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player ready...Where Steven Spielberg and actor Djimon Hounsou failed, Hounsou, director Guy Deslauriers and novelist Walter Mosley have succeeded.
They have managed in a 1-hour-and-20-minute film to make real and comprehensible the full horror and soul-robbing degradation of the holocaust known to history by the simple, innocuous words, “Middle Passage.”
Making its premiere
The film “Middle Passage” was directed by Deslauriers, a documentary-maker from the Caribbean island of Martinique; narrated by Hounsou, the Oscar-nominated actor who starred as the slave leader Cinque in Spielberg’s movie “Amistad”; and adapted for American audiences from the original French text by Mosley, better known as the author of the Easy Rawlins mysteries. It premieres on the HBO cable network at 8:05 p.m. Saturday.
Middle Passage refers to the second leg of the triangular course followed by many sailing ships voyaging from Europe to the West Coast of Africa, and then to the Americas, and then back to Europe.
On this middle leg, their cargoes were human beings — Africans dragged from their homes and sent to plantations in the Caribbean and the American South to be transformed into beasts of burden. If they survived.
Horrifying voyage
“Although there is no way to compute exactly how many people perished,” wrote historian John Henrick Clarke, “it has been estimated that between 30 and 60 million Africans were subjected to this horrendous triangular trade system and that only one-third, if that, of those people survived.”
Spielberg wanted to make a movie about the black holocaust. The result was 1997’s “Amistad,” the story of an actual 1839 shipboard slave revolt in which the slaves ended up in an American court and former President John Quincy Adams successfully aided their defense.
Despite magnificent performances by Hounsou and Anthony Hopkins, who played Adams, the movie proved a dreary failure, largely because Spielberg more or less began it with the slaves’ arrest.
“Middle Passage” takes us on an entire sun-drenched horrifying voyage, which in actual history often lasted four months.
Sunlight does dance on the sea, as it did in the days of slavery. But down in the holds, where human beings are chained and stacked on shelves like produce, it’s a world of sweat and stench; vomit and human filth; rats and pain and bleeding; exhaustion, sickness, fear and rage.
“It’s a beautiful, powerful film,” said Mosley, who now lives and writes in New York and is at work on another Rawlins mystery due out in July.
“My job was to give that power an American voice. I found I related to these people. This is what I was.”
Hounsou had a similar response.
“It’s my history, my ancestors, my culture,” he said. “I am learning about my ancestors, understanding what they had to endure. It’s to honor all that has gone before and leave something for those that come after me.”
Hounsou speaks the words of an unnamed slave. Flashback images show us the world he was torn from when captured by his fellow Africans and taken to the coast to be sold to the slave traders.
“It doesn’t flinch from the Africans’ role in slavery,” Mosley said.
No future for the captured
Aboard ship, in a voice at times laconic, at times fiercely angry, Hounsou’s slave tells us of women and children routinely raped by the sailors. He relates a world and daily life in which the sick and the malcontent are routinely thrown overboard.
“First the dying,” he says. “Then the sick, then the weak, then anyone else.”
But in time the healthy and the strong rebel — so that they may flee the chains and the hold and throw themselves overboard, so they may escape the horror and their spirits may join their ancestors.
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“There is no future for us but the horizon of the present,” says Hounsou’s slave.
“[In the hold] I am alone and friendless, without ancestors, without totems, without a home.”
“There is one important difference between the Jewish holocaust and this one,” said Mosley.
“The Jews clung tightly to their culture and kept it alive. Those centuries of slavery destroyed the Africans’ culture. It’s gone. It’s dead history. We have had to create a new one in its place.”
But the victims of both holocausts had one burning attribute in common.
As Hounsou’s slave says, to those who have enslaved him, as he seeks the freedom of drowning:
“In these bodies, who have no shroud but the sea, is a fearsome engine that will haunt you and your descendants, for eternity.”