Avatar: Another Neocolonial Story

I am here on the second day of 2010, in this Greek Bahamian womanish body, at this worn kitchen table in a studio in Oakland, pieces of 2009 still nudging at my awareness: a Christmas tree I will have to dispose of soon, stacks of books and papers and unopened letters from fall semester in need of sorting, loose ends of a season of teaching online and writing that caused me to fall in love with storying in a way I have never experienced before.

Inhabiting the story more fully than I have since my childhood (when finding the story and witnessing to characters' lives came easily, was not a cerebral task but an embodied one on the fuchsia carpeted floor of a room of my own) I began to see story from the inside. Story as choices. Story as vision and talking back and asking again and again, what if? Story as medicine. Story as transformation. The power of story to create again and again our lives. The framework of our awareness. Of how we get to see ourselves and the beings with whom we share this planet, this universe. I think again of Leslie Marmon Silko saying “Don’t be fooled. Stories aren’t just entertainment. They are all we have to fight against illness and death.” And although she may not have been speaking specifically to me, I know she is right.

So, when my girlfriend and I sat down in a darkened theatre for three hours to watch James Cameron’s story Avatar in downtown Oakland yesterday, I wasn’t fooled. Yes, the visual effects were beautiful, stunning. All 350 million dollars’ worth of them. But the story is clichéd, dangerously so, because while it appears to call into question colonialism’s devastating effects on the colonized, it ultimately reinforces a colonial worldview: the colonizer’s transformation into enlightened savior depends fundamentally upon the initial devastation of the colonized.

Jake Sully’s (Sam Worthington) story begins with the ‘Sky People’s’ invasion of Pandora. There are sufficient references to a US social system (the military, Sully’s mention of “these economic times”) to connect the ‘Sky People’ with America and an American owned landscape, one in which natural resources have been so completely used up that corporations seeking new wealth have had to expand their reach beyond planet earth. On the planet Pandora is the hope of mineral wealth and the only thing standing in the way of getting it are the indigenous Na’vi.

Sully is a physically challenged white marine who will be used to infiltrate the Na’vi. He is also, we are led to believe, the intellectual inferior to his dead brother, whose place he must now take on a mission into Pandora by way of his Avatar. (The mission is at once military and scientific: the two arms of a colonial enterprise in space. In futuristic models, science takes the place of the church). Perhaps Cameron meant these qualities to create a sympathetic character, however I can’t help but observe the similarity here to historical colonial projects in which men of inferior standing in their own European countries could become ‘lords’ of small empires in the countries they colonized.

Sully’s story proceeds in a familiar way. His brutish arrogance and curiosity get him into trouble quickly in a forest he has no understanding of or connection to. He escapes near death in that forest and is spied by a ‘native’ of Pandora, Neytiri, (Zoe Saldana) who saves him from yet another close encounter with the forest’s four footed inhabitants. Why save me? He asks. Because you have a strong heart, she replies. And so we begin to see signs of his chosenness. (Because at least if he is ‘chosen’, we can argue that he isn’t like the other invaders, and if he is chosen, all this was meant to happen, it was destined to take place – the invasion and destruction of the Na’vis’ Hometree, and Sully’s avatar’s rise to ‘savior’ of Pandora.)

Once introduced to Neytiri’s clan, the Omaticaya, Sully’s avatar is allowed to live with the Omaticaya and ‘learn our ways’, and predictably falls in love with Neytiri, and she with him. He also falls in love with the forest and the Omaticaya way of life and commits himself to fighting on their behalf. But he doesn’t just fight on their behalf. Instead, remembering the story of Neytiri’s grandfather who brought the clans together by riding a large flying creature, the Toruk, and using that story to gain trust and, importantly, power, in the Omaticaya’s imagination, Sully’s avatar mounts the Toruk, bonds with it and flies down into the gathering of the Omaticaya by their sacred tree, the Tree of Souls. In a scene that was starkly unselfconscious in its imperialistic arrogance, Sully’s avatar becomes the Omaticaya’s new leader, as they kneel and make a pathway for him, awed by his newfound status.

