Interrogation


Cinematic Interrogation





Accidents of opportunity have made this a week of self-interrogation.



Monday, October 22 ---"Cane River" (1982) forced you to meditate on your color and blood-talk documented Creole ancestry



Friday, October 26 --"Dry" (2014) invited you to think about vesicovaginal fistula in Nigeria and what many African Americans quite too easily trivialize and romanticize about their print-documented ancestry



Accidents of chance have made this a week of reflection and refraction.



Do you want to holler, to make sounds no one shall hear?  Do you want to take a vow of silence, to expose uncertainty to the multi-angled,  ironic gazes of the disinterested world in which you live? Triage isn't exactly an easy task, is it?



ii





It is enough ( necessary and sufficient )  to say that cinema is a tool for witnessing.  For awkward confession.  What follows the visual ending of a film is the advent of torment.  Universal and impersonal torment.  Filmmakers beware.



What you plant can grow crookedly or straight in the soil of the mind.





iii



Look carefully at the flowers of evil which bloomed after viewing these two films.



(1) The orchid of despair -----benign genocide shall not disappear until systemic racism dies.



(2)  The rose of hope  ----after one thousand seasons (years) the continent of Africa shall reunite the above-Saharan and the sub-Saharan and come to its senses.  At that time, Europe and the Americas shall be wastelands and Asia shall be the  frontier of last resort for humanity.



Accidents of chance have made this a week for crafting burial urns.





Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            October 27, 2018








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