WAI Think Tank: How do you see film as a tool of emancipatory storytelling within the context of the Caribbean?
Jason Fitzroy Jeffers: When I grew up in Barbados, I was not aware of—I was not taught—so much of our history. Without a clear understanding of what created us, of the material conditions in which we live, the manner in which we relate to one another, the imbalance of power and resource—and what work has been done to resist, to fight back, to create counternarratives, counterrealities—one can find oneself adrift. History is certainly not the sole province of cinema, but, as an art form, it is tremendously powerful in allowing people to see other possibilities, other histories, other futures, other perspectives—even within oneself, inside one’s own community. That has been the guiding force of my work for the last ten or so years, be it through my own filmmaking or through the Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami.
Nick Axel: How did the Third Horizon Film Festival come about?
JFJ: Back in 2013, upon learning about the martial art of Tire Machèt through a group called the Haitian Machete Fencing Project, I had the idea to make a documentary about the form. Alongside my longtime collaborator Keisha Rae Witherspoon, I wrote and produced a short film called Papa Machete (2014), directed by our dear friend Jonathan David Kane. It did quite well and went to a bunch of major film festivals, and that experience made me realize a few things. I saw that there weren’t many other Caribbean filmmakers in those spaces. But I also saw how hungry Caribbean audiences in the region and across the diaspora were to see these films. I can’t tell you the number of times we would be at a film festival or a museum screening our film, and there would be people in the audience from Haiti, from Barbados, from Jamaica, who would come up to us and say that they’ve never come to a film festival, or had rarely been to an art museum before. So many of my own people didn’t feel like they belonged in those hallowed spaces of art and culture, but decided to come because the work was there.
Inspired by all we both did and did not see during the festival run of Papa Machete, Keisha, myself, and another friend, Robert Sawyer, formed a collective called Third Horizon with the aim of making more Caribbean films, and supporting the work of other Caribbean filmmakers by screening their work at a festival in Miami. Along the way, we learned of another organization in New York, called the Caribbean Film Academy, run by Romola Lucas and Justen Blaize, who were already doing a similar thing: they were hosting screenings of Caribbean films in a corner store on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. They would move the shelves aside, set up some chairs and a projector, and invite a small audience in. We started talking, and thought, rather than focusing on infiltrating spaces, why don’t we just create more spaces of our own? We invited them to join our efforts in Miami, and together birthed Third Horizon Film Festival. Eventually, the Caribbean Film Academy merged into Third Horizon, and now, we’re just all known collectively as Third Horizon.
WAI: What are some of the risks of setting up these types of initiatives?
JFJ: As all of these early experiences demonstrated, there is an incredibly deep need to see ourselves on screen, but for us, the work is not about representation alone. Representation is a slippery slope, actually; a trap. Instead, it’s about narrative. We are interested in stories of resistance, stories of what birthed us, histories and realities that have been hidden. In going down this path, however, one ends up having to confront all of the parts of the filmmaking process and recognize how extractive it can often be. But in doing so, you unearth resources. One example is Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’s manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema,” and their discussion of guerilla filmmaking, of working collectively and getting away from hero narratives—the idea of a singular voice, be it in front of the camera or behind it.1 These are all important steps towards ensuring the films we make and the films we watch are fully representative of who we are and where we came from.
WAI: How has growing up within the political context of the Caribbean influenced the evolution of your work?
JFJ: I had such a strong awareness when I was growing up that we were living in the Third World. I would hear it on TV, read about it in foreign news reports, even sometimes in the newspaper. Not as much as now, but back then, there was a sense that this meant that we were behind, that there were more important things happening elsewhere. Some of our leaders even internalized this narrative. So even though we were “independent,” there was still more that we needed to do to assert ourselves and stake our claim in the world. I like to say that we were—and still are—fighting a colonial hangover. Gradually, I learned about what the Third World actually was and is, about things like the Bandung Conference of 1955, about the Non-Aligned Movement. There are many different formulations of the Third World, but ultimately, what it comes down to, and what I had always felt, was that we were a third space. We were unaligned. We were our own thing. We were alien and the global majority, all at once. What a paradox! When I was younger, I sensed there was power here, but I didn’t have the tools to articulate it yet. Delving into my personal history, working with others who feel the same, and seeking guidance from elders who have bucked the norm, have all given me more confidence to root myself in my alienness, my outsiderness to the “mainstream” narratives of the Global North. I might be an outsider to the jousting over who gets to control the world, but am I an insider to the global majority in their struggles. There is incredible kinship and solidarity to be found with black, indigenous, and immigrant communities in the US and other “First World” countries. This gives you an incredible vantage point from which to survey global power in action, and its ridiculousness.
