Coffee Coloured Children (review)

COFFEE COLOURED CHI LDREN GUGGENHEI M MUSEUM NEW YORK Coffee Coloured Children, part of the "Lights on African Program" curated by Mahen Bonetti for the "Africa: The Arts of a Continent" exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, evokes for American audiences the aesthetic tremors and cultural aftershocks of what within the exhibition remains primarily a continental affair. At the center of director Ngozi Onwurah's short semi-autobiographical film is the familiar "color line", a term coined by W.E.B Dubois in his 1904 treatise on African/ European relations in America, The Souls of Black Folk. I mages and references to childhood- adulthood, Africa-Britain , West-East, white-black, lightdark , nature-culture, first worldthird world alerts the question: what contents define the contexts in which these classificatory terms become more or less in value? Might there be liberatory agency through the transgression of these binary oppositions, or better, a sidestepping of the pre-determined history such reactionary positionings set up? Ngozi's tense and moving story charts the emotional upheaval enacted upon three biracial children — of a Nigerian father and British mother — once they return to the west. Though the film's opening sequence suggests that the beautiful dream of a multiracial, multicultural society is attainable through the dissolution of racial categories of a great big melting pot of peace and love, the moment turns somber as the idealistic 1960s transforms into the industrial decline of the 1970s and 80s. I n the opening sequence, a red socked, black leather-jacket clad, punk youth smears dog shit on the front door of a bi-racial family's flat. Hardly a figure of generational assimilation, he displaces his own "otherness" through a symbolic and primitive act of marking — dark, putrid, bodily waste — on the domain of a neighbor. Here, marking represents the transference of youthful exclusion, culturalimpurity . "Others" become both the cause and effect of European economic decline as w ell as an overwhelming melting pot of foreign ideas and customs. Michael Rogin has analyzed the fin de siecle European immigrant phenomenon of "becoming American" by portraying "blackface" roles during the early years of vaudeville and cinema. According to Rogin, I n times of racism, and anti-semitism, the unstable commodity of national identity can only be affirmed through the identification and ridicule of the outsiders. I n this context, one became black momentarily by serving up another 's identity as parody. This parody both served as a popular form of entertainment during the turn of the century and as vehicle for spiritual cleansing. As the myth of the fathernation -state declines, a contestation for the terms of belonging takes place. We find this theme popping up in practically all the meaningful independent cinema from Britain in the 1990s, from Black Audio Film Collective's Handsworth Songs, Sankofa's Passion of Remembrance, Gurinda Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach, to Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Launderette. I n these films, the cultural subjects are expressedly negotiating various identities or fighting relegation to minority status in the country of their citizenship . The common thread is a national-personal coming to terms with difference once the organizing principle is no longer white patriarchal hegemony. I n Coffee Coloured Children, the family falls into crisis when the father disappears. The mother heads the household singled-handedly , forced to fend for her children's stake in the national identity as "normal and British". But that is a subtext. The parents are never seen, except in an opening moment when the mother wipes feces off her doorstep. The central narrative is carried through the emotional and psychic perplexities of her children, who face the brunt of hate and contradictory relations from this racialized oedipal drama. Dream sequences and voiceovers form the residue of the biracial trauma in aural and visual means. By moving between seemingly documentary footage of childhood and equally treated tableaux recreations, the work makes the subjects' pain and psychic journey of transformation palatable. We both witness and feel the enclosure of parochial British society. Throughout, the innocent musings of childhood, accented with music boxes and fairy tale rhymes are punctured with the yelps and laughs of Cockney ridicule, school bells, and obsessive body...