The Alchemies of Handsworth Songs by Doctor Clive Nwonka
1,556 words
Viewing the opening 17 minutes of Akomfrah’s visual meditation on the habitual life of racism is to experience a kind of alchemy. It is not outside of the context of the film’s counter-hegemonic project that the first clear voice is that of Douglas Hurd, the then Conservative Home Secretary, in Handsworth, Birmingham, where he is surrounded by white residents in the aftermath of the 1985 uprising against police brutality and racism. We later move to another image of Handsworth, where a young Black male, slender in build, runs through the street, his swaying dreadlocks accentuating the sight of human agility that is able to evade several attempts at capture by side-stepping through a police gauntlet before being overwhelmed by a squad of riot officers. A Black woman is filmed being interviewed amongst the observing officers, arguing that the riots were catalysed not only by mass Black unemployment, but by police harassment, and in her occupying of the entire frame, the camera brings the spectator to the full force of both her and subsequently the film’s polemic. Akomfrah introduces a filtered blue optic as we are presented with the hegemonic mainstream media portrayals of Black identities, the physical scenes and narratives of economic inequality, colonialism and the both celebratory and lamenting archival imagery of the Windrush generation, before returning to Handsworth’s Black community: a site of physical devastation, but also isolation from mainstream society in all its forms. Throughout, the images that are drawn from the archive are prefaced and chaperoned by an expressionistic and metaphorical cinematic address; we hear it in the use of reggae music that seems to coexist with, rather than be subsumed into the Englishness of Hubert Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’. Later, the film moves to a sequence of Vanley Burke’s Black photography, the camera eventually meditates on image of a Black boy, Winford Fagan, with a Union Jack Flag on his bike.
In Akomfrah’s audio-visual schema, even at this early point, the alchemy of the film is apparent. In talking about alchemy, I must be very precise, as this does not just equate to the spectacularising of the diurnal. I am also thinking of another type of alchemising. Presenting the conditions of those on the racial and social periphery was indeed a central feature within the 80’s remit of Channel 4, a mandate to be exemplified in the screening of ‘Handsworth Songs’, Akomfrah’s ground-breaking essayistic meditation on the experiences of Birmingham’s Afro Caribbean community within Thatcherite Britain, interrogating the resistant postcolonial melancholia at the centre of the authoritarian policing that would catalyse the 1985 riots. However, the film is also significant for becoming the basis for the intellectual polemic coalescing over the film’s forms of textual definition and cultural meaning. Commissioned by Channel 4 for the ‘Britain: The Lie of the Land series’, the Black Audio Film Collective’s seminal film was embedded in a particularly permissive industrial framework; it situated the text within a PSB (public service broadcasting) context which was providing the space for a counter hegemonic radical documentary culture that was critical of the way society was being governed. This description is in itself conducive to understanding the intentions of Akomfrah’s ‘Handsworth Songs’, for the images of the Handsworth Riots unifies the textual and contextual (from which interpretations are often splintered) and this is the fundamental moment that Akomfrah focuses the spectators attention on; the three days where Black people came out onto the streets of Handsworth against the police harassment and colonial violence inlawed by Thatcherite authoritarianism and in turn, the capturing of the tensions between those who have abandoned the increasingly fossilised demarks of race relations, and those who have yet to come to terms with the loss of empire and Britishness as a racially-homogenous identity.