WAI: Papa Machete celebrates this secret martial art of the machete, which for all of us in the Caribbean is a powerful element in the story of emancipation. Now, you are looking at the legacy of plantations in Barbados and the idea of reparations. The tone of this recent work is more personal, too. What has it meant for you to move from a more collective, shared experience to a story that is perhaps more journalistic, but that starts from you?
JFJ: Papa Machete is a film about a farmer named Professor Avril who lived in Jacmel, Haiti. Avril was a teacher of a particular branch of the syncretic and mostly secretive martial art of Tire Machèt, or Haitian machete fencing. Avril was concerned that the martial art was dying, and even though it had been secretive up until then, he felt that, unless it was captured on film, it might vanish entirely. That started us on this path of uncovering and celebrating hidden histories of the Caribbean, particularly narratives of resistance, of ritual, of ceremony. Currently, I’ve embarked on a project tentatively titled The First Plantation, which speaks to the role of Barbados in the metastasization of the slave trade. It’s not that the trans-Atlantic slave trade didn’t exist before Barbados, but what happened in Barbados and then in the wider Caribbean led to an evolutionary leap in the slave trade, in monocropping, and, no less, in capitalism itself. The British planters who colonized Barbados perfected the cultivation of sugar cane through the labor of enslaved people, essentially establishing sugar as the oil of its day. By the mid-1600s, this tiny island, the thirteenth smallest country in the world, was pumping out more money than all of the North American colonies! Barbados was so important to the growth of the British Empire, and has the tragic distinction of being the world’s first economy powered entirely by slavery, from which emerged the Barbados Slave Code of 1661, the first legal justification for slavery in the Western hemisphere. Again, it’s not that slavery was not happening before or elsewhere, but only then and there did the dehumanization of black people become legally codified. That piece of legislation, in turn, inspired slave codes across the southern United States, from South Carolina to Georgia. What I’m dealing with in this project is the recurring question of why I wasn’t taught this growing up. I knew we were descended from the enslaved, but this?
NA: Do you have an answer to that question?
JFJ: There are a few reasons, and through the film I’m trying to untangle the knot. Some of it is the fact that I was part of the Barbadian middle class, while some of it is simply the fact that we all suffer from the neocolonial worldview, which requires that, as inheritors of this project, there are certain things we shouldn’t reflect on. There’s a lot of unmaking I’m doing with this new film, which is terrifying. As much as I am speaking with different historians, I am also revisiting personal memories, like what it was like to be standing at the side of the road waving a flag when Queen Elizabeth visited the island in 1985. I’ve also been revisiting things I admired and aspired to when I was a little boy, the fantasy worlds created by the hard-to-get toys from the US, things like He-Man and GI Joe action figures. Some of that is still alive in me, but I’m trying to understand why I was drawn to those things in the first place, reflecting on the idea of growing up in the ruins of a maritime empire while being gradually colonized by a cultural and ideological one. Even though I have made films before, I feel like I’m starting from scratch! This film has required so much personal untangling and so much relearning, I feel like I’m back to square one.
NA: Can you speak about some of the spaces you’ve been revisiting when making this film?
JFJ: Part of the reason why the British experiment with plantation slavery was so successful in Barbados is because the island is so small: it’s only 166 square miles. Its smallness allowed for a degree of extraction and capitalization that would not have been possible elsewhere. Some of the maps from the colonial period show that every inch of the island was covered in plantations. When I was a teenager, some of us would joke and call the island as a whole “The Plantation.” There are still people who say this today, usually younger people who are disillusioned with the theatrics of politics and how enmeshed we are in global capital and geopolitics. But we were joking back then; I didn’t know that the entire island practically was a plantation.
