Lovers Rocking In A Hateful Nation

Part of our But Where Are You Really From? season.

He called me his buddy, a brother he had not seen in four hundred years: 'It was never intended that we should meet.' What he said about my novel was quite extraordinary. It was about people and customs of which he knew nothing. But reading it, he recognised everybody.

—Chinua Achebe, 'The Day I Finally Met Baldwin'

Blackness, as a concept, is a mess. Its grasp exceeds its reach. Growing up in a small English town, I’d always been made aware of this idea that I am not mine, but theirs—a local attraction to be leered at, prodded, studied—where I’m always, as Du Bois puts it, “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

Being in this small town helped me realise two things: there’s an explicit belief white people were worse back in time; there’s an implicit belief that to be colonised is to be guilty. The few times I can healthily escape myself and this guilt are when, on a train, the green-gold vistas of rural Britain glaze over my eyes. Hills roll in the rain, then melt into meadows from dramatic sunbeams splitting cloud seams. Wise trees congregate here to celebrate the wind as their roots drink up buried pasts. The world here is naked, modest in its grandeur; scatters the dust we came from, the dust we’ll return to, and the stars we dream under to yawn the time between.

I witness here why the British love this island, why I should call it home. It’s all I’ve truly known. This foreign place. But I’m just a visitor barrelling across this landscape back to where I came from. That foreign place. Through Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology series though, as it focuses on the West Indians of yesteryear combatting the literal and social death inflicted by this cruel country, I witness what the British buried from me; a history that can help me call this island home.

An immigrant’s place in a new country is built on sand, and how can someone promise strength and safety on such a foundation? Where in Remi Weekes’ His House, he shows the deep confusion and terror that afflicts a couple who’ve just emigrated to a callous Britain, McQueen’s Red, White And Blue shows us the children of this confusion and terror. The contradictions that spawn from a parent’s terror-induced need to assimilate while also sticking with their own culture are reproduced and interpreted by the following generations; plagues our daily lives in these dislocated towns we rot in. There’s nothing in these suburban spaces but white, dilapidating Protestant symbols. There’s nothing to do in one but leave. You’ll lose your mind out here if you stay too long.

From 11 to 14, I’d become an angry, violent person. My home had drilled into me a deeply Black pride, and this small town and its school did their best to test that. It was an isolating experience because I was never taught on those who coped with these isles before me.  Protests, riots, court cases, Christianity, policing, schooling—what all the Small Axe films have in common is active, white participation, whether sympathetic or antagonistic. And I’m already accustomed to these aspects of Black existence, struggling and suffering in opposition to whiteness. In Lovers Rock however, McQueen shows what I’m not accustomed to.

Instead of confusion and terror, there’s understanding and love; instead of struggling and suffering, they use this one night to fall into the warm embrace of our cultures to exorcise rage, evoke joy, reciprocate desire away from being leered at, prodded, studied. It’s the most radical form of resistance. The outside world does not exist. One’s soul can finally measure itself by its own tape.

McQueen’s mastery over setting and mood swathes me in this one night—I’m here with us now.

There’s an adolescent thrill to looking up at the first-floor window you’ve just scaled from, knowing in twelve hours you’ll have scaled back up in time for church. The sin better be worth the damnation. For me, it wasn’t. Some white girl’s 17th. Awkward and sterile; some rented-out cricket club, I think. I was only there to find out if the rumours were true about a girl liking me back. For Martha (Amarah-Jae St Aubyn), it’s different. The 17th birthday party she’s crashing is at someone’s house, where friends earlier that day help move furniture from the living room, as crooning voices and spices alike waft their lovely accents in from the kitchen. Silk headwraps and skipper caps; “CURRY GOAT”, “£1 RED STRIPE”, “ACKEE & SALTFISH”. The bass of a rewired Jamaican sound-system seeps a deep groove through the walls, with, as Luke Ehrlich puts it, “sounds suspended like glowing planets or the fragments of instruments careening by, leaving trails like comets and meteors … If reggae is Africa in the New World, then dub must be Africa on the Moon.” And it’s in these sounds, these fabrics, these foods—this arcane, ever-weaving web of pan-African tradition—where I find myself blissfully tangled for the film’s remaining hour.

Pan-Africanism demands an impossible unification of all indigenous and diaspora ethnic groups of African descent. This impossibility is necessary for our survival, because name me a Western state whose wealth doesn’t balance precariously off our ruined minds and severed hands. As years, decades, centuries go by since pale horsemen first rode through, the impossible only grows more necessary; the necessary more impossible. We need one another. So by tangling themselves in this arcane web, a form of pan-Africanism between the West Indians in this film grows, their inhibitions and rage swallowed whole by a vibe greater than the sum of its parts.

Though Martha is our audience avatar, the party itself is the protagonist, soaring effortlessly between its many moving parts. There isn’t so much a plot as there is a mood. An atmosphere of freedom. After spending their days being leered at, prodded, studied, there comes a night when a shared gaze doesn’t deepen their anxiety but exalts them from it. There comes a night when the deejay calls your name, the selector plays your tune, and your waist anoints another with its groove. That’s when the pan-African interactions between the characters develop another axis that extends from the screen to my soul.

I mourn my younger self. My violent self. My anger was a lonely anger, my joy a lonely joy, but Small Axe shows that even this loneliness is shared. Through West Indian eyes, I see the arcs of nostalgia stretching far before me, and that I was never alone. My pleasures and pains, though not fixed, have roots. My anger is valid. My guilt is inherited; to be colonised is to be guilty, in every sense of the word, so why bother proving my innocence? It’s my most radical form of resistance. This white world does not exist. My soul can finally measure itself by our own tape.

Blackness, as a concept, is a mess: it’s an eternity of voices you can’t recall speaking; it’s seeing yourself where you never were. But of course, they were all our voices, we were always there; and when I study the characters portrayed, when I drink up the meticulously crafted atmosphere, I think of what Baldwin said to Achebe.

It was never intended that we meet Black Britain’s blueprint. And I may not know much on the true, West Indian London of yesteryear. But watching it, I recognised everybody.

Nikolai Phoya

This piece is a part of our But Where Are You Really From? season, made possible thanks to the BFI Audience Fund awarding funding from the National Lottery.