Despite the fact that I am, as W.E.B. Du Bois would say, a New England Negro, I do not like the cold. Another thing that I do not like, especially in an academic talk, is too much reference to the autobiographical. So, in defiance of my two dislikes, I will, in this essay, talk about the cold, myself, and the contours of the diasporic blackness that Isaac Julien images so beautifully and provocatively in True North.

As a scholar of African American literature and cultural studies, questions of diaspora concern me nearly everyday. As Brent Edwards points out in his essay on "Diaspora" in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, the 20th century saw many minority cultures claim "diasporic" status as a way to link them to other "like" minorities in other places, to strategize bids for representation and power trans-nationally and trans-culturally.[1] This change in perspective, from minority to diaspora, gave the multifarious gatherings of black people dispersed across the Atlantic by the trade in slaves a relation to one another that could be historicized, analyzed, strategized and politicized. A claim for diaspora became a claim for globalized community, a claim for a diversity of related, but not at all essentialized blacknesses. In my own work, I have been concerned about how, for example, New England Negroes and black British "luxury" slaves expressed their identities through clothing in the 18th century. I have examined the campy and fantastical self-portraiture of a Nigerian-born American artist in New York and his collaboration with an African American artist who spent some formative years in Tanzania—they called their double-portrait "Sisterhood."[2] As I do this work in my writing and in the classroom, I am always concerned with what Paul Gilroy calls the "routes" that black people and blackness as an idea has traveled—whether the route leads to an interrogation, as in Countee Cullen's famous poem, "Heritage," in which the poetic persona is pre-occupied with the question of "What Is Africa to Me?" or if the route leads instead to the North Pole, as in True North, what "roots" these investigations nurture and what they preclude is uppermost in my mind.[3]

Although Julien's film does not ask, explicitly, "What does all this ice mean to me?" I think about this question all the time, not in my work, yet, but in my personal life. I'm married to a Swedish man and spend every summer and every other winter holiday season in Stockholm. You can imagine that more than once, on a bitterly cold day in late December, with no sun in sight, I have absolutely found myself saying, "what does all this ice mean to me?" The beginning of True North was shot in the Ice Hotel (Is Hotellet) in Jukkasjärvi, northern Sweden; I still have an unused gift certificate for a weekend there given to us as a wedding present. Last summer, my family vacation took place entirely above the Arctic Circle and in the midnight sun, ending in Tromsø, Norway, home to the world's northernmost university, brewery, botanical garden, and planetarium, and very close to the northernmost golf course. We spent most of our time on a series of islands to the north west called Lofoten, home to tiny fishing villages with great food and, surprisingly, the odd charming boutique hotel. In every single place we went last summer, I fully expected to be the only black person or person of color for kilometers. While there would, of course, be no replay of James Baldwin's alienating experience of African-diasporic singularity in Switzerland, recounted famously in his 1955 "Stranger in the Village" essay, I nevertheless expected to be adding the diversity to this northernmost landscape.[4] I was wrong. People, indeed "folks," had gotten there before me and not just to visit—in every single place we went (and my husband is a lover of the off-the-beaten track), another diasporic person was in evidence. These villages are in the diaspora now.

The time that I have spent in Sweden in the last few years has taught me quite a few unexpected lessons about diaspora and contemporary conceptions of blackness. Imagine again my gratitude when a few years ago, while in Paris, I wandered into the Centre Georges Pompidou and happened upon a retrospective of Isaac Julien's work. I spent the afternoon watching True North and formulating some answers to the "what does all this ice mean to me?" question, this time productively, rather than in complaint. The film helps me to understand not only a little more about my own black diaspora and the different "blacknesses" that I will pass on and learn from my African American-Swedish son. I know from my own experience and from watching Julien's film that we are now in a different place than was James Baldwin. Baldwin ends his essay by saying, in relationship to the American racial drama which has made him familiar and not a stranger here in the U.S., "It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again."[5] I think of these words when experiencing Julien's film as it recasts the history of the first polar explorations, the racial and gendered politics of the Henson/Peary explorations and rejects the imperialist attitude of "manifest destiny" attached to the landscape's penetration and displacement of the native Inuit people. As it does so, it also meditates not only on "whiteness," as does Baldwin's essay, but indigeneity and blackness. Changing the terms of belonging from negative to positive, from "not white" and "never white again," to black and, perhaps, always black or certainly colored, True North does not merely insert blackness into the landscape and "claim" the poles for black or colored people, but rather the film naturalizes racialized and gendered experience in the polar environment. Not an exotic presence, but one that belongs, blackness in True North is literally and figuratively a mobile concept, and yet another route/root to and from, within the disapora.

