnoticed due to media silence—Nat Turner might be what it takes to stir the waters just a bit, enough to start a tidal wave, just enough to make those on the ground think creatively about military strategy.

The Black Panther Party was successful for a reason. Party members bore arms and knew how to use them. This in itself leveled the judicial hierarchy until Governor Reagan passed laws which made it illegal to do so. Birth is a story of resistance and self-defense situated within the context of a black or African spiritual system. Dreams and visions reoccur throughout the film. A worried mother takes a young Nat to the elders for a reading. Later, he recalls their prophecy as he stands painted in ritual white clay at the center of the crossroads. The sacred and profane inhabit this world, a world repulsive and inhuman. Somehow, though, African ancestors knew the known world was not the only world and that white people were not in charge. Seeing beyond these temporal barriers, our ancestors found hope and resisted. Turner’s Nat, whom he portrays with sensitivity and authenticity is supported by an excellent cast featuring Armie Hammer, Aja Naomi King, Jackie Earle Haley, Penelope Ann Miller and Gabrielle Union in supporting roles.

The director says of his film, which opened October 7 nationally, to arts critic Brennan Williams, Huffington Post: “. . .  I honestly think this is a film that could start a conversation that can promote healing and systemic change in our country. There’s so many things that are happening right now in 2015—100 years after the original ‘Birth of a Nation’ film, here we are. I’d say that is what I hope sets my film apart, is that it’s relevant now—that people will talk about this film with the specific intention of change.”

[1] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/16/inside-the-nate-parker-rape-case.html

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/books/review/Row-t.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

[3] Representative of a larger fear which fuels COINTELPRO from the Hon. Marcus Garvey, Martin King and Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton and Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), to Mumia Abu Jamal and Stanley “Tookie” Williams. All potential black messiah types continue to be slandered, killed, imprisoned or both.

[4] Gray White, Deborah (2013). Freedom on my mind: A history of African Americans. New York Bedford/St. Martin’s. p. 225.

[5] Read http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2016/08/what-would-nat-turner-do/2/

[6] http://www.processhistory.org/holden-birth-of-a-nation/

[7] Ibid.

[8] Turner is responding to 60 Minutes correspondent, Anderson Cooper’s question: Is Nat Turner a hero?

[9] “Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property” (2002) is the title of Charles Burnett’s documentary.

[10] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/10/nat-turner-slave-rebellion-legacy/