A four-part article of film/cultural criticism, published in the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian, September 2014

Three Types of Naïvete, I

The remarkable American writer and anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston, published an iconoclastic essay, “What White Publishers Won’t Print”, in 1950, which remains relevant to Trinidadians and West Indians today. I read this essay about 20 years ago, and  it’s stayed with me.

Hurston proposes that the Anglo-Saxon world (speaking of the US then, but the argument now applies to our relations with the metropole) was content, if not determined, to see the non-white world without complexity.  The metropole sees that, “Under a superficial layer of western culture, the jungle drums throb in our veins. This ridiculous notion makes it possible for that majority who accept it to conceive of even a man like the suave and scholarly Dr. Charles S. Johnson to hide a black cat’s bone on his person, and indulge in a midnight voodoo ceremony, complete with leopard skin and drums if threatened with the loss of the presidency of Fisk University, or the love of his wife.”

Things have changed. Now, instead of being insulted by being seen as Hurston describes, we in Trinidad & the Caribbean revel in it. I’ve examined this idea in relation to what “we” insist is “our” culture – Carnival. It presents us exactly as the most racist and / or ardently open-minded Western observer now sees us: musical, sexual, irrational. We encourage them, as Hurston put it, to “refuse to believe in the ingestion and digestion of western culture as yet. Hence the lack of literature about the higher emotions and love life.”

“We’ve” actually produced a manifesto of this atavism in the MacMillan-published Caribbean Dispatches, which I’ve written about before. And many contemporary Caribbean writers are products of the cultural/political episteme, which engineers them to see themselves (and the rest of us) this way. This paradigm reaches its zenith in the works of Milla Riggio (US critic/academic) and Trini/British writer, Monique Roffey. This is the top of a considerable heap, comprising 90-something percent of the contemporary creative and critical work about and from the region.

And it’s not a new thing. There has been, in fact, a long-running contest of these dialectical poles running through Trinidadian (and West Indian) literature. Errol John’s Moon on A Rainbow Shawl presented the existential conflicts of Ephraim, who in the end decides the smallness of the “Yard” was slow suicide, and leaves for England. This was counterpointed by Errol Hill’s Man Better Man, about a stickfighter, which remains trapped within primitivism, and indeed refuses to look outside.

The contrast figures in Naipaul’s Mimic Men read against Lovelace’s Dragon Can’t Dance; Walcott’s Another Life against Kamau Brathwaite’s entire oeuvre. (Admittedly reductive, but the point has been argued for decades, safe from the delicate sensibilities of the public.)

And now, that meme/episteme has infected the visual imagination. At the recently concluded Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, I was interested to see how it expressed itself in film via Kim Johnson’s (Pan! Our Musical Odyssey), Yao Ramesar’s (Haiti Bride), and Sean Hodgkinson’s (Wendy) works.

All those works are accomplished in various ways, and were probably the best Trini efforts.

But before looking at them for their naivete, a look at the their filmic antithesis: the 1974 movie, Bim, produced, written by, and starring Trinidadians. It was a giant artistic success, but it sank into oblivion anyway.

Bim is the story of a Trinidadian gangster, roughly modeled on Bhadase Maraj (and Vito Corleone), who makes his way from the rural districts, where he watches his father murdered, to the town criminal underworld. The story is subversive in its matter-of-fact portrayal of the charismatic savagery of Bim, who has the best line ever in a Trini or West Indian movie, and any movie: “Tonight, I feel like I could kill a man or sleep with a woman.”

Like  “Go ahead, make my day”, or “You talkin’ to me?”, or “When you come to shoot, don’t talk” – black belt in bad-assedness to Ralph Maraj who played Bim, and Raoul Pantin who wrote the screenplay.

Bim is convincing in its portrayal of a society teetering on anarchism. It showed a corrupt, ineffective, and hidebound racial/political system. It showed a likeable psychopath, who happened to be Indian, who gets to the top of that society, and made his existence utterly believable.

Naturally, when it was released in Trinidad in the 70s it was initially banned by the censors. It did very well once released here and in arthouse cinemas abroad. But it never catalysed the local film industry. This, according to Susan Robertson, wife of the director Hugh Robertson, was because local investors would not step up and provide the most crucial element of the movie business: money. But that’s a digression.

Naivete: The point is, an Ur-text of a successful Trinidad movie exists. Limited budget, limited technology, improvising in the field, and local talent produced a stellar result, both artistically successful and commercially viable. Nothing since then has even come close. Money remains a problem, but not so debilitating a one, since it’s been counterpointed by technology, which has since improved such that a movie can be made with a Canon camera and a Mac computer. 

