{"id":104583,"date":"2016-11-07T14:02:29","date_gmt":"2016-11-07T19:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=104583"},"modified":"2016-11-08T12:36:29","modified_gmt":"2016-11-08T17:36:29","slug":"how-to-swim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/07\/how-to-swim\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Swim"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Birth of a Nation,<\/i>\u00a0Moonlight, and the black protest tradition.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

A still from Moonlight\u00a0<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

Last week, I took a train to Harlem to see\u00a0The Birth of a Nation<\/em>, Nate Parker\u2019s retelling of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. Released in October, the film had already disappeared from most theatres, including my local cinema in Brooklyn. At the matinee at the Magic Johnson 9 cinema on Frederick Douglas Boulevard, there were a total of three people, and I was there with a friend.<\/p>\n

The Birth of a Nation<\/em>\u00a0was supposed to be the film of the year. Fox Searchlight acquired the world rights for the film for $17.5 million dollars, a record-breaking deal for the Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered in January. Nate Parker, who produced, wrote, directed and starred in the film, instantly became a media darling, and the Academy nomination for best picture seemed all but assured. After the #OscarsSoWhite boycott of the Academy Awards, here was a FilmSoBlack, made by a black director, in which heroic slave rebels slaughter their white masters. The film seemed to speak to the insurrectionary spirit of contemporary black America while also offering a belated corrective to D. W. Griffith\u2019s eponymous ode to the Confederacy, released almost exactly a century earlier.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Not since Elaine May\u2019s\u00a0Ishtar\u00a0<\/em>has a widely anticipated film flopped so spectacularly. By now, everyone knows the reasons for the film\u2019s failure: heralded in the press as an almost saintly figure, Nate Parker turned out to have a less than saintly past. In 1999, he and his friend Jean Celestin, who co-wrote the film\u2019s script, were accused of sexual assault by a female classmate at Penn State, where they were wrestlers and students. Parker was acquitted, partly based on testimony that he had previously had consensual sexual relations with the woman; Celestin was convicted, and sentenced to prison, though the conviction was later overturned. Shortly before the film was released, the story of the case resurfaced, along with its previously unreported epilogue: in 2012, the accuser had taken her own life. Parker\u2019s response only made things worse: he described the case as a \u201cpainful moment\u201d in his life, and spoke of his wife and five daughters as if they were proof of his redemption. He even brought his six-year-old daughter to an interview about the case.<\/p>\n

When\u00a0The Birth of a Nation<\/em>\u00a0finally appeared in theatres, it was dead on arrival. That white audiences didn\u2019t turn out is hardly surprising: they have never had much appetite for films about black suffering. More noteworthy is Nate Parker\u2019s failure to attract black audiences, or intellectual supporters. Thanks to the odious history of lynching, prominent black men battling allegations of sexual violence have generally been able to count on a certain amount of black sympathy, or at least the benefit of the doubt, particularly when the accuser has been white (as in Parker\u2019s case). In spite of views on race that were anathema to most black Americans, Clarence Thomas struck a chord with many when he denounced Anita Hill\u2019s claims of sexual harassment as a \u201chigh-tech lynching\u201d during his 1991 confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. And as Ezra Edelman\u2019s extraordinary recent documentary, O. J.:\u00a0Made in America<\/em>, has reminded us, O. J. Simpson was acquitted by a largely black female jury in part because race trumped gender in Los Angeles, where the police had subjected black residents to a veritable reign of terror for more than a half century.<\/p>\n

That was in 1995; two decades later, things look very different. Parker\u2019s most vocal critics have been black women. Roxane Gay wrote in The<\/em>\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>that she would not see the film because she could not\u00a0\u201cseparate my blackness and my continuing desire for more representation of the black experience<\/a> in film from my womanhood, my feminism, my own history of sexual violence, my humanity.\u201d Tiffany Drayton, writing in the online magazine\u00a0Clutch<\/em>, observed that even if Parker was acquitted<\/a>, he was still collaborating with Celestin, who was not, and urged black women to boycott the film.<\/p>\n

I doubt that seeing the film would have changed their minds. As Vinson Cunningham argued<\/a> in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>,\u00a0The Birth of a Nation<\/em>\u00a0is a decidedly middlebrow film, with clumsy auteurist flourishes lifted from Steve McQueen\u2019s powerful\u00a012 Years a Slave<\/em>. (There are enough burning candles to make night-on-the-plantation look like a s\u00e9ance, or a Pottery Barn advertisement.) But the chief liability for the film\u2014and for Parker\u2014is its depiction of sexual violence and black female passivity. Parker portrays Nat Turner as a proud but acquiescent slave preacher who is moved to take up arms by the rape of two women: his wife Cherry (Aja Naomi King) and Esther (Gabrielle Union), a slave rendered mute by her ordeal. As he mobilizes his fellow male slaves, they experience what Sartre called \u201cfraternity-terror,\u201d the exhilarating sense of solidarity that binds men at war. The only role assigned to women is to cheer their men from the sidelines, as their honor is avenged. (Gabrielle Union confessed in the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em>\u00a0that she had been raped at gunpoint at twenty-four, and that \u201csince Nate Parker\u2019s story was revealed to me<\/a>, I have found myself in a state of stomach-churning confusion.\u201d) As Salamishah Tillet writes in\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>, the silence of Parker\u2019s female characters \u201cmutes their ability to act<\/a>, rendering their rebellion virtually nonexistent in a film about revolt and freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