The aesthetic subversiveness of ‘Handsworth Songs’, which would in 1986 go on to win the prestigious British Film Institute Grierson Award for Best Documentary, is located not simply in its highly poetic mosaic created for the recontextualization of the Handsworth Riots, but also in its vital deconstruction of dominant cinema and its modes of representing the Black people of Britain, of which Paul Gilroy was eviscerating as organised by a colonial dictate that set the stage for the violent disallowance of Blackness within its national insignias. This points to the dialogical nature of the work of Black Audio Film Collective, Sankofa and the broader Black film workshop movement which placed itself at the centre of a dialectic struggle between the form and nature of Black visual representation, contested in linearity with the emergence of Black British Cultural Studies as a powerful intellectual paradigm to contextualise what has been accepted as and what could be derived from Black British film and television. In turn, the reception of ‘Handsworth Songs’ was precisely the example of the subjectivities of identity that for the Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall would become the central occupation of his 1988 Black Film British Cinema conference paper ‘New Ethnicities’ at the ICA. It is this public nature of the film that reveals how it came to inform not just the paradigmatic expansivity of Black Cultural Studies and public intellectual labour throughout the period, but inaugurated a major conjunctural shift in both the parameters of Black Britain’s representational politics and a critical shift in our understandings of the heterogeneities of race, ethnicity and cultural difference. But the film’s alchemising polysemicity invites us to consider the racial conjunctures that have occasioned our more structured reencounters with the film. For example, ‘Handsworth Songs’ would be screened publicly in September 2011 at the Tate Modern in the immediate aftermath of the English Riots that would explode in response to the police killing of Mark Duggan, a black man and father from Tottenham whose shooting would expose the unrelenting colonial violence commandeering the anti-humanness of the Black existence. Less than 10 years later, it would be a similar but more globally permeating moment of racial lacerations that would condition the socio-political context in which ‘Handsworth Songs’ was made available by the Lisson Gallery in 2020, as the world responded to the Black diasporic tremors of the events in Minnesota on 25 May of that year where George Floyd would be killed in the most visually haptic of circumstances. And as this emotional tremor reached Britain’s streets, ‘Handsworth Songs’ would again be cited not just as a repository of cultural memory, but for a historicising of the very present anger and trauma emerging from the fatal anti-Black racism that conditions our every expression and propelled the global resonance of the Black Lives Matter movements. This being the case, the 1980’s context is, of course, different from that of 2011, 2020 and beyond. Whilst the colonial geneses of the riots of 1985 undoubtedly impose themselves onto the contemporary, the present also exhibits a number of specificities on which ‘Handsworth Songs’ possesses no definitive or collective answer, and to a certain extent, this absence of absolute and atemporal solution is immaterial. What is fundamental to our revisitation of the film is the sense of fidelity to the aesthetic principles that constitute it, and how it asks for a spectatorial attention that relies not on the replication of Black trauma but on the continuous plausibility of entirely new constellations of Black visual representation. In that respect, the work here is alchemistic in that Akomfrah made it possible via a continuous accruing of multiple meanings at the point of spectatorship to offer a critique of the definitions and manifestations of a critical Black politics through the cinematic medium, but in a form that permits metadiscursive responses and opens up dialogue among and between generations, conjunctures, cultural periods and between the esoteric sensibilities that privilege an engagement at the level of text and the necessary encounters with the habitual forms of state racism at the film’s most visceral, indexical and contextual existence.
‘Handsworth Songs’ may be as relevant today as it was in 1986. It’s obvious to me that much of film’s continuous virtue rests in this philosophy of alchemy. I will take this argument further to suggest that this might itself be fundamental to the problem of public service broadcasting; the more the spectators of radical documentary understand about the historical context of racism in all its textual difference, the more able we are to engage and determine for ourselves, through imagination, our present circumstances, how a future can be determined, and how we might participate. Perhaps this suggestion in itself is an unreachable horizon, for public service broadcasting no longer provides the space for radical documentary as a meta-discursive medium. Yet, the continued revisiting of the film, however this revisitation is justified, defined, or bestowed, must also rest in its ability to make demands on our receptive registers without either reducing itself to the homogeneities of Blackness, race and difference or being seduced by the chimeric idea that televisual documentary in our current neoliberal context provides the definitive answer to both racial inequality and the methods of redressing it. In doing so, ‘Handsworth Songs’ can be seen as a mode of alchemising public sociology through which more contemporary examples of ‘race making’ as a neoliberal gambit for the spectacularising commodification of race can be interrogated against the pertinent questions of Blackness, identity and politics. And like all forms of alchemy, ‘Handsworth Songs’ retains occult affects that continue to escape true explanation.