Furthermore, the art of the low-budget high-appeal movie has been perfected by Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino. So what explains the inertia and naivete of Trinidadian movies?  A few reasons are obvious: government has become involved; talent has migrated, leaving many dilettantes to romp; “filmmaking” is now like blogging, and the sheer volume stifles the good stuff. But the most debilitating change has been the cultural meme which infects art and destroys it from within, as described by Hurston.

II Sophisticated Naivete in Pan!

Kim Johnson’s movie, Pan! Our Musical Odyssey, was one of the best-made Trini movies in a long time, perhaps one of the best. It told its story in an original and absorbing way: a documentary following four pan players from different countries in present-day Trinidad interlaced with a fictional story of the origins of the instrument, following two characters through post-War Trinidad.

The contemporary pan players were drawn from Japan, the US, Trinidad, and France. The stories of each culminated in the big night – the Panorama final – with a few twists and turns in between. One player’s band didn’t make it past the semis. One player was a 12-year-old, who made the point to the camera that he had to do his schoolwork. A key figure featured was Andy Narrell, who arranged for Birdsong, who was introduced to pan by his father, who worked with delinquent boys in the US and used the pan to get them off the streets.

 The fictional story begins in the hills of Laventille after the Second World War, where a young fellow (Goldteeth) steals a 55-gallon drum and uses it to create a larger pan than existed at the time. Apparently then, unlike now, the cops actually worked, so Goldteeth had to go down to the country to hide out till the heat dissipated. There, in the care of an aunt who is a Baptist/Orisha priestess, he refines the prototype of the modern steelpan.

Goldteeth brings the pan back to town, and has it stolen from his posse by a rival gang. There’s some counter-warfare to retaliate, and his younger brother gets “done” (as they say in the UK), for stabbing a rival gang member, and teeters on the verge of a lifetime in jail.

The contrasting textures of the two stories (visual and narrative) make it interesting. Neither story (the fictional or the “reality”/documentary bits) is gripping, particularly, but their hybridization is inspired, and should be shamelessly imitated by anyone who can think of a way to use it. The fictional part is almost like a historical recreation, except it’s all made up.

But for its originality and sophistication, what makes Pan! naïve? Once you get over the originality of the form, each narrative on its own seems inadequate, even banal. This isn’t a judgment on the movie, per se (where the narratives complement each other), it’s a judgment on the movie’s overarching story.

The story Pan! tells is the official story of the steelpan, that’s been told and re-told since forever. It’s the only one the vast majority of Trinis knows, and there isn’t really a counter narrative or alternative story. It’s the story of gumption, ingenuity, and originality coming from the bowels of the society, from the lower strata of society who were known only for violence and misery. The violence among early pan sides is played up, then glossed over with a happy ending.

But what’s interesting here is the sub-text of the story, the instrument’s creation story. The pan wasn’t invented from science and intent: it emerged from intuition, chaos and accident. Neither set of qualities is enough on its own for invention. Science relies on satori, but after the flash of intuition and insight, years of experiment, theory and rigorous trial and error follow. The former (intuition, emotion) are the qualities by which Trinidad & the Caribbean have demanded to identified via Carnival.

 Certainly the stories of the invention of the pan involve the coalescence of several streams of effort, and experimentation to derive the full range of notes and whatnot. But it’s not systematic; what drives the story are chaos and magic (as in the Orisa ceremony Goldteeth attends), which are the handmaidens, if not the midwives attending creation. What’s missing are purposeful science and logic. This absence constitutes the chasm between the primitive and the civlised/advanced.

And for all its sophistication in conception and production, this is the story Pan! tells. Pan is the result of accident and luck. It exists in the pristine realm of the intuitive, the chaotic; a space where rationality and order do not apply. That space has other qualities, the chief among which is revealed in an interesting moment where the Japanese character reflects that she was able to come to Trinidad and be accepted as part of the steelband orchestra, and wonders whether it would be so for a Trinidadian who went to Japan.

This is the other theme of the story: “our” catholicity, an almost promiscuous invitation to all and sundry. This blends with the mythology of Trinidad & Tobago as the land of callaloo and Carnival: all welcome, no conflict, happy, smiling natives making music. This is fine as part of a tourism marketing strategy. This is what all tourists want to be told. However, in Trinidad, this isn’t just a tourist story; it’s the national mythology, which is, to put it mildly, crazy.

As a movie, it’s interesting, well-made, and commercially viable. This is a good model for future films. As a version of the nationalist mythology, it’s simply found a way to tell a single, uncontested story in a slick, well-made way. In fact, the whole Carnival “creativity” effort seems to be to find ways to repeat the same narrative, and divert attention from the more difficult sociological and cultural questions the story raises.

Thus the naivete of Pan! lies under its sophisticated exterior, it tells the same story of emotion, intuition, and a haven from the complexity and rigid organization of the advanced societies. As part of an artistic repertoire, it’s valuable. As a materialization of a trope, it’s not. But it’s not the only example of naivete. A much less interesting example is to be found in Sean Hodgkinson’s Wendy. 

