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.”1 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.
- Baldwin, 129. [↩]
