Khonsay: Poem of Many Tongues by Bob Holman et al. (review)

Khonsay: Poem of Many Tongues, produced by folklorist Steve Zeitlin and directed by poet and activist Bob Holman, premiered in New York City at the 2015 Margaret Mead Film Festival and, later that year, won the "Viewer's Choice Award" at the Sadho Poetry Film Festival in New Delhi, India. The term "khonsay," from the Boro language in India, means to "pick something up with care as it is rare or scarce." This sentiment underscores the film, encouraging the viewer to reconsider their perception of language and approach it as a valuable and easily lost resource. Compiled by Bob Holman, this avant-garde project falls under the category of a motion poem, a film designed to function as poetry—and vice versa. This film is a compilation of scenes from 50 artistic productions, all featuring orators speaking in their native language, with each scene contributing one line of poetry. Their voices fuse to create a "cento," a collage poem, or a patchwork composition, curated to attain a new significance. It is the quilt version of poetry, an imagery the film actively integrates to formulate its unique aesthetic.

The film opens in gray scale with lines of poetry written in their original script moving in a slow vertical crawl down the screen as a cacophony of voices speaking different languages play over each other, reaching a deafening crescendo. The statement "Poetry is a distillation of language, the energizing patter of consciousness itself" is then superimposed over the different scripts, accompanied by columns and rows of animated portraits, moving blocks that depict the native speakers. Another layer of text follows, stating: "There are 6,500 languages spoken in the world. By the end of the century more than half will disappear." With that, the goals of the project are revealed to be twofold: to create a powerful tribute to the diversity of our world and to serve as a call to action to recognize the value of and need to preserve our many varied voices. The film is successful in both endeavors.

To bring these voices to life, the film pans through a series of black-and-white portraits. When it focuses on one, the image comes into color and reveals a split screen. The name of a language appears on the top left side; then under it, a clip of the performer; and in the bottom corner, a rotating globe that highlights the source country of the language. As the native speaker recites a line of poetry, the text appears next to the globe, transliterated into their language's alphabet. When the clip finishes, the line is translated into English and moves to the right side of the screen, where the cento comes together in a scrolling text. The poem itself is divided into eight thematic sections: Prologue, Welcome, Threat, Ancestors, Myth, Love, Death, and Words.

The juxtaposition of these various texts and spoken performances from around the world is powerful. Consider the line "Our destiny is not to have an unfortunate end," spoken in Haitian Creole. It precedes "Hold fast to your island child / To your island child, hold fast," chanted in native Hawaiian during the performance of a hula kahiko (ancient hula). The speakers are from islands located in opposing oceans. They are of different ethnicities and have distinct histories, but they come together on the screen to give the viewer a glimpse of a shared concern—the imperative of navigating conceptions of home and identity in the face of the ever-encroaching giants of globalization and industrialization.

This treatment of complicated material distilled into short and easily digestible scenes makes the film well-suited as a teaching tool for all ages. Students could draw larger parallels between populations and marvel at unique cultural differences, while teachers could provide additional context for individual segments. For example, in regard to the Hawaiian clip mentioned earlier, an educator could point out the...