III Wendy’s Witless Naivete

It’s always fun to play a filmmaker’s little games; from Kevin Smith to Stanley Kubrick, from Greedo in the cantina to “purity of essence”, the geeky smirking is nice if you get it, but no great loss if you don’t. However, seeing a movie and knowing where the filmmaker borrowed from, without acknowledgement, is something else. And that lack of self-awareness is the first stop on the niavete train of Sean Hodgkinson’s witless eponymous waif, Wendy.

Wendy is a cute, twenty-something brown girl (who believes she’s “white”, but more on that later). She befriends those of the lower orders, (i.e., of a darker hue), and skips happily along through the here and now in Trinidad. She lands a job with a television station, working for the boss from hell, Simone, and much of the action revolves around her first day of work. It cuts to and from her workplace to her dark-skinned friend’s workplace – for contrast, evidently; it's a fast food joint staffed, apparently, by troglodytes, which the movie takes pains to paint as such. (We know this from accents, skin colour, and clothing.)

Before I get to the naIvete I have to interject here, about (Catherine Emmanuel, the actress who played) Simone: if she’s the devil, paint me red and send me to hell. I’ll bring my own pitchfork. That said, the rest of Wendy takes me somewhere else, for a whole other bunch of reasons.

Wendy is a local simulacrum of Carrie Bradshaw (aka Sarah Jessica Parker -- yep, the Sex in the City chick), and the “plot”, such as it is, is loosely agglomerated from the 2006 film, The Devil Wears Prada, with a dash of Horrible Bosses and a few other sources.

The naivete here is an intriguing mix of the obvious, and ridiculous, and the "is he serious?" More specifically, three issues: first: borrowing plot and character is cute if done well enough to make an acceptable knockoff, which is what pop culture is all about. It’s not in this case. Second, the matter-of-fact transmission of the filmmaker’s worldview, his conception of the society, seems to be completely unconscious, and quite disturbing. And third, is the absence of irony in the movie, some sign of satire, parody; some sign that Wendy’s world is not proposed as social realism.

Social realism is a real possibility since outside the soap-opera machinations and the generous dollops of the above-mentioned movies, there’s no sign of why all this is going on, what the purpose of Wendy’s existence, or the movie, is. In fact, the cinéma vérité for its own sake seems to signal the unconscious plot of the movie: the desire, and purpose is to display Wendy’s/Hodgkinson’s world.

That world is arranged with the “white” people on top, black on the bottom, little else discernible in between. “White” doesn’t mean phenotype as much as a Trini class location, but still, you see that the opposite of white is, well, black. You see this when Wendy’s car breaks down and she is helped by a ghetto chick (on drugs, heavy drinker, dark skin). Throughout the movie, ghetto chick is desperate to get in touch with Wendy, and Wendy remains unavailable. The other non-white people you see at the TV station are the guards, who are very large, very dark-skinned, and who do things like fall sleep with a piece of half-eaten fried chicken in their hands. Even the skilled labour (technicians, clerks and what not) are drawn with thick, crude brushes.

All this to provide a direct contrast with the petite, soigné Wendy, whose sole redeeming virtue is, apparently, “whiteness”. Her anomalousness in the island setting is established when a coconut smashes her windshield and she yells: “We don’t even have a coconut tree!”

The most glaring naivete here is the reproduction of the fantasy society of a certain class in the real world represented by Wendy:  generally ethnically “brown”, which is an elastic category based on social class, colour, education, and money. Its seat exists somewhere between the Lighthouse in the east, and West Mall in the west. Its feet are not on the ground, and its mind is a formed by metropolitan consumerist fantasies, a la Carrie Bradshaw and Kim Kardashian, and the power of "whiteness".

The greatest enormity here is believing this rendering for ostensible  comedy is clever rather than sad. This dovetails into the general identity issue in T&T. The fact that Wendy (movie and character) seems clueless that its identity is about as substantial as a layer of soap is not anomalous. It’s just that this identity is so at odds with the “national” identity (already described) you realize with a burp that all the identities are similarly constructed, and just as insubstantial. After all, the Indo ethnic costumes come from Bollywood, and the African ethnic costumes and glowering and rhetoric come from the US.

So in the end, Wendy’s naivete is the most profound: not realising that our lives in large part are merely projections of metropolitan fantasies, which we reproduce and believe we invent. It also indicates the absence of any overarching identity template, or mechanism for constructing one, in our little speck. The absence is countered by the equally pervasive fantasy that we are capable of this on our own steam.

