Allowing waters and truths to sluice in
Responding to Coconut/Cane & Cutlass by Michelle Mohabeer
Coconut/Cane & Cutlass, 1994 (Film still)
The sea persists in us, whether we have made one journey or incalculable crossings.
In 2024, it will be thirty years since Guyana-born, Canada-based Michelle Mohabeer’s Coconut/Cane & Cutlass was released, yet it is as persistent as the subjects it studies: the pains of exile; the hollowness of conformity; the crucible of lesbian desire. I was eight when this film was being released, with no reckoning yet of how my own Indo-Caribbean queerness would find me in the world. I could not have known then what the material and psyche-driven importance of such a film would be, in three of the most primordial, intersecting communities I occupy: woman-loving; Indo-Trinidadian; writer.
To sit, rapt, while Coconut/Cane & Cutlass plays through its full length (a hairsbreadth over 30 minutes) is to be submerged in its rhythmic experimentation. Straddling dreamscape autobiography, psychogeographic documentary and historical confrontation, the film tugs on several cords of strong feeling. Guiding her viewer through fugue-like scenes which spill and flow into each other, Mohabeer establishes segments denoted in vivid fuschia script on black title cards, such as “Voyage Across the Kala Pani (black water)”; “Ancestral Spirits”; “The Exotic and The Erotic”. These divisions do not delineate neat conclusions: they act much like kokers, the Dutch sluice gates used to drain Guyana’s floodplains, to keep the Atlantic Ocean at bay. The investigations of the film, which traverse indentureship in the West Indies; racism and xenophobia in Canada; same-sex eros in Black and brown bodies of people of colour, are in the finest sense intersectional: no identity inscribed in these scenes exists in isolation.
Rhythms ripple through the worlds Mohabeer conjures, as the film documents her painful autonomous exile from Guyana to Canada, in the tradition of numerous Caribbean diaspora citizens who make their homes primarily in North America and the UK. Frames of a young person moving from girlhood’s innocence to the wise-eyed experience of adulthood flash across the screen while a voiceover pronounces Canada’s embedded cruelties. Leaving, the documentary underscores in stark detail, provides no easy sanctuary. Brandishing a sea branch as she walks along the Guyanese shore, the filmmaker/narrator regards and faces her landscape, letting the branch trail revolutions and cyclic shapes in the sand. Here, too, are the inscriptions of repetition: of a life that moves back and forth between states of accommodation and alienation, between knowing oneself intimately, and being at the mercy of forces far greater than your individual soul. The cinematic insistence of the sea in the background, in this and numerous other long and close shots, is a palpable echo. It presses at the viewer, resonant and undeniable, like an amalgamation of all that cannot be denied.
To hear the voice of a beloved living figure one has only hitherto known as dead: this would be startling in ordinary circumstances, and in this film, it is an act of powerful alchemy. The late Guyanese poet and social reformer Mahadai Das features prominently in Coconut/Cane & Cutlass; Mohabeer not only involves Das’ herstory in the film, but makes it an indelible part of its narrative fabric. Stunned into a grateful, awed silence, I tremble as I listen to Das speak, in her own words, of the isolation she felt upon her unplanned return to Guyana after severe illness cut her PhD education short in Chicago: the loneliness of feeling herself distanced, by her unbridled longing for more than the subservient femininity expected of her in Guyana’s hegemony. The film does more than simply present Das, who died in 2013 of that illness. Including her pioneering poem, They Came in Ships, as a key part of the documentary’s sonic archive, would have been enough, yet Mohabeer’s directorial inclusion does not still at ‘enough’. It preserves the voice of an iconic writer, dead long before her time, as a voice worthy of memory, worthy of that self-same oceanic undulation. May her voice be heard over and over, the film exhorts. May it ring loud and clear as freedom.
It feels right, not late, to be seeing Coconut/Cane & Cutlass for the first time in 2023. Nothing about this forthright film, layered in vulnerability and sensual candour, is tardy. Almost 30 years onward, all these messages still arrive with a fiery insistence. This one, perhaps, lingers longest: the sight of two nude brown women lovers having sex with devoted tenderness on-screen. What would it have taken to screen this in 1994, I ask myself, watching their bodies undulate and embrace, following their own primeval rhythms? The answer is as timeless as desire itself: clarity. Mohabeer’s film has rightly been heralded as groundbreaking by many before me. To this, I add that it lets the truth sluice in, as unstoppable as the sea. When you cease concealing yourself from your own gaze, as the masked narrator demonstrates in the closing scenes, the precise power you wield becomes unstoppable – sovereign.
