Close-Up: Toward a Close-Up on Teza

Occupy the screen...

—Haile Gerima (1995)

Teza means 'dew,' or 'morning dew,' in Amharic.

Recalling an Africa outlawed under slavery and colonial imperialism, Langston Hughes spoke of rivers, famously, as "ancient as the world and as old as the flow of human blood in human veins," from the Nile to the Congo to the Euphrates. But he also speaks of dew. He vows to become a composer who will write him some music in "Daybreak in Alabama" (1940): "And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it / Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist / And falling out of heaven like soft dew." In visual poetry, he cannot recall but does manage to imagine people "touching everybody with kind fingers" and "touching each other natural as dew" in that "dawn of music," de jure segregation and US settler colonial imperialism be damned. His soul must have grown deep like rivers with a certain promise of morning dew.¹ To meld Ayi Kwei Armah and Erna Brodber, Hughes would "remember a dismembered continent" and a "continent of Black consciousness" in the diaspora.²

That promise continues to be violated by the later political history of the world and the hemisphere, hence the very title of Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker (2004). This novel in stories tells a tale of the "Tonton Macoute" of Haiti. In "The Book of Miracles," one ex-militia man who hides out comfortably in New York lies to himself: "He hadn't been a famous 'dew breaker,' or torturer, anyway, just one of hundreds of who had done their jobs so well that their victims were never able to speak of them again."³ Both memory and testimony are outlawed here, in other words, across the African Americas. In "Night Talkers," another character is a palannit; that is, he's "lucky" enough to be able to "speak his nightmares to

Haile Gerima in the editing room at his Sankofa store in Washington, DC. Photos courtesy of Titilayo Akanke; montage by Jonelle A. A. Davies

himself as well as to others."⁴ He returns to his aunt just in time before her passing. She tells him to go wash himself and so he does: "Low shrubs covered in dew brushed against his ankles as he made his way down a trail toward the stream at the bottom of the fall. The water was freezing cold when he slipped, but he welcomed the sensation of having almost every muscle in his body contract, as if to salute the dawn."⁵ Finally in "The Bridal Seamstress," yet another character remembers and elaborates: "'We called them choukèt lawoze,' Beatrice said, the couch's plastic cover squeaking beneath her. 'They'd break into your house. Mostly it was at night. But often they'd also come before dawn, as the dew was settling on the leaves, and they'd take you away.'"⁶

The focus of this Black Camera Close-Up is Haile Gerima's eleventh and most recent film production, Teza (2008). Remarkably, he has said that when he made Hour Glass (1972) and Child of Resistance (1972) as a young MFA student at UCLA, he didn't know whether or not he was a filmmaker. When he made Bush Mama (1976) and Harvest: 3000 Years (1976), his cinematic reputation began to grow by leaps and bounds, nationally as well as internationally. Still, nothing would amplify his popularity more than Sankofa (1993), literally a cultural phenomenon which by now should need no introduction whatsoever. Born in Gondar, Ethiopia, and Pan-Africanist to the core, Gerima is a creative and accomplished documentarian as well, even if Wilmington 10—USA 10,000 (1978), After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Imperfect Journey (1994), and Adwa: An African Victory (1999) receive less critical attention, not unlike his oft-neglected feature film, Ashes and Embers (1982). The widely acclaimed Teza is a fictional dramatic production set between Africa and Europe, Ethiopia and Germany, Berlin and Leipzig as well as Addis Ababa and the rural villages of the dewy East...