This male-centered vision of rebellion is also, as Tillet notes, profoundly \u201cout of step with the cause it has often been associated with, Black Lives Matter,\u201d a movement led in large part by women, some of them members of the LGBT community. The decentralized structure of Black Lives Matter owes more to the participatory, horizontal organizing model of Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker than it does to charismatic leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Malcolm X. In a movement where all black lives matter equally, regardless of gender or sexual preference; where concerns over sexual discrimination and violence are not considered secondary to black male empowerment; and where traditional definitions of black masculinity are being deconstructed on popular television shows like\u00a0Empire<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Atlanta<\/em>, Parker\u2019s film feels like a curious throwback to the patriarchal black nationalism of the late 1960s, when, as Stokely Carmichael notoriously declared, the \u201conly position for women \u2026 is prone.\u201d (It\u2019s worth noting, too, that Carmichael\u2019s views on gender have been echoed by the most racially inflammatory presidential candidate in recent history, and that they have received their most eloquent rebuke from a black woman, Michelle Obama.)<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Just as\u00a0The Birth of a Nation<\/em>\u00a0collapsed, a very different kind of black-themed film arose. Barry Jenkins\u2019s\u00a0Moonlight<\/em>, based on a play by Tarell McCraney, is a work of intimate, anti-heroic, unsentimental portraiture, rather than a Spielbergian epic; it explores an individual\u2019s lonely, introspective struggle for liberation and self-acceptance, not the blood-soaked birth of a nation. The story of Chiron, a gay black man from the projects with a crack-addicted mother, feels both more contemporary, and somehow grander in scale, than Nat Turner\u2019s. Rather than protest, it affirms; and what it affirms is the complex humanity of its characters, not one of whom is white, although the confining presence of an indifferent, if not hostile, white-dominated society is keenly felt at the edges of the frame.<\/p>\n

James Baldwin wrote that in black fiction \u201cthere is a great space where sex ought to be; and what usually fills this space is violence.\u201d The threat of violence is ever present for Chiron, who lives in a Miami housing project called Liberty Square, where both Jenkins and McCraney grew up. (The centaur \u201cChiron\u201d was a wounded healer in Greek mythology.) In the first part of the film, he is a shy, fearful ten-year-old boy (Alex R. Hibbert), hounded as a \u201cfaggot\u201d by neighborhood bullies. The man who takes him in and teaches him how to protect himself, Juan (the magnificent Mahershala Ali), is his mother\u2019s drug dealer. Juan walks with the wariness his profession requires, but it does not save him from his adversaries.<\/p>\n

Yet\u00a0Moonlight<\/em>\u00a0is a film about the varieties of love that emerge in conditions of urban violence, not the varieties of violence that, as Baldwin suggested, have conditioned, and even prevented, the expression of black love. There is, for example, the paternal affection that little Chiron experiences when Juan teaches him how to swim: only when we see a black boy cradled in a black man\u2019s arms, just above water, do we realize how rare such scenes are in American film. There is the maternal tenderness of Juan\u2019s girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monn\u00e1e), who looks after him when his mother (Naomi Harris) is looking for her fix. And there is the breathless desire that the teenage Chiron (Ashton Sanders), in the film\u2019s second part, feels when his friend Kevin (Jharrel Jerome) makes love to him on a moonlit beach: an experience so startling that he apologizes to his lover.<\/p>\n

