An Invitation to Life

Culture Watch

An Invitation to Life
Sankofa's truth will set you free.
By Calvin Morris

The word of the Lord that came to Joel son of Pethuel:

Hear this, O elders, give ear, all inhabitants of the Land!

Has such a thing happened in your days, or in the days of your ancestors?

Tell your children of it, and let your children tell their children, and their children another generation.

—Joel 1:1-3

Sankofa, directed by Ethiopian-born Howard University professor Haile Gerima, is a hauntingly beautiful, powerful, and disturbing film about Western slavery and its aftermath.

Beauty is created by the lush scenery of the unnamed Caribbean island where the action takes place and the visual attractiveness of the actors whose sepia, ebony, and cafe au lait tones grace the screen. Power is provided by the film’s ability to evoke in the viewer an awareness of the pain and hurt, rage and anguish, and guilt and shame long suppressed and unacknowledged. Distress is caused by the truth that it reveals, mocking the presumed innocence of America’s historical past.

Gerima, through Sankofa–an akan word meaning "you must go back to go forward"–endeavors to assist the film-going public in an unexpurgated exploration of the slave past through the eyes of the slaves themselves.

Sankofa’s subject matter and its critical perspective have left it without support, financial or otherwise, from the movie industry. (Media moguls have deemed the project lacking in commercial appeal.) Conventional wisdom suggests that people go to the movies to be entertained—the more fantasy, the better—not to be confronted with uncomfortable truths about their past histories. Truth is usually a casualty in both film and life.

Nations and people engage in massive forms of denial when the issues involve a country’s participation and culpability in past wrongs. America is not alone in its avoidance of slavery: Germany continues in its amnesia concerning the Holocaust; the former Soviet Union is in no rush to reveal the depth and horror of the Gulag to this present generation; and Australia finds no enthusiasm in excavating its past wrongs against its aboriginal people.

Still, Sankofa challenges us to know the truth of our past, to admit it to present and future generations, and to be set free by such knowledge.

THE FILM OPENS with Mona, an African-American fashion model, being photographed on the Ghanaian coast near a former slave castle and fortress. Writhing on the sand in various suggestive poses, dressed in garish orange with a wig and long false orange fingernails, Mona is a caricature of her real self...a self she does not know.

Directing the fashion shoot is a young white photographer who quite possibly represents Western voyeurism and exploitation. If so, Mona is an unwitting accomplice in her own subjugation.

In the midst of the action, a piercing, strident voice is heard saying, "Look to your past." The speaker is an old black man of indeterminate age whose Old Testament-like prophetic utterance unnerves Mona (and this reviewer) considerably. Soon thereafter she returns, alone, to the castle, intrigued and troubled by the challenge to "look to your past."

As Mona traverses the corridors of the castle basement, she is transported—yes, snatched back—into the slave past, becoming Shola, a house slave. We experience the realities of slavery through Shola’s eyes and are introduced to her lover, Shango, whose unrepentant commitment to individual and group liberation eventually enables her to strike a blow for her freedom as well.

Sankofa permits us to see Shola’s slave compatriots in all of their individual complexities. Some resist slavery, while others accommodate to it. Others affirm a remembered African past, as in the character of Nunu, and acquire resilience because they know from whence they have come. Still others have no remembrance because they do not know from whence they have come. And others have no remembrance of "home" and are bereft without a foundation on which to stand and fight.

We see Shola’s ambivalence as a house slave to the entreaties of some of her fellow slaves to assist them in revolt. One of the most achingly poignant and unsettling scenes in Sankofa involves the anguishing desperation, fear, and self-loathing experienced by two male slave-drivers, themselves slaves, who are ordered to whip a pregnant slave-girl who has been caught in an escape attempt. They lash her body until she dies, although Nunu and other slave women, calling on the gods of their ancestors, save her unborn child. Hence in the midst of death there is life!

Thus, throughout the unfolding of Sankofa, the past engages the present. Ours is the opportunity, through the film, to confront the realities of the past not as a sentence of death, but as an invitation to life. We are invited to embrace the agony and the ecstasy, the fear and the faith, and the tragedy and triumph of the "many thousand gone." By looking back we can, indeed, go forward. —Calvin Morris

CALVIN MORRIS, a Sojourners contributing editor, is vice president for academic services at Emory University in Atlanta.

Sakofa. Haile Gerima. Negod Gwad Productions Inc., 1993.