12 and Many More Years a Slave

    “We were told we would be paid at one o’clock. Then they told us we should come by later, at five and then finally they told us to go as another group would work and not us. Then three guys started shooting straight at us, injuring about 20.” The date was 17^th April 2013. The place was the village of Manolada, on the western coast of the Peloponnese, Greece. And the statement made by Liedou, a Bangladeshi worker at the strawberry plantations. A few hours ago, him and his colleagues had been demanding their unpaid wages, only to be answered with gunshots and bullets of their “superintendents” in return.

    This flashed through my mind while listening to director Steve McQueen’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards two weeks ago: “Everyone deserves not just to survive, but to live. This is the most important legacy of Solomon Northup. I dedicate this award to all the people who have endured slavery, and the 21 million people who still suffer slavery today.” The film, to my opinion, deserved all awards, nominations and honors received. It deserved them artistically, but it also deserved them symbolically and historically.

    One of the features of the film that most struck me was of course its impressive direction. Steve McQueen managed to give a different perspective to well-known narratives and themes. For example, American South steamboats we are all familiar with. They appear in many other films as leisure and travel means and pleasant tourist attractions; from one of the first Mickey Mouse movies, “Steamboat Willie”, to “Gone with the Wind” and “Maverick”, steamboats usually appear with positive connotations. Not this time. Steve McQueen moves the camera under the paddle wheels; the turning of the wheels paddling the river comes across as an imminent death threat. McQueen faces the symbols of the American South with crudeness and naturalism. He tells us the truth about what lied beneath the steamboats, the mansions, the belles and the oak trees.

    Complementary to the direction is the amazing cinematography of Sean Bobbitt. Weeping willows sagging over musty rivers, emblazoned sunsets, the blazing heat in the mottled white cotton plantations: the images of the American South are breathtakingly beautiful. But the more beautiful they get, the more dire becomes their contrast to the cruelty, the sadism, the brutality, the oppression of man by man. The images are powerful as much as the emotions they depict.

    At times, the images become so powerful they overwhelm you. It certainly is not the first slavery-themed movie; similar stories from various parts of the globe have been told, from “The Colour Purple” to “A Dry White Season” to “Amistad” and from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “Huckleberry Finn”. But in “12 Years a Slave” the acidity, the pungency of the scenes made me involuntarily identify with the white man and his guilty conscience. The story of Manolada came to mind: even as we speak, in 2014, in my home-country Greece, can we really have the moral ground to complain about the miseries of the economic crisis when 21 million people in this world are slaves? When people of a different race are being treated as slaves even inside our own limited territory? Taking a sip from my glass of wine while watching all this misery seemed to me an act of disrespect to the suffering of all enslaved people, and I am sure I was not the only one. This is Steve McQueen’s success.

   The movie, based on a true story, highlights another facet of the social position of African Americans in the 19^th century: Solomon Northup was a free man working as an artist, an entertainer. Although the movie tends to idealize his social position as a free man, and rightly does so in order to emphasize the contrast to his later misfortunes, reality must have been somewhat different: as Professor Jan Nederveen Pieterse of USCB puts it “After emancipation, […] trade unions throughout the United States barred black people from skilled trades - the very trades they had performed during slavery. The few occupations open to black people were servant, entertainer or unskilled worker, resulting in common and enduring American images of black people as servants, porters, busboys, doormen, waiters or bartenders.”

    But what is even more disturbing is that such social stigmas have managed to find their way into today’s society. Even if nowadays we would probably achieve a consensus in considering a movie like “The Jazz Singer” as politically incorrect, the infamous practice of “Blackface” did not become extinct after the beginning of the 20^th century. Traditions such as Zwarte Piet or Black Piet still go strong in the Western hemisphere, in countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands. Notwithstanding a massive attempt by the Dutch society in the last few decades to convince kids and the rest of the world that Black Piet is not really black, but just dirty because he arrives through the chimney, one closer look at Dutch popular children songs makes it harder to convince us: “Want al ben ik zwart als roet,/'k Meen het toch goed” (“For even though I am black as soot/I have good intentions.”)

    Slavery and racial discrimination, as mentioned already, are not a novel artistic theme. Many will rush to label “12 Years a Slave” as “another slavery-themed movie.” I, from my side, hope that slavery-themed movies, books and all kinds of artistic products shall never cease to be made. As is the case for the Holocaust and WWII, our society has not yet overcome its traumas. We appear not to have grasped the lesson fully, not yet. So, until that day, let us welcome this constant reminder of what we did and what we suffered, let us watch in silence what it feels like to be the perpetrator or the victim. Lest we forget.

Photographer YANNIS BEHRAKIS, Greece

“I first heard about Hassan Mekki from the Athens office of an international NGO at the end of November. Soon after I saw an amateur photograph of his back on Facebook - I was shocked! It took me a week to find the right persons and contacts, and finally through his lawyer in the Greek council for refugees I found him. He was very scared and desperate. He was also hiding. His lawyer told him that he should trust me and he should tell me his story if he wants to be photographed by me. The scars on his back, head and throat resembled those of slaves of the 18th and 19th century.” 

via http://blogs.reuters.com/fullfocus/2012/11/30/best-photos-of-the-year-2012/#a=96