Soon after, the space of desire is filled by violence, when Kevin, caving in to peer pressure, beats up Chiron outside of school, a scene deeply reminiscent of Amiri Baraka\u2019s 1964 play\u00a0The Toilet.\u00a0<\/em>In that play, a teenage boy is brutally attacked by a gang led by his lover, who wraps his arms around him in an ambiguous, piet\u00e0-like embrace just before the curtain falls. But unlike Baraka\u2019s play\u2014and unlike some of Baldwin\u2019s own stories of doomed gay love\u2014Moonlight\u00a0<\/em>does not end with the grim triumph of \u201cfraternity-terror\u201d in the form of a homophobic mob. In the film\u2019s third and final part, Chiron and Kevin meet again a decade later, in the restaurant where Kevin works as a cook. The adult Chiron (Trevante Rhodes) has evolved into a brawny drug dealer, much like Juan; he tells Kevin that he built himself \u201cup from the ground\u201d during a stint in prison, and that no man has touched him since high school, his voice trembling with the vulnerability his fortress-like body conceals. Kevin (Andr\u00e9 Holland) has also spent time in prison; he is a father, but he lives alone, and though barely getting by, he finally feels free to be his own man. Toward the end of the film, the men embrace; they are fully clothed, yet more naked to each other than ever. What will come of this is uncertain, but the decision is at last theirs to make. The image left me thinking, again, of a passage in Baldwin: \u201cOur humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult\u2014that is, accept it.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Moonlight<\/em>\u00a0has been rapturously praised for its depiction of same-sex desire between black men, but its treatment of the so-called \u201cculture of poverty\u201d is no less striking, and no less symptomatic of a shift in black cultural politics. Like Chiron, both McCraney, who identifies as gay, and Jenkins, who is straight, are the sons of mothers who suffered from crack addiction; both depended on neighbors when their mothers were unable to provide care. They are well aware of the dangers to body and soul faced by people growing up in Liberty Square: on Fresh Air<\/em>, Jenkins told Terry\u00a0Gross of having felt \u201cunworthy<\/a>,\u201d fearing that he was \u201cnot deserving of love because of my DNA.\u201d The scenes between Chiron and his desperate, reckless mother (Naomi Harris) bear witness to the emotional injuries inflicted by oppression. But while Jenkins and McCraney don\u2019t sanitize the world of the black poor, neither do they see it as, in Donald Trump\u2019s words, \u201cliving in hell.\u201d In the character of Juan, they have created a father figure of riveting ambiguity, tormented by an unspeakable inner moral strife. Juan feeds Chiron home-cooked food, and his mother crack. He nearly breaks down when Chiron asks him if he is his mother\u2019s dealer. It is Juan who tells Chiron that \u201cfaggot\u201d is simply a word some people use to make gay people feel bad: an explanation that McCraney says he heard from a drug dealer when he was a young boy.<\/p>\n

Juan and the adult Chiron, who has followed in his footsteps, are flawed survivors, rather than, as Hillary Clinton once put it, \u201csuper-predators.\u201d In daring not only to imagine black men in love, but to treat drug dealers with empathy,\u00a0Moonlight<\/em>\u00a0embodies, more than any film yet, the sensibility of the Black Lives Matter generation. It rebels, moreover, against a black protest tradition in literature and film that has tended to depict the ghetto as an inferno in an effort to stir white compassion. The defining work of that tradition is Richard Wright\u2019s\u00a0Native Son<\/em>, whose anti-hero, Bigger Thomas, strikes out blindly against the force of oppression, driven by inarticulate wrath. Baldwin famously accused Wright of having created, in Bigger Thomas, an heir of Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s Uncle Tom, a \u201ccontinuation of \u2026 that monstrous legend it was written to destroy<\/a>\u201d:\u00a0\u201cThe failure of the protest novel,\u201d he continued, \u201clies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.\u201d What makes\u00a0Moonlight<\/em>\u00a0such a transcendent work is that it illuminates these invisible lives, beyond the categories that have blinded so many to their humanity and their beauty.<\/p>\n

Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the <\/em>London Review of Books, and a fellow in residence at the New York Institute for the Humanities.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Birth of a Nation,\u00a0Moonlight, and the black protest tradition. Last week, I took a train to Harlem to see\u00a0The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker\u2019s retelling of the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. Released in October, the film had already disappeared from most theatres, including my local cinema in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1098,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1186],"tags":[25588,25595,25594,25597,80,7698,23023,25589,2576,881,25596,25590,5656,25587,81,25586,11394,3816,4617,3826,9578,25593,22839,11924,25585,25591,3847,25592],"class_list":["post-104583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-film","tag-oscarssowhite","tag-alex-r-hibbert","tag-barry-jenkins","tag-black-cinema","tag-cinema","tag-clarence-thomas","tag-d-w-griffith","tag-frederick-douglas","tag-harriet-beecher-stowe","tag-james-baldwin","tag-janelle-monae","tag-jean-celestin","tag-michelle-obama","tag-moonlight","tag-movies","tag-nate-parker","tag-native-son","tag-o-j-simpson","tag-protest","tag-richard-wright","tag-roxane-gay","tag-salamishah-tillet","tag-stokely-carmichael","tag-tarell-mccraney","tag-the-birth-of-a-nation","tag-tiffany-drayton","tag-uncle-tom","tag-vinson-cunningham"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEverybody's Protest Film: Why "Moonlight" Matters<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Adam Shatz on Moonlight, The Birth of a Nation, and their divergent approaches to the black protest tradition.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/07\/how-to-swim\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How to Swim by Adam Shatz\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"November 7, 2016 \u2013 The Birth of a Nation,\u00a0Moonlight, and the black protest tradition.Last week, I took a train to Harlem to see\u00a0The Birth of a Nation, Nate Parker\u2019s\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/07\/how-to-swim\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-11-07T19:02:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-11-08T17:36:29+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-1.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"675\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Adam Shatz\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Adam Shatz\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/07\/how-to-swim\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/07\/how-to-swim\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Adam Shatz\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/bcf2e7f91b0d799a2a68f3c201be1b19\"},\"headline\":\"How to Swim\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-11-07T19:02:29+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-11-08T17:36:29+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/07\/how-to-swim\/\"},\"wordCount\":2300,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/07\/how-to-swim\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/moonlight.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"#OscarsSoWhite\",\"Alex R. 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