I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO Film Review

niggers

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO is a mind bending, soul immersing cinematic seance with James Baldwin. An incredible transcendental experience.

Though I saw the screening several days ago, I can still feel Baldwin through the medium of a resonant Samuel L. Jackson unlike any Samuel Jackson I’ve ever witnessed, a Samuel Jackson possessed by the spirit of Baldwin who was alive in that screening room at that 110 Leroy Street screening room several days ago, a preternatural force to be reckoned with today just as he was when he was alive and writing and talking and walking this earth.

A spoken-word movie with images that sear, it is directed by Raoul Peck, using 30 completed pages of James Baldwin’s final, unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, Baldwin writing about the slaying of his three friends: Medgar Evers, June 12, 1963. Malcolm X, February 21, 1965, and Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1968. Baldwin died in 1987 before he completed the book but in that screening room on Leroy Street, I couldn’t accept that he was dead because he was so much alive because of Raoul Peck and Samuel Jackson. Time stopped, reversed, and restored. Period.

Baldwin also spoke that night of the screening about the brutal murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, et. al. And, yes, Emmett Till. And the murders happening now or to happen in the near future. Talk? More like a reverberating roar. But this isn’t a masterpiece about death. “By confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassinations of these three men, the film uncovers the larger narrative of America’s historically irrational relationship with race and today’s resurgence of movements that campaign against violence toward black people, most recently with #BlackLivesMatter.”

 

On a Personal Note – By Raoul Peck
Excerpts via Magnolia Picture:

raoulpeck

I started reading James Baldwin when I was a 15-year-old boy searching for rational explanations to the contradictions I was confronting in my already nomadic life, which took me from Haiti to Congo to France to Germany and to the United States of America. Together with Aimée Césaire, Jacques Stéphane Alexis, Richard Wright, Gabriel Garcia Marques and Alejo Carpentier, James Baldwin was one of the few authors that I could call “my own.”
 
Authors who were speaking of a world I knew, in which I was not just a footnote.They were telling stories describing history, defining structure and human relationships, which matched what I was seeing around me, and I could relate to them. Stories that were different because I came from a country which had a strong idea of itself, which had fought AND won against the most powerful army of the world (Napoleon’s) and which had, in a unique historical manner, stopped slavery in its tracks, creating the first ever successful slave revolution in the history of the world, in 1804.
 
I am talking about Haiti, the first free country of the Americas. Haitians always knew the real story. And they also knew that the dominant story was not the real story.The successful Haitian Revolution was ignored by history (as Baldwin would put it: because of the bad niggers we were) because it was imposing a totally different narrative, which would have rendered the dominant slave narrative of the day untenable.Three important men in the history of the United States of America and beyond. These three men were black, but it is not the color of their skin that connected them. They fought on quite different battlefields. And quite differently. But in the end, all three were deemed dangerous.
 
They were unveiling the haze of racial confusion.I came upon these three men and their assassination much later. These three facts, these elements of history, from the starting point, the “evidence” you might say, for a deep and intimate personal reflection on my own political and cultural mythology, my own experiences of racism and intellectual violence.
 

From production notes: Baldwin’s manuscript was entrusted to Raoul Peck by the executor of The James Baldwin Estate. By confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassinations of these three men, the film uncovers the larger narrative of America’s historically irrational relationship with race and today’s resurgence of movements that campaign against violence toward black people, most recently with #BlackLivesMatter.

 

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO screened at NYFF54 October 1 and October 2. It is showing tomorrow a 7:15, Standby Only, at the Francesca Beale Theater, 144 West 65th Street.

Gregg Morris can be reached at gmorris@hunter.cuny.edu