A PLACE OF RAGE
<p>A Place of Rage - Trailer from Kali Films on Vimeo.</p>
We all know that history is written from a male perspective and nowhere is this truer than in the civil rights and black power movements of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s America. British filmmaker Pratibha Parmar‘s wonderful documentary, A Place of Rage (1991), vividly stands apart as a defiant critique of this ‘malewashing’. The film was screened recently during the LLGFF, celebrating its release on DVD which you can pre-order now.
Filmed in the early 1990s, the documentary focuses on two civil rights activists and feminists Angela Davis and June Jordan who look back on struggles encountered during the civil rights movement of the ’60s and ’70s.
While some of you may only have a vague recollection of Davis’ name, hopefully many more will recognise the iconic image of a young black woman with resplendent Afro, defiantly raising her fist in the air. Davis is a civil rights activist, philosopher, writer, academic and one time state branded ‘terrorist’ on the run. Away from the iconic image, Davis has produced hugely influential works such as Women, Race and Class (1983), which chronicles the ways in which the suffrage movement came to supersede the fight for civil rights in America. Although lesser known, June Jordan is a poet, essayist, teacher and feminist, civil rights and LGBT activist. Her powerful use of language is simply breathtaking and makes the fact that she is little known so much more woeful.
Their powerful testimonies are then interspersed with reflections by author and activist Alice Walker and postcolonial academic and filmmaker, Trinh T. Minh-ha.
The instrumental role women such as Davis, Jordan and Walker, to name just a few, played within America’s recent history would be almost entirely erased, were it not for groundbreaking and revisionist works such as this documentary. Indeed, we see these great women themselves paying homage to black female role models significant to them, such as Rosa Parks and the little known, yet no less important, Fannie Lou Hamer. This in itself is an act of reclaiming a herstory, forever in danger of being erased from ‘official’ chronicles.
Crucially, these black feminists were not only interrogating the ways in which racism and class exploitation were overlapping in the lives of black women, but also went on to emphasise the need to pay attention to other forms of oppression, based around gender identity and sexuality, within the black feminist movement. Parmar skillfully underscores this through the scenes in which June Jordan reads her brilliant and arresting work ‘Poem about My Rights’:
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin and
suppose…
Parmar allows Jordan’s commanding voice and intensely truthful vision to captivate the audience, compelling us to question how it could be that Jordan struggled to gather support for gay and lesbian rights from those in the anti-racism movement of which she was an integral part. When Jordan states that the “the sanctity of an individual’s right to love who I want” is necessarily “the same issue” as that championed by the anti-racist activists, she reminds us that racist violence and homophobia exist on the same oppressive continuum.
Both women were emphasising the importance of thinking about the various forms of oppression that simultaneously act upon an individual. They were forwarding ‘intersectionality’ well before it became something the wider feminist movement embraced – though, arguably, this is still something we struggle with.