"Movies on the Blackboard" - THE PEACOCK: The Prof (20 November 2019)

Movie days in my classroom are an event. Rather than have my students watch required films in the privacy of their dorm rooms, I organize screenings for my students at my college’s mini theatre and we even have popcorn. As enjoyable as these “non-classroom” occasions are, they aren’t any less academic. Instead, students use the opportunity to critically analyse the films as artefacts of a time and place, part of the zeitgeist of a cultural moment. Employing film in my teaching and academic research, I attempt to understand how cinema is more than an art form that runs parallel to our life experience. Just as my students do when they watch pictures in class, my columns over the next few days will think about how the movies are exemplary of our existence, even constitutive of it, but not always in obvious ways.    

Take my Interpreting Literature class – the gateway course to the English major at William and Mary, where I teach. In it, I pair texts from the canon (think Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Dickens) with work, generally, by more contemporary writers (think women, probably not white, and usually not dead). Between the study of corresponding books, linked by subject matter but separated by time, I’ll include a film that can help bridge the material but also illustrate concepts, portray a place, or bring nuance to words. Yet, how a syllabus puts disparate texts in conversation with one another may not be self-apparent. For instance, what does the Vietnam War have to do with the Belgian Congo or Nigeria on the eve of European colonization? A lot, as it turns out, thanks to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).

After they’d read Heart of Darkness (1899) and before they encountered Things Fall Apart (1958), Chinua Achebe’s response to Joseph Conrad, my students watched Coppola’s opus, which is inspired by Conrad’s turn-of-the-century novella. Apocalypse Now’s river-ride between war-torn 1970s’ Vietnam and Cambodia may seem far off from the late-nineteenth century water-bound journey Marlow takes in the depths of the Congo in search of Kurtz. But my students quickly picked up on the themes the two share: imperialism as failure and the belief in racial superiority as folly. Despite this, neither Conrad nor Coppola adequately develop their non-white characters, women especially. When students meet Okonkwo, the proud but fatally flawed Igbo protagonist in Things Fall Apart, as well as the rest of the people who constitute his life, they are given a sense of how “the other” was affected by colonialism, even resisting it.  

When they met in 1980, Black American writer James Baldwin confided in Achebe: “That man, Okonkwo, is my father. How he got over, I don’t know, but he did.” By this, Baldwin didn’t mean that the African origins his father shared with Okonkwo, separated by a legacy of slavery, were what prompted him to see the fictional character as his parent. Baldwin’s statement had more to do with Okonkwo’s patriarchal nature – his brooding, sometimes overbearing demeanour – and how there was a kind of universality to this character that transcended time, place, and even the confines of a book. 

Interestingly, upon watching Apocalypse Now, several of my students – all millennials who had never seen (or, in many cases, even heard of) the film – talked to their parents about what their lives were like during the America of the Vietnam War period. My students reported that their parents were surprised by the question and even more so that it arose from watching Coppola’s war epic in the classroom. “Did you know that the film is based on Heart of Darkness?” a student said her father asked, to which she responded with an eyeroll. But wanting to push my students further, I urged them to consider how the American film might play to a Southeast Asian audience. Would Vietnamese viewers see themselves in Coppola’s Vietnam like Baldwin saw his father in Achebe’s Nigeria? 

These are the kinds of questions that the study of film allows us to grapple with. Sometimes enjoyable, other times thought-provoking, the movies are our cultural moment, mirror of our past and, perhaps, even what we don’t always see. 

From The Peacock.

"The Stagnant Traveller" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - December 2013/January 2014)

A whole year would go by before I could visit her grave. It was my first trip back to Goa. Twenty years on, and it is still one of my two biggest regrets of moving to the United States: I could not be there for my grandmother in her final days. Now, two decades later, I have the opportunity to make up for the second misgiving.

