Race and Belonging: A Review of Recently Issued National Film Board DVDs

Abstract

Race is a Four-Letter Word. Written and directed by Sobaz Benjamin. Produced by Annette Clarke. National Film Board of Canada, 2006.55 mins, 19 secs, Language: English. Full Screen, $59.95. Closed captioned--decoder required. Dolby sound. This film is a collage of autobiographical and biographical narratives combined with artistic performances on the complex issue of race, racism, and identity in contemporary Canadian society. The director and narrator is a young black radio show host who presents the audience with a personal journey of exploration to address his own demons centering on race and belonging. He interweaves his story with those of three others: a young black Caribbean woman from England who moved to Canada to escape British racism; a young black Canadian female performance artist who reacts to the dominant racialized aesthetic of beauty as white; and an aging white, male artist who was raised by a black family and sees himself as more attached to blackness as an identity than whiteness. This is also a film about the body politic and representations of self. For instance, in a photo-shoot, the aging male body is contrasted to the young body as well as white to black, each in opposing masks--black to white. The photo-shoot is a performance of race, gender, ageism, and sexuaiity, where the homoerotic context of two nude male bodies entwined also comes face to face with the issue of miscegenation and ageist fears in Western society and the race masks that we all wear, whether we are white, black, or in-between. The nude masked poses are an effective means of de-stabilizing how the black male body is stereotyped and viewed in Western culture through its Other, the dominant image of the ideal: the young white male body. As another example, the young black performance artist challenges dominant images of white beauty and beauty queens by declaring herself Miss Canadiana. Resplendent in red satin gown and beauty queen sash and tiara, she features herself in parades and public events at a variety of locations across the country. Sobaz Benjamin does a wonderful job of personalizing the painful scars of racism on individual lives, without reducing it to simply a problem of the individual. If his objective is for the audience to understand the complexities of race as the lived experience of individual Canadians, he has done that masterfully and in an extremely personal yet abstract and thought provoking manner. The film is successful in raising questions about race and identity, about racial issues that go far beyond structural issues of discrimination. Through the characters' reflections on their lived experiences of race and self-hatred, racism is exposed as a personal struggle for racial identity and feelings of home in a society that privileges white skin. While the use of art, performance, and personal narrative makes the film extremely compelling, the narrator's leaping back and forth between different people's stories is somewhat annoying. The film needn't have been organized in a traditionally linear fashion, but there is too much self-conscious post-modern collage that ultimately contributes to a sense of confusion. The stories also do not have equal weight. While Sobaz and the female performance artist are the strongest characters, the white male artist, though complex, remains aloof, while the young English immigrant, who came to Canada to escape racism in England, is little more than a rant against the hypocrisy of Canada as a country of racial tolerance. This leads to a superficial understanding of their issues. Without more information on these characters' stories, their issues are only about race. Perhaps this is the point of the film, but since the viewer is not able to connect with these characters, they remain shallow, and we do only see their skin colour. In this regard, the white male artist's story seems out of place: while his life story was moving and, in some ways, even tragic, Sobaz Benjamin needed to do a better job of explaining why this person is in the film in terms of what his identity crises can tell us about racism in Canadian society. …