Once located on their stage beneath the Tree of Souls, in a position to speak to the Omaticaya as their new leader, Sully’s avatar directs them as to how they must call on all Na’vi clans of Pandora to fight together to resist the Sky People, an idea that any of the Omaticaya could have articulated as well or better. Claiming an understanding of how colonialism works, (people come in and just take what they want) he then refers to Pandora as “our land”, and the Na’vi ‘masses’ are roused to fight with him in determined resistance. To Cameron’s credit, Sully’s avatar does ask Eyra (the ‘All Mother’ – the Omaticaya’s source and lifeline to their ancestors) to search through Grace Augustine’s (the now dead leader of the science arm of the colonial mission) memory of the Sky People’s world in order to use that information to fight them. But the point is that once again, the colonization of the indigenous population is the background story to a colonizer’s story of transformation. Of course the Na’vi fight back and win. Of course Neytiri helps kill Colonel Quaritch, and saves Jake Sully from dying so that Sully’s avatar will live. And, in the climactic last scene of the film, Sully lets go of his human body to become fully Omaticayan.

I am certain that many viewers saw in this final act of relinquishing his human self a triumph. In fact, when I was there last night, the audience applauded as the credits began to roll. After all, here is a white American marine whose job was to infiltrate, gather information and persuade the Na’vis to relocate so that the corporation could mine the mineral wealth underneath their Hometree, who instead becomes “a traitor to his race” and colludes with those whom he set out to trick and colonize. But he doesn’t just collude with the Na’vis, he claims leadership of them and we are led to believe that without him the Na’vis would have perished: a regurgitation of the neocolonial narrative of the ‘Great White Hope’.

Far from symbolizing hope, when Jake Sully relinquishes his human body, Cameron symbolically gives up on the possibility of transformation for human beings, and, I would argue, white people within a racially polarized society. In Avatar Cameron creates a world view that is fundamentally dualistic: a white dominated military force invading an indigenous population of blue people (people of color). He shows us that one is essentially monstrous and the other is essentially good. And that ultimately, in order to become what is good, the monstrous (a veteran marine, in a damaged body - a metaphor for the ways human beings have damaged themselves and the earth, are crippled by their own values) must be transformed by giving up himself. The suggestion then is that white people are not capable of transforming ourselves as white people, and instead we must take on the identity of the ‘native other’ to heal ourselves of ourselves.

The idea of white people as being so essentially divided from the ‘other’ is problematic. The idea of white people as being so implicitly alienated from what is ‘indigenous’, aligned with nature and an earth-based spirituality is also problematic, to say the least. ‘White’ Americans were indigenous people of somewhere before they became ‘white’ in a land where they were not indigenous. In the places where Europeans were indigenous, we also had earth-based spiritual world views which we relinquished, (many of us, but not all) as the religion of the ‘sky God’ took over. In our collective colonizing projects, we erased our own memories of these spiritual world views, then looked for them in the people we colonized. And though it may morph here and there, we are still telling (and living) that story.

For Cameron to end his movie with the human beings (the majority of whom are white) being called ‘alien’ by the now transformed Jake Sully is not triumphant. It is a sad commentary on the possibilities of the imagination in these times. It gives white people permission to a. imagine that people of color are responsible for teaching us to be more ‘humane’, and to b. opt out of imagining transformations of our own communities and the inheritance of a colonial and imperialistic and racist world view that keeps us trapped in stories like this one (and, dare I say, binaries like 'white' and 'people of color'). And, it feeds into the seductive idea that if white people ‘disappear’ (or at least all the bad ones) balance will be restored.

As a white woman, specifically as a Greek Bahamian woman who grew up on more than one story, I am not reconciled to any of these options. As a storyteller I know it’s in my power to imagine new stories; to ask myself questions like "What would a white American man’s story look like if the predictable plot were interrupted? What if the journey to Pandora was interrupted and Jake Sully’s story rose and fell and rose again on different soil, on the soil the Sky People left behind? What if white people’s enlightenment and transformation did not depend upon the devastation of people of color? What would that story look like?"

Leslie Marmon Silko’s words resonate in the walls of my kitchen, in the aloe plant and yellow hibiscus blooming on the linoleum floor beside me. Stories are medicine, and they can be poison too. As a storyteller - as a white woman who crafts stories - I am aware of the large responsibility of storying, of the risks involved in the work of imagining - the need to discern medicine from poison, and how, perhaps, to make use of both.