My parents named my sister after my grandmother Inacia. When my sibling had her daughter, she named her after Adeline, my brother-in-law’s grandmother. Inacia had passed away on my parents’ wedding anniversary and Adeline on my birthday. A metaphor for life, then, that jubilation is not without counterpart. Though those two matriarchs never met, they may as well have been kindred spirits for their fierce independence and straightforwardness, qualities I already see in my niece. Having not had the chance to grow up with my sister, on this the longest sojourn in my ancestral homeland since having departed, perhaps it is not too late to mitigate that shortcoming by being in the life of her daughter, the latest addition to our family. 

The trouble with being a transnational is not simply the impossibility of existing in multiple places at the same time, but coming to terms with knowing that life and death happen even when one is not “there,” wherever there might be. Yes, there was every joy to be had, this year, in watching my niece take her first steps, utter her first words and, finally, say my name. But on the other side of the planet, in my other life in America, Andy, a close friend, was to succumb to a hit-and-run accident. I had to mourn from afar, again. Only, this time, the geography was the other way around, and I wondered, again, if my presence might have changed something, anything. Around the same time, my godmother came to the end of her life. I was in Goa when she breathed her last, and I wondered – if I had the choice – if I would have chosen to be elsewhere. But how would that change the grief I felt? It was becoming only too clear, that while I had lost loved ones before, I was at that point in my life where the space between those losses might only get smaller.

A neighbour, whose father had died not too long ago, asked about my mother who was being treated for a recurrent illness. It was how I had found out that my godmother had taken a turn for the worse – both women had been referred to the same hospital. While my mother was being attended to by the doctor, I went up to see my godmother. She had been sedated, and the family kept vigil outside the intensive care unit. The priest had already been to administer extreme unction. I tried not to dwell on the future and what it might hold, nor did I want to think about how this scene may be one I might bear witness to again. 

Outside, the monsoons pelted rooftops and turned the streets the characteristic red of Goa’s laterite soil. I recalled how my godmother would come to see me at my grandmother’s house where my family used to stay during trips from Kuwait where my sister and I were born. The last email I wrote Andy was to tell him about my godmother and to share my niece’s latest exploits – he had gotten to meet her on what was his only trip to India earlier this year. It was only after that I realized he never got to read my message. I tried not to be angered by my neighbour’s question, which came from a place of concern and memories of the parent she had lost. “Your mother... Are you looking after her well?” Instead, I recalled with shame what I had said to my uncle nearly twenty years before. It was right before I left for America. I could not have known that it would be the last time I would see my grandmother when I said to my father’s brother: “Take good care of her!” My uncle, a patient man, simply replied, “Do I not?” 

I could not return to Goa when my grandmother died. It had only been a few months since I moved to America and did not have the means. I was saddened, too, to be absent at my niece’s birth. Instead, that November two years ago, I was doing battle with graduate school in London while desperately missing my family in Goa, as well as the relative warmth of the California autumn. I shared news of the newborn with my flatmate, a fellow student of Nigerian and Ghanaian origins. She promptly responded, “Another ogbanje!” 

Our friendship had been firmly cemented when at a conference to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Things Fall Apart, we both remarked upon the phenomenon of changelings in Chinua Achebe’s novel. The ogbanje of Yoruba and other Nigerian traditions are children destined to die and be reborn in the same family; often considered malevolent, we decided that Achebe had incorporated these babies that traverse spiritual and physical terrains as a postcolonial metaphor. Ogbanje might symbolize the past reincarnated, but also remade in the present – always evolving, but never certain. Achebe’s death this year reminded my friend and me of how we related his use of ogbanje to our own understanding of otherness in the lands we called home – of being transnationals.  Ogbanje became our code word to refer to those we identified as having had similar trajectories to ours: fellow travellers trying to make home in several places, but never really at home in any one place. 

That my friend should classify my niece as an ogbanje seemed apt, named as the little one is for her great-grandmother, born to my sister named for our grandmother. Those names that have travelled through generations allow nostalgia to live on, even as new memories are made and baby steps are taken. Despite the impossibility, I will always regret not being there for those moments in life – both of loss and gain – that happen elsewhere. But what will carry me is knowing that the stagnancy of memory is life’s deepest well, even when life happens in many places at the same time.

This article appears in the print and online versions of India Currents. It also appears on The Compassionate Species Project blog.