The film opens with the sound of footsteps, indicating that our lens in this landscape will not be still, but rather in motion. A black-clad figure walks through a black and white "northernmost" landscape as the film's triptych itself comes in and out of focus. Although the landscape appears monotone and monolithic in its supposed "whiteness," its presentation is anything but—motion and multiple perspectives abound here, literalized by the triptych and the light and shadow the landscape produces. The footsteps transform into something that sounds more like a heartbeat as the camera's "eye" enters and moves forward in an icy, womb-like structure—something lives here. We hurry forward, with visible breath, into a church built of ice—in the next frames, it seemingly melts, becomes both rushing water and small icy rocks, caressed by beautiful black hands. The perspective from which we've been seeing, that of a black woman, is revealed; she then looks at herself, recognizes herself in a mirror, is familiar to herself while washing her hands. She then moves on. After this journey and the destruction of the church or "temple," as it were, two defining aspects of the establishment of diaspora, she is, it seems, at home.

True North shows that this woman, a historical analog of Matthew Henson, the first African American to explore (and perhaps reach) the North Pole with Robert Peary in 1909, and contemporary member of the black diaspora, is rooted here. An image of two black rocks (which resemble her in the black cloak), ground this moment of recognition. They are permanent residents of this place, as old as the ground on which they rest, older than the snow that surrounds them. As she walks through the landscape, she looks comfortable, at ease, meditative, busy. Though alone, she does not seem lonely and even finds herself, later, in community not only with the "whiteness" around her, but with those who are native to the place. Inuit music and culture orchestrate this film, accompany, even guide this woman on her journey. The narration tells us that she was meant "to stop," to arrest her motion, to not reach "True North" first, or at all; we know from the incessant motion associated with her that this cessation of her progress will be impossible. Sometimes approaching us, sometimes retreating, she follows her own trajectory toward what is "true." When the woman is finally still, looking at passing floes of ice, she puts her hand up, caresses the air, attempts to feel the contours of her location, asks for us, "what does all this ice mean to me?" Her answer and ours come at the beach at the end, a black sand beach, evidence—in each grain of sand eroded from a black rock—of a "dark" presence here for millennia. Here, on this coast, white or transparent blocks of ice melt, disappear into this black place. "Diaspora" does not always mean displacement or simply an oppositional claim for rightful place. It can also be and increasingly is a long-term, sometimes timed- or tied to-nature process of redefining home for black people and for blackness as an idea.

In "Stranger in the Village," James Baldwin certainly paid the "price of the ticket" for his racialized, gendered and sexualized journey into a white "European" space. In True North, the ticket seems to be bought and paid for before we even get there. Again, this change matters because now, as Julien's film reminds us, we have a new place within which to explore black identities, an actual new landscape (the polar north), but most importantly, a new place in the mind. As much as True North is about actual polar exploration, it seems to me that it offers the possibility for a new mental landscape, one that encourages us to expand our thinking about the diaspora, as not simply a journey away from "home," riddled by the experience of loss, dominated by the hope for return. The Arctic may be a new route to and for diasporic thinking, but I see True North as a reminder about other roots for the field ideologically and methodologically. We have, over the last few years, been trained to see race and racialization intersectionally, with attention to the way in which race, gender, sexuality, class, nation are interstitial categories of identity formation and expression.[6] True North asks us to add another "intersection" to that list, one that I'm going to call "temperature." Taking the "temperature" of diaspora adds another dimension to it, not of geography, but of an investigation of phase, of multiple home "states." "Temperature" in True North is an expression of space and time, represented by the repeated images of transformations between water, snow and ice that are associated with black presence and agency in the film. "Temperature" points our attention to the motion between different states of being; the possibility that identity, blackness, diaspora is routed/rooted not just in motion, but in transformation, endless change of phase. I like to think that near the beginning of the film, when we see the black female figure stumble, perhaps fall into a crevasse or a kind of polar "black hole," we should think not of loss, but rather transportation into another "black" place or state, another home-like diasporic phase or location. We travel toward True North to get to this place, only to realize, once there, that we have already arrived.

Endnotes

1. Brent Edwards, "Diapora," Keywords for American Cultural Studies, eds. Burgett and Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2007): 83. [Return to text]

2. Monica L. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming Fall 2009). [Return to text]

3. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). [Return to text]

4. James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village" in Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: Literary Classics of the United States (Library of America)): 117-129. [Return to text]

5. Baldwin, 129. [Return to text]

6. For an originary moment of this critical paradigm, see Kimberle Crenshaw, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color" Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1241-99. [Return to text]