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 These correspondences
occur frequently enough to be significant, and, in view of the rest of the sound track, act as life belts to be ignored at your peril because the second
layer has a strong undertow. Real people telling true stories in a variety of languages and, as Bob Dylan would say, ‘something is happening, but
you don’t know what it is’. The effect is such that it appears that part of the soundtrack has made a unilateral declaration of independence. It hasn’t,
instead it is hung like a curtain, making numerous points of contacts to what is happening on screen.
There are eleven native languages in déjà vu, each reflecting a distinctive way of thinking and the cultural assumptions
of those who speak them. Viewed historically, some of those languages (English, French, German, Portuguese) represent major export items - spreading
the word with missionary zeal in the interest of the politics of power, economic efficiency and cultural presumption. In this post-colonial era we are
still only half aware of the hierarchies which language creates. Language does not simply aid communication. It can, and often does, create cultural
refugees - people whose mother tongue is devalued or actively suppressed while they are still in their ‘own’ land. Contemporary examples abound. Until
recently one of the most obvious was Kurdish. The effect of this invalidation is to consign an entire people to a linguistic limbo where the presumptive
superiority of the colonial power is demonstrated by the inability of the colonialised to raise their voices in effective dissent. Imposed silence is
free to be equated with agreement or even stupidity. |
‘Big ships’ have visited these waters for hundreds of years, bringing Columbus, Cortez and Cook, but always bringing the
missionary word and often the vessels of gun-boat diplomacy in their wake. Coincidentally or not, the shadow of the ship on the ocean evokes battlements
of the kind we draw as children. The second sequence of shots shows docks and Africans loading bananas (hard work, if you can get it). The sound track
gives us a work song from a prison in America. Not surprisingly it is an Afro-American singing.
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