Black Mother (2018)

Khalik Allah / 2018/ Jamaica, USA / 77 minutes

Review by Jonathan Ali

An island is a world, as the writer Samuel Selvon declared. So it would be foolhardy, dangerous even, to assume that a single work of art could entirely encompass or reflect an island, with all of the depth and complexity and contradictions contained therein—no matter how small the island or large the work.

Khalik Allah’s documentary Black Mother is a portrait of Jamaica. Yet ambitious as it undoubtedly is, the film has no pretensions of being definitive, or even representative. This is a highly personal work, a poetic cinematic vision in which the filmmaker implicates himself as its subjective, singular author.

It’s a personal film because for its maker Jamaica is personal. Born in New York to a Jamaican mother (and a father from Iran), Khalik Allah grew up with journeys to Jamaica to see his family who lived in the countryside there a constant in his life. As he got older Allah started going to Jamaica alone, often to visit with his grandfather, a deacon in his local church. These visits, during which Allah would listen to his grandfather dispense religious and spiritual wisdom, became like pilgrimages.

A sense of the spiritual, therefore, even the mystical, underpins Black Mother, which confers upon Jamaica the idea of it as a sacred and special place. This might suggest that the vision contained in Black Mother is a romanticised or an idealised one. But nothing could be further from the truth, given that Khalik Allah has made it a mission of sorts to reflect realities of life that are often quite harsh in his work.

Before starting to make films, Allah gained acclaim as a portrait photographer, his bold, sometimes shocking renderings of his New York subjects reflecting their often deprived, marginalised lives.

It is this concern for capturing the experiences of everyday people that Allah brings to bear on Black Mother. The film therefore is not only a personal portrait of Jamaica; it also isn’t a picturesque tourist’s portrait. Black Mother is essentially a series of testimonies, from ordinary Jamaicans, talking about their lives and answering the filmmaker’s questions about those lives; the audio of the testimonies is layered over a series of portrait-like images of people (including but not restricted to the ones giving testimonies), and also images of landscapes, urban and rural.  These images are shot in different formats—crisp, high-definition digital as well as 8mm and 16mm film stocks that provide a contrastingly warm, grainy richness—that build Black Mother up and out like a tactile collage.

The film’s asynchronicity—the absence of a direct correlation between its sounds and images—is also striking; add to that lack, the lack of a traditional score to cushion the experience (most of the music comes from a few hymns sung a cappella) and Black Mother can initially feel random and disorienting. As it progresses, however, Allah’s stylistic methods establish themselves and the film takes on a hypnotically experiential quality, like an intoned prayer—even as it becomes clear that the film hews to a clearly defined structure.

That structure reflects the film’s pointed title, with the narrative (such as it is) broken into three “trimesters”, each one having a separate preoccupation.  The first trimester is an urban one, featuring the testimonies of people, such as sex workers and drug addicts, on city streets; the second takes us into the fertile countryside, with testimonies of Revivalists and Rastafarians, among others. The final trimester contrasts birth and death, and includes the poignant testimony and subsequent funeral of the filmmaker’s deacon grandfather, as well as a young woman giving birth: Jamaica, the nurturing black mother, personified.

The notion and image of the nurturing mother might strike some contemporary sensibilities as masculinist and, therefore, problematic. Indeed, the starkness of much of the material here, from the frank testimonies of the sex workers to the explicit nature of the concluding birth, might well make for problematic, even objectionable viewing for some.

That’s as may be. An island is a world, and worlds contain multitudes—the dark and the light, the harrowing and the uplifting, the base and the profound. Black Mother is of a one-of-a-kind work, a moving-image transmutation of and tribute to the island-world of Jamaica quite unlike anything before it.

More about Filmmaker Khalik Allah   khalikallah.com