Burning flags and banishing colonial dust

Responding to Suffocation by Reema Saad

Suffocation, 2022 (Film still)

In Suffocation, sunlight feels harsh. Harsh in the sense that we have been kept in the dark for too long. We, scarred by racism and empire, welcome the sun: it exposes “colonial dust” – what is left in the wake of the bombs, deforestation and destruction used to maintain the mythscape of colonialism. No leaf, no rock, no aspect of the land is untouched. It is an incarceration of body and soul. Shot around the site of an abandoned ship on Kaurna Land, otherwise known as Adelaide, Australia, Suffocation, directed by Reema Saad, is a film that glares at past and present structures of colonialism, while envisioning a better, liberated future.

Scanning a burnt orange landscape, drone footage takes in the winding river and lush outback – the natural beauty that manages to thrive on stolen, ravaged land. The sun is powerful in another way. Round and whole, it is symbolised by the yellow circle at the centre of the Aboriginal flag, as the giver of life, alongside red – the earth – and black, which stands for Aboriginal people. The camera focuses for a moment on that flag, the national Māori flag, and a handful of others, together standing firm in a row.

As someone with plenty of gaps in my knowledge of the world’s communities, initially I feel detached, but curious. I shamefully cannot identify all the flags. But perhaps that is not the intention here. Perhaps this colourful display is a prompt for us to think instead about our place in the world, and about how at any point in space or time, the way that we define ourselves is not the way others will choose to define us. Our identity – whether national, cultural, political or something else – is always contested, constrained, redefined.

Except for the few people wandering up the path by the flags, the landscape in the film is empty, guiding our eyeline to the wide, open horizon – and the feeling that better worlds are out there, if we choose to embrace them. Saad’s choice not to feature crowds of people sparked another thought. I wondered if there was irony in it: one of the myths that held up settler colonialism was that Australia’s land is empty and sparsely populated, leading the settlers to blindly assert the right to invasion. In other words, discrediting the history and culture long established by the elders and original custodians of the land. Throughout history, some colonisers have spun the narrative of ‘arrival’, imagining themselves as the first to give ‘underdeveloped’ peoples a shot at progress. The accompanying verse in Suffocation, by Dominic Guerrera, explores both the things that this narrative has taken away, as well as how it has deposited unnatural masses that weigh down nature:

‘Your colonial dust can be found in a place

a place the colony likes to keep things

[...]

It can be found in the hollowed out earth for mining[…]’

This final line made me think back to the greed-driven explosion of a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal site in 2020 in Western Australia, where a mining company – so blinded by its mine expansion plans – destroyed a precious repository of heritage and knowledge in a blast. The cave in Juukan Gorge in the Hammersley Ranges was one of the oldest in the western Pilbara region. Though the incident is not mentioned in the film, the communal grief for this sacred rock shelter – and countless other examples – hangs in the backdrop of Suffocation’s portrayal of the rich world’s continual exploitation and abuse. After all, what happened in 2020 was far from exceptional: Rio Tinto, the mining company, was given permission for the blast under outdated Australian laws. Hundreds of other sites have suffered for the same reason. And the destroyers? Caught on tape saying they had no regrets.

The global outrage that followed Juukan Gorge resembled an explosion itself; initially erupting far out before dispersing into particles that hover limply in the air, as sympathising politicians and broadcasters lost the energy to carry on the fight. The plea by colonisers to “have patience” for reform and justice is merely a shameful ploy given that for generations the lives, dreams and heritage of so many have been irretrievably erased by the privileged few. We are restless for change, Suffocation says, as the poem turns to a simple message: “It’s pernicious shit, and we are still forced to breathe it in.”

Then we see the fight in action. Midway through the film, two masked figures burn the flags of Britain, Australia and Israel in a visceral act of protest. The flags operate like devices of entrapment, imposing a national ‘identity’ that too often stands for the oppressor, and never the First Nations peoples who lay the foundations. Again it resonates with the theme of self-identity and alienation; the flag is one of the first things you see when you cross borders to Britain or Australia – a sign by the authorities that your home defers to our identity.

After the flag-burning, the two people restore the Aboriginal flag to the centre of the frame, as the poet offers up a vision of a more just future: “No racism, as white archaic constructs will be banished to the empty skulls that created them.” Parliament has been burned down. The decolonisation process is incremental, but monumental; every toppled statue and treaty is a step closer to banishing the “colonial dust” from the recesses of our land and bodies. Setting out that there is cumulative agency to minority dissent, Suffocation’s invitation to audiences is to step into the sunlight and open our hearts to our own possible radical futures.