What this also means is that wherever you are on Barbados, you really are never more than a short walk away from a burial ground, whether you know it or not. I only recently found out that my childhood home, where my mother still lives, used to be a plantation. I went to archives in England last year and looked at some of the ledgers of plantations in Barbados. Within them, I found both the plantation where my ancestors came from, which was on the south of the island, and also the plantation where I grew up. It was such a shock. But then I remembered the old, abandoned windmill about two or three blocks from my house, where we used to play hide and seek. So, of course, there had to be a plantation there. How could I have never connected the dots? I felt like an idiot. But there are so many abandoned windmills across Barbados—there are so many abandoned plantations—that they can be easy to overlook. We used to explore them as children, these shells of buildings, burned out, half-crumbling, burned out old manors. Even without a deep awareness of their specific histories, I remember going to them and feeling the presence of things. I couldn’t put it into words, but I did feel the presence of something that I wasn’t being told about. Yes, we knew that we were descended from enslaved people. We have an annual festival called Crop Over, which we are told grew out of the history of the enslaved being able to celebrate the end of a successful harvest. But we didn’t know, or at least I didn’t know, the extent to which the island was a plantation. There’s a real sense that you are living with ghosts in Barbados.
WAI: That could be true throughout the entire region.
JFJ: Absolutely. What is true of the Caribbean perhaps more than any other place in the world is that its society is built from the detritus of empire. Caribbean society, or rather Caribbean societies—because you have the English-speaking Caribbean, the Dutch-speaking Caribbean, the French-speaking Caribbean, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean—were fought over by the great maritime colonial empires. But then they gradually faded away, and we were just kind of stranded there. It’s a very different narrative from somewhere like the United States, where there are vast expanses of land. Many of our islands and countries are tiny, and we’ve had to pick up the pieces.
In so many science fiction movies about the collapse of societies in the future, what you see is cultures that have come together: people speak languages that are made up of a bunch of other different languages, or styles of clothing that are scraps of different cultures put together. Be it Mad Max, the Matrix, or Cloud Atlas, I was always able to recognize the societies in these kinds of films, because that’s what the Caribbean already is. Two or three hundred years before we’re seeing it in these films, Caribbean society is this hodgepodge of people who were either dragged across the ocean or left behind by maritime empires that fell apart on its shores. These are the ghosts that we’re living with: ghosts of future past. A lot of early dub music is people making instruments do things that they’re not supposed to do, constructing and working with echo and delay, giving an oral sense of trails, of ghosts, of hauntings. The Caribbean was steampunk before steampunk was a thing. How do you build a society with scraps, while being so disconnected from both metropole and motherland? Every constituent part of the things that we’re building—be it ourselves, our buildings, our society—is haunted. Every piece comes from a broken thing that came before. That’s what makes the Caribbean unique as a region, and what makes our cinema unique. Not that there hasn’t been a world of fantastic Caribbean cinema before, but we are still in our infancy in a lot of ways. The more that we understand this history, the more unique our cinema will be.
NA: Are there any recent films that are exemplary of this?
JFJ: Years ago, I studied permaculture. Nothing really came of that, but I always remember the first principle, which is that before doing anything with a piece of land, you have to just sit with it. I’ve recently been fascinated with films that almost spend time with places and ask what has lived there, what has been witnessed there, what these places are burdened with. What does the land itself have to say? I recently screened some films with Loudreaders both in Puerto Rico and Iowa that explore this. Vashti Harrison’s Field Notes, for instance, spends time in different locations in Trinidad and Tobago and relays different stories, ghost stories, by friends and family members.2 The film leaves room for the weight of these stories to sink in and ponder what could give rise to them in the first place. Another example, Listen to the Beat of Our Images, by Maxime and Audrey Jean-Baptiste from French Guiana, expands upon the gaps in the archive of the little-known French space program in French Guiana to imagine the emotional experience of somebody who was living on that land and who was displaced to build it.3 These films bring our history to life in a way that is not just about the facts that we might not have known; they allow us to be possessed by the spirit or the emotion of our ancestors. We are already a haunted people, but stories like these allow us to embrace and learn from that, rather than to just be traumatized by it. For those of us who aren’t venturing into syncretic religious practices such as Obeah or Santería or Candomblé, it’s almost as if cinema gives people an opportunity to practice spirit ancestor veneration. Cinema allows us to be in ceremony together, with each other and with our ancestors, and create space for more informed and empowered descendants to come.
Loudreading is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, WAI Architecture Think Tank, and Loudreaders Trade School supported by the Mellon Foundation, re:arc institute, the Graham Foundation, Producer Hub, Iowa State University, GSA Johannesburg, Universidad de Puerto Rico–Rio Piedras, and the inaugural ACSA Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture.
