Am I: Too African
a movie by Nadia Sasso
This film is driven by the interviews with six compelling, woke young women who had either been born or had second generation roots in Sierra Leone, a Sierra Leonian grandmother and an African Studies Professor, This 43 minute discussion on identity was a humbly presented (and therefore more powerfully provocative) engagement of stories from a place in-between cultures that offered both subtle and explosive evidence that cultural identity, while a human construct, frames how we experience life.
I spoke briefly with the filmmaker right after the viewing about the frustrations I was experiencing. I couched my lament in the recognition that this type of dialogue/exploration is so vital and effective. In my white, male, hetero, third generation United Statesian privilege, I think we both thought I was frustrated because of the distance between where I live and where this was created.
After some time to sort things out a bit, I believe the frustration stemmed from the fact that in the course of the inquiry these beautiful people explicitly said that “some one like me” would never be considered as a potential mate and that did/does have a gut-punch effect that “some one like me” rarely is subjected. Certainly I could process the rejection of my fantastical adoration because of age or bad breath or some other attribute specific to me, but because I was so squarely set in the category of “the other”, the simple and non-malicious statements subliminally triggered a protective disinterest and survival-mode sense of boredom that colored my viewing experience for the last fifteen minutes of the film.
In all the years I have internalized the malicious racism of my culture (chicly critical for affect and perhaps on principal) toward brown/black/non-white men, women and children —- it has so often been framed with in masculine violence and inevitable despair. Like gels across the theater lights communicate how we are to feel as an audience, I have cultivated a way to watch a Spike Lee Joint and walk away with the right amount of outrage and amusement.
Ms. Sasso’s film took me to a place so simple and without pretense that my defenses were no match for the honest, thoughtful process this generation of African in America women are traversing.
Being a product of a disposable culture, I was shook by the struggle of the elders and their prodigy to protect and project their homeland’s mystery and flavors and claim their identity/dignity on the land where they walk, no matter the continent. I was pole-axed by the implications of the slavery business that stripped the family ties, customs, identities and histories from the incarcerated and tortured humans brought here to feed a greed and a viciousness I cannot yet process.
It was more deeply felt how isolation insinuates itself between us all, when the Sierra Leonian women (whose facial structure and body types were so familiar to me as they resemble my African American friends) openly discussed the differences in the values and identity that they had constructed and the identity and values of the descendants of American slavery. They had a stable home of fathers, food, extended families, industry, agency and ambition. The Diaspora was a defining cut across time but they still have a sense of belonging on this earth.
In the eyes of these women, while they shared the destiny of the African American because of our American racist assumptions and behaviors, the two communities no longer shared the same culture. They did not deny the descendants of slavery their West African culture, but rather drew stark attention of the effects that incarceration and torture inflicted on the people of the middle passage by our nation’s economic exploitation. Slavery had stripped the victims of those deeply human qualities and the damage was/is so catastrophic that our new Americans from Africa can not find a sustainable bridge into the African American culture.
The stories all gave tribute to the universal human aspects of adaptation and resilience, whether it was code-shifting between home, school, extended family, North America or Africa —- or the reframing of all the teasing/ridicule they absorbed and survived. The pain and transcendence seemed to bring a shine to their bright eyes and at the same time bind them each to one another.
If yesterday I was ready to dismiss this documentary, this simple vehicle of point of view and hope, I sit here now typing in repentance. So simple in its structure and approach, this straight forward dialogue shines a stark clean light on the implications of our system of past and current slavery, race and gender based alienation and the violence and oppression we have internalized.
I was given a lifeline into this deeper appreciation of the piece by the brilliant and gracious words of Ms. Sasso during the panel discussion after the viewing. She said, in effect, that in academia their is a culture of hazing where people strive to claim their intellectual superiority and fail to bring thoughtful dialogue to the broader community. She smiled and confidently asserted that her film was simply made in the hopes that we would discuss her film and be changed by the profound process of considering another’s point of view. Mission accomplished.
Am I: Too Immersed in White Male Supremacy to be Human or Too Human to stay Immersed in White Male Supremacy —- thank you Nadia.
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