[English review] Bantú Mama

Violence, poverty, death. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a favela in Brazil, in the suburbs in France, or in the inner city in the US, this is the visual storytelling cinema and television have built around the hood in the past 30 years. Until “Bantù Mama”, I only knew one narrative attached to the hood life in the Dominican Republic. Houses barely furnished, barely big enough to accommodate a large family gathering around a big table to share a meal. Kids running around, screaming and laughing. Adults hustling on a daily basis just to survive…. And Han (Sung Kang) flirting with an Afrolatina as seen in the short film “Los Bandoleros”. This “Fast & Furious” spin-off (2009) used the Dominican Republic as a sunny background to display a story centered around non-Caribbean characters. With the same background, “Bantù Mama” shifts the focus and puts the people actually living this reality at the forefront.

Disclaimer: this may contain spoilers.

Written by director Ivan Herrera and Clarisse Albrecht, “Bantù Mama” had its world premiere at the SXSW Festival in April 2021. Described as the tale of the re-encounter between Africa and the Caribbean, it tells the story of Emma, a French Cameroonian woman who gets arrested in the Dominican Republic. She manages to escape and finds shelter in the most dangerous neighborhood. A group of minors takes her in and protects her until she finds a solution Although Emma (Clarisse Albrecht) plays the lead role, I feel like the unit she forms with $hulo (Arturo Perez), T.I.N.A (Scarlet Reyes) and Cuki (Euris Javiel) is the main character allowing us to explore the meaning of family, identity, and Blackness in a Caribbean context.

Family

As “Fast and Furious” Dom (Vin Diesel) has been showing us for the past twenty years, family isn’t just about sharing the same blood. It’s also about the people you choose to be around. In “Bantù Mama”, circumstances bring Emma, $hulo, T.I.N.A and Cuki together. If I were to compare this film to traditional European tales, I’d say it takes elements from “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” and “Snowhite”. A young woman running away and finding shelter in a home whose owners are different from her but welcome her. She helps with the chores in exchange for their protection until she’s able to go back to her world. The twist here is that Emma is an adult but she gets help from kids. I know she’s supposed to be seen as a maternal figure, but I see her more like the quiet aunt always willing to give hugs or unsolicited advice. T.I.N.A and $hulo are in charge of the household and they’re the ones making life-changing decisions for the family. Starting from the moment they decide to protect Emma to the moment they go their separate ways. When the story ends, a choice is made and the question remains: are they still a family? Regardless of their circumstances, all Caribbean families are confronted with this question because some of us leave their country or come back after a long time spent abroad. That’s why keeping a sense of your identity can become a challenge. Society will put labels on you. It’s up to you to define yourself on your own terms.

Identity

In their own way, each character transcends the negative stereotypes they usually carry in the hood folklore. Emma is a biracial French woman who lives by herself and for herself. She has no family, no husband, no child. She can’t be defined as a daughter or a sister, nor as a wife or as a (baby’s) mother. She’s no Jezebel, no Aunt Jemima, no Welfare Queen, and none of the stereotypes applied to Black women. And the story isn’t about her getting her happily ever after through the love of a man. Her happiness only relies on her finding herself.

Bantu_Mama_TINA_2.png

$hulo doesn’t seem to think twice about the way he makes money. He could have been a womanizer, he could have tried to be a true gang leader. Yet, what we get is a young adult who enjoys rapping, dancing, and making sure his family is taken care of. T.I.N.A could have been the teenage girl sleeping around and ending up getting pregnant. Instead, we get a businesswoman in the making who stands her ground in front of men. And last but not least, Cuki is reaching the age when he has to make the choice to walk down the path $hulo and T.I.N.A chose. Regardless of what they do, they’re first and foremost multidimensional human beings with a bright side and a dark side. Despite Emma being Afropean and them being Afrocaribbean, they recognize the similarities in each other’s identity.

Blackness

I was talking with an English-speaking Afrocaribbean friend who pointed out inconsistencies in Emma’s behavior. Although I agreed with my friend, I didn’t find Emma’s behavior unrealistic either because, well, she’s French. And it made sense to me she’d let her guard down and put herself in danger, thinking some kind of magic would make everything work out in the end. I never dissociated her French identity and her Black identity. What does it mean to be Black when you’re an Afrodescendant? If you listen to my podcast, you know I’m intentional in the way I use “Afrocaribbean” as Afrodescendant from the Caribbean whereas in France it’s used to describe Afrodescendants from the Caribbean and Afrodescendants from Africa/Europe as one community. We’re not a monolith. While we share an African heritage, it didn’t get transmitted in the same way and we, Afrocaribbean people, also built up our own traditions. My favorite scene is the one you see in the trailer. Emma helping T.I.N.A to tie up a headwrap and explaining to her where it came from. In our interview, Clarisse and Ivan explain how and why they came up with that scene. This visual connection highlights the re-encounter between Africa and the Caribbean. However, from my perspective as a Guadeloupean woman, this scene is also a much-needed representation of the differences within the French Black community and within the Afrocaribbean community. The exact same scene with a Guadeloupean woman would convey the exact same pride held in this piece of fabric, but I think her explanation would insist more on the different meanings the headwrap had before and after the second abolition of slavery. This scene as well as my discussion with Clarisse and Ivan made me realize how I shouldn’t take for granted the traditions that I know and how we should cherish those who won’t let us forget our history that our cinema helps curate.

Bantu_Mama_Emma.jpg

I really don’t want to spoil the ending, so I won’t get into details here about the meaning behind it. All I’d say is that I enjoyed their idea of showing an option. This isn’t the option I’d chose. As I explained in episode 7 of Karukerament, I’m at a point in my life where I’m trying to figure out how to be happy in the place that I chose to call home. When you’re an Afrodescendant, “home” may take a lot of meanings. Is home in Europe, in the Caribbean, or in Africa? It’s up to each one of us to figure out our own answer.

English CinemaL S