Asger Leth's Ghosts of Cite Soleil
When I saw posters around town with a beautifully fit black man looking like a thug, I wondered when will this thug rap thing be over and done with? I mean, are we really that stupid? I couldn't help but think about what Sun Ra said, about how we tell the Gods about ourselves through our music. Well, ouch! I hurriedly prayed for the rash of bad, highly-produced music to run down the drain into humanity's sewer of things better off forgotten, of things we'll look back on and be like, what the hell were we thinking? You know, kinda like that feeling you get when you look at pictures of yourself from the 80s.
But it was not a poster for a new rapper. Rather, it was a documentary by Asger Leth, Jørgen Leth's son. Now, some of you may be familiar with the father. Benjamin loved his Tour de France commentary, something he was fired from doing after his memoir, The Imperfect Human was published.
I knew what to expect when I viewed Asger Leth's documentary and boy did it deliver. He did nothing less than what is to be expected from an indoctinated, European man: He presents a highly stylized, exploitative, vacuous story of the two brothers, Bily and 2pac who belong to the infamous Chimeres gang who run Cite Soleil.
The documentary is captivating not least of all for the tragic beauty of its protagonists but also because, at some point, I patiently awaited a historical deconstruction as what brought Haiti to where it currently is.
Instead images of nonsensical violence abounded and visions of black bodies perished like gold turned to dust, fulfilling societies violent lust.
But you still get hooked. You get hooked on these beautiful men, representative of an even more beautiful past where the French Revolution was made to count for the enslaved masses of the New World. You wonder about their momma--where is she? What happened to her? You wonder why Haiti continues to suffer so, and who is behind it? You wonder why it is a privileged European who is given access to tell their stories, and how come in the end, there is death--theirs, but not his? Instead, he returns to Europe, where his film is lauded and his career, like so many others, is built on the dead bodies of black people.
For more on Haiti read: An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President by Randall Robinson, The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James, and the Boston Times article, Anyone Remember Haiti?
But it was not a poster for a new rapper. Rather, it was a documentary by Asger Leth, Jørgen Leth's son. Now, some of you may be familiar with the father. Benjamin loved his Tour de France commentary, something he was fired from doing after his memoir, The Imperfect Human was published.
I knew what to expect when I viewed Asger Leth's documentary and boy did it deliver. He did nothing less than what is to be expected from an indoctinated, European man: He presents a highly stylized, exploitative, vacuous story of the two brothers, Bily and 2pac who belong to the infamous Chimeres gang who run Cite Soleil.
The documentary is captivating not least of all for the tragic beauty of its protagonists but also because, at some point, I patiently awaited a historical deconstruction as what brought Haiti to where it currently is.
Instead images of nonsensical violence abounded and visions of black bodies perished like gold turned to dust, fulfilling societies violent lust.
But you still get hooked. You get hooked on these beautiful men, representative of an even more beautiful past where the French Revolution was made to count for the enslaved masses of the New World. You wonder about their momma--where is she? What happened to her? You wonder why Haiti continues to suffer so, and who is behind it? You wonder why it is a privileged European who is given access to tell their stories, and how come in the end, there is death--theirs, but not his? Instead, he returns to Europe, where his film is lauded and his career, like so many others, is built on the dead bodies of black people.
For more on Haiti read: An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President by Randall Robinson, The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James, and the Boston Times article, Anyone Remember Haiti?
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