Movement, displacement and the great Black pilgrimage
Responding to Black Exodus by Daniel Bailey
Black Exodus begins in the same place the Israelites found themselves – The Wilderness. The opening scenes of Daniel Bailey’s powerful political documentary captures the seemingly eternal and yet fragmented sense of diasporic yearning in a series of grainy shots from last year’s Black Lives Matter protests. Woven between washed out overlays of varying Black faces, a saxophone croons introspectively as we are guided by several nameless voices reflecting on the ever-shifting nature of The Wilderness and how it functions as a metaphor for diasporic displacement. Far from being characterised as a place of loss, the narrators offer incisive opportunities for reimagination and liberation:
‘The Wilderness can seem like a place where we have no identity… But actually, the Wilderness, the Exile is where you discover what it means to be you as a people’
Through solemn shots and images of protest, our continuous violent dislocation at the hands of white supremacy is characterised as The Exile, with The Wilderness becoming a manifestation of disorientation that comes from mass displacement of the Black Exodus. Within the next 16 minutes, Black Exodus is explored through four unique lenses: Black motion and displacement through breaking (Kintsugi), the optimism of Black possibility and consciousness (Negritude), the passing of our elders (Nanny), and finally, the most recent expression of our mass collective movement - the 2020 protests (Black Summer).
The first titular segment Kintsugi uses the 400+ year old Japanese art of pottery repair to capture two types of movement within the Black Exodus: breaking and healing. Using the methodology of Kintsugi, an art form that honours broken histories by emphasising instead of hiding the breaks, this segment manages to wonderfully encapsulate the disruption and fracturing of Black linear historical time and existence. Yet simultaneously we’re offered ways in which our healing is also powerfully binding and beautifully restorative. A Black woman, her face adorned with white tribal patters elegantly sits in a silver dress and giant matching gèlè, she stares into the camera transcendently as the narrators describe the ways that Black people have been historically broken as a people.
Using Audre Lorde’s ‘A Litany of Survival’ as a base, Kintsugi’s dialogue pays tribute to the way the Black Exodus survived through enslavement and oppression. Our continuation of living is a resistance that allows us to bind together the broken pieces of the Exodus; ‘every breath’ is characterised as a victory. Calm and meditative dance, alongside sharp pushing movements and silent shouting, provides a balance of meditativeness and resistance. This accompanies the celebration of healing and resisting the harsh conditions of anti-Blackness that surround the Exodus. One poignant line that stayed with me simply states; ‘God is in the space between breathing.’
Negritutde is explored during the second segment of Black Exodus. Named after the mid-twentieth century French socio-political movement centred around Black consciousness. Black Exodus uses the philosophical possibility of Black consciousness to explore all the different forms of Black possibility previously restricted through white gaze. Gender, sexuality, spirituality, and intercommunal relationships are all challenged as the music switches pace to a bass-filled swaggering melody that is at once bold and audacious. It is the perfect complement to the visual confidence expressed within Negritude. The segment expresses not only the full range of possibility that Black imaginations can hold but defies colonial binaries of identity, sexuality, and white traditions of spirituality that would all serve to limit the expression of Black imagination. The full consciousness of Blackness is explored even until its absence. One thought provoking narration that lingers asks: ‘If we begin to see death as a release, do we allow whiteness to shape our eternity?’
If Black Exodus is all about migration, then the death of this generation of elders is explored as a movement from life to death; the Nanny section pays attention to an exodus within The Exodus. The passing of our elders is examined through the touching story of a grandchild and their close relationship with their grandmother. They describe how beautiful it feels to hold her energy within them and leads them to ask an existential question to the rest of The Exodus: ‘If us who are left don’t have a connection, are we more lost?’
It is a question of a new type of displacement happening within the community. Here, the leaving of our elders and the cultural knowledge within them are characterised as another loss; points of reference we no longer have if we do not take the time to preserve their stories and lessons. Nanny is a reinstatement of the passing of a generation and how important they are to us as navigational points of historical reference; to catalogue, archive and celebrate them as an extension of our past and futures. The segment ends with the image of the silver woman in the gèlè and matching dress reaching out to the camera once more as the narrator urges the importance of maintaining our connection. She reaches her hand out towards the camera like an ancestor wishing to preserve the connection that the narrator speaks of.
Black Summer is the only section title not in red, a double reassertion of the uncompromising protest in defence of Blackness in all its powerful anger. A Black person sits on a chair, their hands agitated and their movement sporadic, as they begin to violently pull a red conch-embroidered balaclava over their head, their movements becoming more chaotic and resistant. Here, their movements symbolise the active awakening of resistance in the face of a continually interrupted existence. The movements could be described as mad to those who do not understand the maddening cycle of living under continuously violent systems of oppression. Alongside narrations of revolution the dancer kicks and tears at their head, and throughout the section groups of dancers’ kick and crump pulling at invisible nooses in the struggle of resistance.
Black Summer contains the energy of a riot. A narrator explains that the liberation and revolution wasn’t contained within the burning down of the plantation but from the shift within the minds of the enslaved; the refusal to let what was happening continue any longer. The speaker highlights that the transformation from stillness to liberation didn’t lie in the burning down of the plantations. It was when the enslaved were looking at the callus on their hands, deciding that this couldn’t continue, that they refused to take anymore, that their lives are worth more.
Here, questions about revolution and a refusal to be still provoke and urge the movements of the Black Exodus. It ends with the banging of a gong, a waking sound calling for us to rise.
In its final credits Black Exodus is dedicated to ancestors of our past, present, and future. This short documentary film is a spectacular intergenerational conversation about our movements as a people, a conversation that transcends any one given moment and speaks to several histories at once. The dancing and the mournfully hopeful saxophone capture the range of emotion involved within our movements.
What remains long after watching Black Exodus is the philosophical conversations surrounding identity, spirituality and radical imagination that are woven with images of emotive dancing and stunning shots of a reflective gèlè. The material functions as a carrier throughout the film the same way the vibrant colour red carries the main titles and dancers through the sequence. The film pulsates with movement and direction, exploring the full possibilities of what exit means, through death, through grappling with the pain that comes with diaspora, though mental consciousness.
Exodus is characterised by movement in all times, and all tenses; if the present tense of our movement is going, then the past tense is our elders being gone, and the radical hope and imagination of our continued movement in the future tense is to go. Black Exodus is a poignant shout of stirring provocation. The last text we see onscreen is a quote; ‘We out – Harriet Tubman’. Her radically imagined words of optimism assert that the final definition of exodus is exiting, by any means necessary at the cost. Far from being trapped in the hopelessness of our current position, ‘we’ are, actually, already ‘out’.