On The Significance of Barack Obama As President

On November 4th I sat at my kitchen table in my Oakland apartment watching CNN.Com. In fact for days and weeks before November 4th I had become accustomed to waking and before brushing my teeth or putting the kettle on, turning on my computer to see what had transpired in the presidential campaigns the day before. The US elections had become that important to me; I was rooting for Obama.

As I boiled water for tea, I watched and listened as Obama campaigned in Virginia the day before, making the same speech he had made in the other two states he would visit that day. Speaking of his campaign and the need to maintain respect for differences, he said “we try to make sure we are always reminding our supporters that we are all in this together. We are Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, democrat and republican, young and old, gay and straight, disabled and not disabled, and all of us have something to contribute…” In the crowds behind him, I saw brown and beige and pink skinned people, children and elders, women and men, most standing, some in wheelchairs, and I believed enough to be moved.

That Tuesday reminded me of another day, back in 2004, a year before I left my yellow and green stucco house in Shirlea, Nassau, Bahamas for the neighborhoods of the Bay Area, California. I had been watching the US Democratic Convention on television and a senator from Illinois happened to be speaking. I was sitting down but by the end of his speech I was standing because I could hardly contain the excitement I felt for this man I had never before laid eyes on. His words had a feeling about them, an energy that I had not witnessed in my 35 years, except in snatches of speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, both African American visionaries and leaders who had been assassinated by the time I was born. When I heard Barack Obama speak that night I knew he was the one. I told my friends, this is the man who should be president, and when he runs, I am going to the US to vote.

I am a Greek Bahamian who was born in Coral Gables, Florida, so my promise was not an idle one. And on November 4th, 2008, with a long yellow envelope enclosing my absentee ballot in one hand, I left my apartment building at midday and walked the short way to the Lakeside Temple of Practical Christianity where our neighborhood polling station was open and ready to take our votes. As I stepped into the church hall, the full import of what I was about to do assailed me, and I began to weep. In that moment thoughts rushed in all at once: names and faces of the visionaries who had shaped my own most deeply held convictions, about justice and possibilities for change – Rev. King, Malcolm X, Mandela, and the writers whose teachings are my touch stones – Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Alice Walker, James Baldwin; Obama’s message of hope and unity a branch sprouted off that tenacious tree, ancestral roots many and deep. And too, I felt and saw the faces of friends and family, of Bahamians of African descent who have their own histories of liberation struggles, and how I am integrally connected to them, how their history has helped me to understand mine, how their lives today ask questions of me, and answer the questions I cannot answer alone; and of course I felt the hearts and saw the faces of friends here in the United States, many of them Africans in the Diaspora, from the Caribbean or Africa, and some from Boston and Brooklyn, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, and LA and Oakland and their stories were now part of my story and all this history felt deep and wet inside me so that for a split second I had to turn away from the hall, the quiet in there, the voters with their backs to me, to let the tide swell up and of its own accord fall gently away.

I showed the official my envelope. She showed me the black box and the narrow slit to push the envelope through. And on that day I voted for the first African American president of the United States of America. I was grateful to be alive then, and a witness and participant in an exquisite moment in history. I have never believed in the vote as much as I did in that moment. Nor understood how connected we are to all the moments that have brought us collectively to this one.

Later that day, as evening came and votes were being counted on the East Coast, it soon became clear that Barack Obama was going to win. And by 8:30pm that night, only half an hour after West Coast polling stations had closed, CNN had announced their projection that Obama had indeed won and could now be called President Elect Obama. And as the news spread so did voices across Oakland just outside my apartment windows. Horns were blowing, people on the streets were screaming, answering shouts echoed in hallways and in adjacent buildings. Strangers embraced as hoards left bars and community theaters and walked out into the night, wet-eyed and elated.

