A Dry "Middle Passage"

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

Though the true horrors and consequences of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Middle Passage have not been made the stuff of popular culture (outside of "Roots" and the film "Sankofa") we do know from many sources that the hull of a slave ship is a place of terror and death. It is a place we do not want to visit or stay. Even a static reproduction of a slave ship makes children scream and run at the Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore. The insistence that we do stay down there is what gives "Middle Passage" (Playing on HBO) its grip on our psyches.

But once it gets us down there, it doesn't quite know what to do with us. Patrick Chamoiseau's French script, a poetic rumination adapted to English by Walter Mosley, is plodding and draining as it takes us on this voyage without new insight or depth of emotion. The only voice we hear is narration by a dead African captive (Djimon Hounsou) who speaks under the weight of less than inspiring text.

For such a visceral experience, there is an odd and somber detachment here. Sadness is understandable but referring to your fellow captives as "the slaves" sounds very strange. Did Africans boarding these ships already think of themselves as slaves? Especially since, at one point, the narrator tells us that some believed they were being carried away to be boiled and eaten by cannibals? Would a man captive in the bowels of a ship address himself and his community as "they" as opposed to "we?" They same questions hold true even if the narrator is speaking as an ancestral spirit.

The detachment is furthered by the silence of all other voices. Of all the sound effects—the toy flicks of a whip, the repeated fiddle music provided for the Africans' dancing, the moaning of the ship and the whoosh of the ocean—it is singularly the slip-splash of bodies into the ocean, as the dead are thrown overboard, that provides both an aural and visual sense of mounting horror.

Director Guy Deslauriers treats the action on the ship in a fairly benign way. There is a sense of unwashed bodies but not of a feculent atmosphere ripe with human waste of all sorts. The narrator speaks of the sailor's rape of women, girls and boys but this abomination is not even hinted at visually. The poetic meditation lends an air of calm to the story and a sense of passivity to the captives who seem to offer their wrists to be shackled. Long close-ups on faces of women, children and men (whose fresh shape-ups and baldies never grow out on the four-month voyage) are designed to evoke emotion but do not. Little rodents scampering the hull look like white lab mice painted gray for effect. The scrawny rat that never bites anyone and the single pile of maggots on the floor also looks hokey and staged.

If filmmakers are going to take us on this voyage in 2002, or even in 1999 when the original film was made, it needs to be worth the trip. And still, for some among us who have never seen or heard the history, maybe this is worth it.

Esther Iverem's reviews also appear on BET.com.

-- February 21, 2002

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