Sankofa and the Exchange Value of Female Characters

    Honestly I found Sankofa to be a really difficult movie to watch. Initially because of the subject matter—Keeling is not joking when she claims that “spctators must survive the film” (63), its so visceral—then because it became really difficult to decipher Gerima's efforts to reclaim representations of Black people. I assumed that I would have the critical vocabulary to understand the movie. It seemed like a really straight forward Black Nationalist message. And at first I was impressed by the narrative function of women in the film. However, Keeling problematized this reading for me. Many of the theorists we've read this semester have discussed the role of female characters as motivators of the plot and the object of visual pleasure. Intrinsic to this argument is idea of the exchange value of women in a film's narrative. In classical Hollywood cinema, women are a form of currency that it exchanged between male characters in a complex narrative economy of spectacle and pleasure. At first glance, Mona-Shola subverts this idea by assuming a ostensibly autonomous position within the narrative. She speaks herself, and is the primary set of eyes through which we view the movie.

    Keeling complicates this idea of an autonomous Mona-Shola, by discussing the ways in which, in decolonizing narratives of blackness, Germina denies Mona-Shola the choice of identification. She is identified in the movie as male by her rejection of genital sex, femininity, and Western religion. I was really skeptical of this stance at first. It seemed that Keeling was perhaps saying that Shola's way of being a woman was not feminine, which I found problematic. However, Keeling is addressing larger scripts of femininity, in an attempt to criticize the reactionary representations offered in Sankofa. Keeling is saying that Gerima's reaction to the representations of black women as lascivious and oversexed is not progressive. By presenting Shola's humanity as devoid of femininity, free from genital sex and slavery, Gerima holds the feminine body to guidelines that reinforce the subjugation of women.

 

    “Sankofa calls for the extrication of the Black from the White and the achievement of a hypothetical prior African purity. Gerima sees film as a cultural medium adequate to the task of (re)staging an original encounter between the Black and the White in order to disentangle one from the other, Sending Mona back into the past to live as Shola, a slave on the Lafayette Plantation, Sankofa seeks to decolonize Mona's mind and body. In so doing, it wants do decolonize the mind and the sensorium of the contemporary cinema audience as well” (53) This quote was helpful in summarizing the political aims of Gerima, and offering an abridged version of the Black Arts Movement. However, it demonstrates how Gerima circumvented tropes of classical Hollywood cinema, yet still maintained the practice of female characters as exchange value. The men in Keelings analysis aren't restricted to male characters, but political actors as well; the Black male and the male spectator. This description by Keeling breaks down the process of exchange within a broader discourse of the film, not just its narrative.