The uncomfortable truth this naivete tries to combat is that without a large foreign component, we are barely people, in the true sense of the word. But it’s a truth that’s powerfully countered by Yao Ramesar, whose Haiti Bride is perhaps one of the most underestimated films and cultural texts in recent times. Yao’s genius is upending a way of seeing the world which is taken for granted in other movies. 

IV The Redress of Naivete: Haiti Bride (Conclusion)

Yao Ramesar’s Haiti Bride is what might be termed an offering from the “Rough” cinema, akin to what Peter Brook called the Rough Theatre. It is rich in technique, innovation and experimentation, but its roughness, its unfinished, even unresolved quality, could overwhelm the art. But as art goes, Ramesar’s cinematic vision offers the most convincing answer to the naivete infecting Caribbean art: he embraces naivete, transforming it into a visual style.

Haiti Bride is set in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated the island in 2010. It follows three people, a man and two women. The man and the first woman met in the US, fell in love and decided to get married in Haiti. They return to Haiti and the earthquake interrupts the wedding. Thereafter they are separated, and the man, left in Haiti, begins to woo another woman, as his first intended returns to looks for him.

This is a sketch of the narrative. There’s much more ambiguity in the film, starting with chronology (time has passed since the earthquake, and action apparently moves back and forward in time, without signal or clarity). There’s also the thematic the tussle of return and exile, as the first bride’s family fled the country in the Aristide era. Beyond that, the narrative is fractured at points almost to incoherence. Ramesar said the problems arise from the extreme limitations under which the film was made – by a crew of two people working on the slimmest, and at times, no budget at all.

So the film has an unfinished quality in that all the photography was not done, and there are elements the director could not add because of the constraints, but Haiti Bride works pretty well in its rough state. It could even be viewed as a complete, if naïve text (which makes incomplete-ness a creative element), like a Gauguin painting.

Haiti Bride’s most significant element is the upending of the perspective. Many films begin with an establishing period, where environment, rules, and logic are laid out. For locales we know and are familiar with, the establishing scenes are brief, assuming familiarity.

Haiti is not familiar outside scenes of riot and suffering, but Ramesar makes no attempt to introduce the other Haiti; his camera races over the landscape and people, looking at them as a native would. This is a huge accomplishment – no visual clichés, no artifice to reassure the foreign viewer that what he or she is seeing is comforting, or if not, at least familiar.

The landscape and colours are presented in a raw, almost over-exposed palette. You feel the film has been manipulated, but, Ramesar assures, it hasn’t. What you’re seeing on screen is what you’d see on the ground, in natural light.

A fair bit of de-familiarisation, and re-conditioning follows from this. In their light, and at home in their environment, you realize quickly that the aesthetic ideas you bring are inadequate. You look at the people up close, and (for me at least) you realize there's a local, intimate way of looking at them, absorbing their features and expressions which activate another aesthetic, another way of consciously and unconsciously evaluating them. And with a shock, you realize the heroine, and the other girl, are beautiful in a way that you’ve never really considered.

The same lack of artifice applies to the performative aspect of the movie. The majority of the cast are people, not actors. The camera works in a manner that transmutes their lack of artifice into a style. The shots of ordinary people doing ordinary things, like braiding hair, cooking, and walking amidst the ruins of their country are transmuted by the movement of the camera. A fair bit of voiceover is employed, but when the characters speak, the direct, naturalistic quality of their voices fit into the way their images are shot.

For all this, Haiti Bride is not an easy movie to look at or make sense of, but then –  even though Ramesar calls it a narrative feature, and therefore sets up that expectation – it doesn’t have to be.

In other words, if you’ve been fed a steady diet of Michael Bay and whoever directs the Kardashians and those numbing rom-coms, this might not be the film for you. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss it as something one must suffer through for art’s sake. After watching Haiti Bride once, I realized why I was anxious for it to end: I wanted resolution, but the movie didn’t offer it. So I had to see it again, looking at it differently, activating a different set of aesthetic and emotional expectations. Like all viewers, I had to work to thread or reassemble the narrative fragments into coherence. This is not a bad thing.

And this leads directly back to the theme of naivete. The naïve as a style as I've described it, is the invention of a European way of organizing and defining our world. There’s nothing wrong with European epistemology or aesthetics. But in teaching us to see ourselves as naïve, or primitive, and worse, we internalizing it without question, is a deficiency on our part.

Using naivete as a starting, rather than end point, is one of the things a Caribbean aesthetic must do, and it’s what Ramesar has done in Haiti Bride. It offers a way of looking at Caribbean reality in its own terms, making use of the technical sophistication of Western cinema. I’d originally thought Ramesar could be likened to the Impressionists, for his extravagant use of light and colour, but by the end, I realized his achievement is more similar to Cesaire’s Cahier.  I hope more people can see it, and it and film and the filmmaker get the exposure they deserve.

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