On oil, Drexciya and building pressure

Responding to Black Gold by Ashanti Harris

Black Gold, 2023 (Film still)

It is left unsaid: Drexciya. I clasp it in my hands and it is as if I have held it before. 

Drexciya rests on the seabed, beneath the ripples and the tides. From ships, the pregnant Africans were thrown overboard, their children then birthed into the sea. The water babies swam down and made their world at the very bottom. Drexciya.

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Ashanti Harris’s Black Gold layers spoken word with video of water – rocks, streams, droplets – producing a subversive meditation on Blackness and oil, each existing and forming under pressure. Oil, a substance misused to the point of our extinction, becomes something of its own formation, reclaiming a certain beauty. We are pulled in by Black Gold’s gentle tide and we return as oiled Drexciyans. I think about oil a lot; I think many of us do. But I am thinking of oil differently now: with reverence and with relation.

It begins with the credits rippling. We are on the surface of something. And then Harris’s voice begins and the text fades into particles mid-screen. I do not think we are on the surface anymore.

And yet, as we move below the surface, Harris refuses to visually extract from the seabed. Instead, Harris extracts the surface and sinks it into the abstract. Sometimes, I am not fully sure of what I am looking at and I enjoy the uncertainty. Our sight is funnelled to the water through the screen’s framing: a blurred black curve floats from left to right, its full circle only visible when centred. I search for patterns but I cannot see nor hear them. The water rushes, a drum sounds. It is entirely separate from the noise I am expecting to accompany the visuals. I like the asymmetry of it. Below the surface, more is possible.

It is possible that oil is beautiful. We learn its origins with Black Gold’s very first line. “I am thinking about pressure and building pressure,” begins the narrator. It is possible that, from the very beginning, to think and to do is one and the same. Throughout the film, Harris reminds us what oil is, actually: bodies and plants from millions of years ago. We could all be oil, one day. We ought to be envious of its peace, quiet bodies pressed against quiet plants. If only we could rest so easy with nature.

I let myself be guided. I let myself become one with the narrator, just as she is one with oil. “I don’t know if I have ever seen real crude oil,” our narrator says. “But if I close my eyes I can feel it.” I close my eyes. It does not burn. I feel peace when the “whole body is submerged and I am moving in slow motion.” It is nice to go slowly.

“It smells like earth and heat,” says the narrator. I have always been jealous of those who like the smell of oil. It stings. To me, oil smells like a burning anger, a greed, and do not let it touch your skin. But with Black Gold, something else is possible. Take a breath; it smells like earth and heat.

We do not see the body until the narrator is “thinking about oil” with fingers spread, held almost crown like. Then, in cupped hands, diamond-like, we are safe. I think of the scene in Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood (2014), where the girls are dancing to Rhianna’s song Diamonds, and everything is gorgeous and okay. Their dances are slightly out of rhythm, resisting routine, and it is much like Harris’s diamond, sinking and nodding to a distant drum and the rush of water. A moment outwith pressure, yet – somehow – existing within.

All that pressure can create such beauty: oil, diamonds, Drexciyans. But there can be too much pressure, I think. It sees us working late, surviving on propranolol and an endless to-do list. It’s excellence bound to Blackness – all that our parents watched grow in us, a little helpless, a little hopeful – a seeking of the Black gold. But Harris seems to have located something hopeful that has always been here: a beauty created by a pressure that did not demand our cries or our crushing.

I welcome that space, and we are welcomed by it. “I am at its will. I am its will,” says our narrator. The figure almost fades out, sinking into plantlife. We are so dependent on oil. But it’s just us who are using it as well as being it. I see a TikTok about human hair mats used to clean oil spills. It is cost effective and biodegradable. And it is also sort of miraculous. Black Gold only reminds me of this. I imagine our hair as mats, coiled and buttered and twisted, soaking up oil. We’d soak up ourselves, Drexciyans.

As the film nears its end, the light upon the water stretches into pockets, honeycomb-dome like. I am certain we are below the surface. There is that black curve, afterall, perhaps it is a tunnel, from down here, to up there. It is the deep black of the sea. With Black Gold, perhaps, we have always been here, in Drexciya, with the oil.

Perhaps, in Drexciya, we do not feel perpetually inadequate, and we do not have to work twice as hard. We do not hold the weight of our history quite so heavy on our shoulders. A24’s film Waves (2019) does not exist and we do not watch, with clenched teeth, its violence upon a teenage boy. Perhaps, in Drexciya, I do not have lock-jaw or heart palpitations, and on the weekends my mind feels free to sleep in.

To imagine Drexciya is to create Drexciya, and therefore to inhabit Drexciya. There is a kind of pressure that feels safe and good, and its creations are not exploited for extraction. There is much we ought to let rest: oil and Drexciya, for certain. I feel rested with Black Gold.