I have heard friends say that this moment matches in emotional intensity September 11th, but significantly rather than distrust in its aftermath, it has brought more openness. Strangers look at each other and smile tentatively, knowingly, and between them is a sense of the possibility of transformation. The possibility of transformation nationally in which they have already played a part, and if Obama’s election was the result, who knows what could happen next? The old story, with its inevitable limitations and foreseeable conclusions, just got told a different way. And for now the question most people I know seem to be asking is, should we remain hopeful, or cautious, or both?

African American scholar Cornell West, while applauding Obama on his election, cautions that while symbolism is important, Obama the man, the leader, must be held accountable particularly to African Americans and to the poor, and it is how much he is willing to risk on behalf of those suffering most in America that will be the measure of his success in the White House.

Others, including my friend and Bahamian local activist Erin Greene, have said that Obama’s election means very little as far as institutionalized racism goes, and that very little gain has been made as a result of Obama becoming the first African American to be elected president of the United States of America.

The truth is institutionalized racism is as strongly entrenched here in America now as it was before November 4th. And, ongoing social critique is crucial, but, to minimize and misname this historic moment by claiming, as Greene has, that “Obama’s victory will perpetuate confusion” regarding the existence of institutionalized racism, robs us collectively of this transformational moment, which, rather than perpetuating confusion, has already opened the way for real talk regarding, in poet Janice Mirikitani’s words, radical inclusiveness, in this country and globally.

As a white person living in this country, I have to believe that change is possible. I also have to make a distinction between vigilance and cynicism; I can be hopeful and vigilant, but cynicism generates in me profound despair. While vigilance invites me to be awake and ask questions and hold myself and others accountable, cynicism, (and not Obama’s victory), perpetuates distrust and failure to imagine anything better than what already exists.

Unlike Bill Maher, I do not want to ignore Barack Obama’s blackness. Barack Obama is the right man for the presidency of America not in spite of his race but because of it. It is because he is of African descent in a country maimed and wounded by white supremacy that he understands what is needed to heal it; his election calls on white America to live up to its own highest ideals, to live up to its own most cherished vision of freedom from which it has again and again fallen short. His election is a balm to the psyches of African American people particularly, and people of color in general, whose lives have been undervalued or not valued at all in a country where racism has consistently corrupted ideological lenses. Similarly, it is because of Obama's bi-racial and multi-ethnic location, and his interpretation of it, that he was uniquely able to rally together so many across class, race, gender, religious and even political affiliations. For people of every color and ethnicity, who have felt devalued because of class or sexual orientation, or spiritual affiliation, who do not fit with what are considered mainstream standards, Obama’s election has countered that devaluation, has replaced it with possibility: what was marginal has been brought to center in an extraordinary human drama, and so too in our psyches that which we have marginalized we can now bring to center and begin to know what it feels like to have (these parts of) ourselves be honored.

With Obama’s election to president of the United States of America, white and black and brown and red and yellow people are all called on not only to question the old story that white supremacy invented, not simply to cast it out either (since who knows where it would land and still find ways to grow), no, with Obama’s election to president we are called on to take that old story and transform it, word by word; to take its words apart and reconfigure them, revise them, bring new words to the table that can focus new light on old images, all the better to see and create new meaning. And it is in our power to do so. That is the hopefulness that Obama has invoked, symbolically and otherwise: it is in our power to make new stories. In Obama's words, "We are the change we have been waiting for." Ashé.

What is significant about Obama’s call to power is that he is asking his people to hear themselves being called too. In Obama’s own words, he did not win this election, the people who campaigned and believed and hoped and voted did. The people who decided to transform old stories into new ones did. And he reminded the people of their responsibility to carry on this powerful work of change in his victory speech:

“What began twenty-one months ago in the depths of winter must not end on this autumn night. This victory alone is not the change we seek -- it is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were. It cannot happen without you” (Chicagotribune.com).

Listen, the truth is, people, ordinary everyday people, have been telling new stories already. And Barack Obama is a visionary leader precisely because he has been able to hear those new stories and articulate them in a way that the majority of people in this country were able to hear. He is a product of those new stories, and it is his job now to act on them and bring about the changes they call for. It is the job of everyday people to imagine new stories (many of which are really marginalized stories that have been struggling to be heard for generations) and speak them in our homes, in our mosques and churches and synagogues, at work and on the streets, loud enough for the neighbors and the President to hear.