Filmic Autobiography in the Caribbean Diaspora

Abstract

Al l hear are the wavesABout hALFwAy thRough isAAc JuLien 's 2004 DocuMentARy Darker Side of Black, there is a moment of intervention of the first person. disembodied, apparently voice-of-God narration unexpectedly shifts from the conventional third-person, factual voiceover to address the audience using the terms both I and we. This is then followed by a use of the second person, addressing not the viewer, but the narrator himself by imagining another's response to him. this complex moment of narration, there is a destabilisation of the narratorial address, combined with a reflexive awareness of the narrator's voice embodying a specific position in relation to the material. context of this point in the documentary is a discussion of the violently homophobic lyrics of DJ Buju Banton's track Boom Bye Bye.1 Contextualised through an interview with Banton about the rapper's youthfulness in the writing of the lyrics, the narrator questions how Banton's position would change as a man:What does Buju the man say, that Buju the child could not? All hear are the waves. If Buju doesn't speak with his father's voice, then perhaps the law of the father speaks through Buju. And this law says to me: The masculine integrity of this downpressed race requires your death. You shall die so that this race will live.The narration of this documentary is complex in its shifting terms of address. Initially, it takes a conventional approach, introducing the complexities of the topic of homophobia in black popular culture and tracing the endemic violence in the popular musical styles of dancehall and hip-hop. Yet as the documentary progresses, the tone becomes increasingly lyrical and the address to the viewer more personal, before a return to the more conventional third person. At one point, the narrative voice assumes the first person plural, personifying the ambience of fear inspired by this homophobic aspect of Caribbean popular culture: In the face of death, long for closeness. Cruising the harbour all the men are silent. When they turn to Buju, he says . This is then followed by an interview with Buju as he claims to speak for Jamaica. This intervention of the first person plural is ambiguous, at once speaking of a general we that can embrace the viewer, but then aligning that we specifically with gay men cruising the harbour. One of the effects of these turns is to unsettle the viewer's comfortable position as recipient of neutrally presented third-person information and to implicate him/her in the emotional affect of the homophobic culture. Darker Side of Black situates this strand of homophobic popular culture as a legacy of slavery and does so by directly identifying with the victims of homophobic violence. these moments of shifting address, are left asking who is speaking, and to whom. As a narration performed by the narrator, the cultural critic Paul Gilroy, and written by the writer-director Isaac Julien, it is a highly mediated intervention of a personal commentary, constructing an individualised and personal speaking subject behind the conventional distanced and distancing voiceover. voiceover constructs a fictional I, at once part of and separate from the director as author, and from the narratorial enunciation.Aside from this brief moment of subjectivity in the narrative voice, Darker Side of Black is not an autobiographical film; its first-person intervention is ambiguous at best. It undermines the objective third person, without fully claiming the subjective autobiographical first person. enunciator never identifies himself; there are no direct images of either the director or the narrator and only the occasionally acknowledged presence of the filmmaker in the form of an interlocutor in the interview sequences. Despite this, its use of first-person narration raises issues of how Caribbean diaspora documentaries position an ambiguous subjective voice in order to question issues of identity in the face of migration and the ongoing history of oppression. …