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75 The House I Live In: An Interview with Charles Burnett Aida A. Hozic/1994 Published in Callaloo 17, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 471–87. © 1994 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett’s first feature film, was made in 1973 as his thesis project at UCLA and shot in its entirety on location in South Central Los Angeles. Beautifully filmed by Burnett himself, the film tenderly recounts a few days in the life of a slaughterhouse worker, Stan, whose existence is as bounded by invisible threads of hopelessness as that of the sheep that he is forced to kill each day. At the time of the film’s original, sporadic theatrical release in 1977, the New York Times critic Janet Maslin dismissed Killer of Sheep as “amateurish” and “boring.” Since then, the film has won awards at festivals in Houston and Berlin, acquired honorary protection by the National Film Registry accorded to a select few “masterpieces” such as Citizen Kane, and aided its author in winning a prestigious John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “genius award.” Even in this world where justice—if, indeed, there is any—lives elsewhere, things occasionally , as Charles Burnett would say, “balance out with time.” I first saw Killer of Sheep just recently, on video, with a group of my high school friends from Sarajevo currently seeking refuge in Los Angeles from the war in Bosnia. We expected to see an award-winning film, possibly a cinematographic masterpiece—but most especially a film about a world that we were neither part of nor could ever join. In spite of all the intellectual comparisons which are currently being made between the war in Sarajevo and the sealed-off war zones in Los Angeles, South Central Los Angeles seemed to us as distant as China’s 76 charles burnett: inter views Forbidden City and as irrelevant as the war in Somalia. We had our own tragedy selfishly to worry about. And then, just fifteen minutes into the movie, we were all crying. The children were playing on the minuscule TV screen, throwing rocks onto passing trains, fighting with each other, wrestling in the dust, and doing the “bump.” Our entire childhood on the dirty streets of Sarajevo came back in a flash—we too used to throw rocks at busses and climb onto streetcars instead of trains. Also, there was a song in the background that we paid little attention to, although we knew the words by heart and continued to sing it long after it had ended in the film’s sequence: “What is America to me? . . . /The grocer and the butcher/The faces that I see . . . /The children in the playground . . . / That is America to me.” A few weeks later, thanks to my friend Orson Watson, who had learned the song in a Russian Pioneer Camp, I learned that its title was “The House I Live In” and that it was sung by Paul Robeson. I realized that it was truly unusual that we Bosnians knew by heart the words of a song that most Americans have never heard, and, in retrospect, that we were crying not only because of the images of the “children in the playground ,” but also because of this music locked somewhere in the back of our minds: how strange that the memory of one of the greatest African Americans of this century—Paul Robeson—was unconsciously, unintentionally , and paradoxically, retrieved for a moment by a group of refugees from Bosnia who could not even understand its significance! Memory in and for the Black community, as Charles Burnett says in this interview, “is a strange phenomenon.” For the people whose history is continuously being eroded, “memory is like coming on an island, something to catch up on and hold onto.” Burnett, enduring resident of South Central L.A. and the Black independent filmmaker whose name is revered by all other like-minded filmmakers for his talent , courage and, above all, for his exceptional human decency, has devoted his entire career—and life—to the safeguarding of such islands. Charles Burnett was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, but his family moved to South Central L.A. at the time of the great Black migrations North and West, when “progress” seemed possible and owning a home was “not a dream.” Most of the characters in Burnett’s films are, much like Burnett himself, first- or second...

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