or how an Oscar campaign could help stop the genocide in Darfur
Last week, I went to hear Ntozake Shange read at City Lights. It was Mardi Gras, and the eve of Chinese New Year, and firecrackers exploded behind her in Chinatown. Ntozake is a legend; it had been 30 years since she'd lived in San Francisco, holding down two jobs while writing what would become "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf." Her new book of poems, The Sweet Breath of Life, is inspired by historic photos from the Kamoinge Workshop.
A young woman asked Ntozake what had inspired her to become a writer.
"The Vietnam war," she said, describing it as a "terrible time to be alive if you were conscious of what death was." The civil rights movement and black power had too few women's voices. The women's movement had too few voices of color. "Someone had to speak for us. And no one was talking."
The times we live in require us to bear witness. We do this every day here, but the Republicans are setting the agenda. The major news media don't bother to cover wars we started on the other side of the world. The American people simply don't want to know. How many artists will be inspired by the Iraq war, the war we never see on TV or in the streets? Maybe the answer lies in the movies.
Today George Bush met Paul Rusesabagina, the valiant hotel manager who sheltered 1200 Rwandans from massacre. If you believe Don Cheadle's portrayal in Terry George's film, he did it by sheer will, by forcing himself to wear a dress uniform to maintain order while the world around him descended into hell.
I saw Hotel Rwanda in a packed theater on a sunny Saturday afternoon with tears streaming down my cheeks. I'd heard the criticism that it wasn't bloody enough (what could possibly be bloody enough but still watchable, when 800,000 were hacked to death in 100 days?), that the politics were overly simplified.
But I felt the film struck a fine balance of having heroic characters and making us care about real events. Events no one wanted to know about, and once they knew, didn't want to do anything about. I went home and worried about Darfur. But I worried more about what Joaquin Phoenix's character, a journalist, says in the movie: what if Americans saw those images of massacres on TV but went right on eating their dinner?
We just lost the White House because of the willful ignorance of the American electorate and an administration that prefers to distract us from the killing fields. Of course it's natural to look away, to prefer to believe in your worthiness rather than your good fortune. What will it take for us, as political activists but also as artists, to engage them in a reality no one wants to see, on a basic level to make the connection between the cost of war and the cost to domestic programs, the cost to our future?
I also saw A Very Long Engagement this week, and found it a profoundly beautiful film, perhaps a bit too beautiful to look at it, although the director makes us pay by occasionally sticking someone with a bayonet or blowing up a zeppelin at close range.
It reminded me of an exhibit at Berkeley Art Museum on surrealism, which I had always found delightfully wacky or occasionally disturbing in a vague, conceptual way. The exhibit placed photos of people in gas masks alongside Magritte paintings; disembodied limbs from the battlefield next to Jean Arp and Frida Kahlo. Perhaps museum-goers in Paris or Amsterdam in the 20s made these connections, but I needed them drawn for me.
Most great films about war are made afterward (Apocalypse Now), or are disguised by analogy (M*A*S*H was set in Korea). In recent memory I can only think of a few: David O Russell's brilliant Three Kings. Spike Lee's 25th Hour felt like the first post-9/11 film but that was an accident; the novel was written before. Sure, there are been weighty plays about firemen, seen by a handful of theatergoers in the tri-state area. It's no accident the first great musical of the millenium was Urinetown, a Brechtian drama about privatizing public utilities. But so far no film has ever stopped a war.
When W first took office, he reached out to the democrats by inviting Teddy Kennedy over to watch Thirteen Days together. Thirteen Days is a thoughtful low-budget film about JFK's resistance to leaping to a military--nuclear--option during the Cuban missile crisis. I thought about this movie night in the days after September 11th and hoped the president had taken the film's message to heart; after all it took us a whole month to go into Afghanistan.
But it turns out all he remembered was Adlai's presentation at the UN, reenacted by making a chump of Colin Powell in support of an unwarranted preemptive attack. So who knows what message he got from Hotel Rwanda? Maybe he puts his shirts on more carefully in the morning, tying his tie with panache on his way to privatize Social Security and declare war on Damascus.
In an odd twist of fate Africa Action e-mailed today, asking me to write to the president, and to tell 10 friends to go see Hotel Rwanda. They even sent questions for discussion. (Don't worry, you can still go out for sushi afterward.) This week the NY Times ran photos above the fold of the mixed race babies of black Sudanese women, the visible product of rape by the marauding Arab janjaweed. Of course we look away. It is a terrible time for conscious people to remain silent. There's a lot to be said for someone who can make you laugh in the midst of it, or provide a narrative that allows you to relate and make sense of tragedy.
What art will grow out of this war and the wars on the horizon? Who will be the artists who bring it to the consciousness of an unwilling public?
What do y'all imagine: Guantanamo Guernica? A Baghdad Hogan's Heroes?