“Since there are two things in the human soul upon which all knowledge we can have of its nature depends: one is that it thinks; the other is that, united with a body, it can act and suffer together with it.”
Anton W. Amo (The Inaugural dissertation and Philosophical Disputatio)
It is widely accepted both in the West and the rest of the world that collective memory is the foundation of individuals’ identities and their history. It is the cornerstone of legislative demands, ideologies, beliefs, daily practices, and habits that are the distinctive characteristics of peoples and nations.
When collective memory is lost, self-representation, individuality, and identity can exist only as absence or as trauma and repression. The possibility of this happening is already dramatic in itself, but when it happens by design and system, through the practice of violence, it takes on the tragic connotations of contempt, hatred, and genocide.
This is what has happened to millions of Black people with the beginning of deportation from Africa to the rest of the world over the last six centuries: the African diaspora.
The documentary We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe[i] by Fred Kudjo Kuworno, an important, pioneering work in the documentary genre, tackles the thorny issue of forced removal, the narrative of Black people, and the exploitation of the debate on the presence of Black people and migrants on European soil.
How does it accomplish this?
Following the biographical tradition, the documentary works backwards, retracing and searching for the director, narrator and protagonist Fred Kuworno’s roots. It does so, in the time and space of a restored apology, of memory recovered through a framing device that focuses and highlights the centuries-old presence of Black people in Europe.
The director’s dialogic approach, as well as his imaginative intuition, come through both in the documentary’s perspective and single frames and fragments, combining the theme of the uprooting of enslaved people from their lands and their reconstitution in historically asymmetrical lacerations within foreign lands. The result is a choral and colorful collage where the space of pain is sutured into the rediscovered memory. In a type of memory that is suffocated, denied, and silenced, where Black history is capable nevertheless to glide over oblivion and impose itself on History. This outcome is not at all trivial, nor obvious, and certainly not assured. Once an identity has matured within the confines of suffering, knowing how to narrate oneself through the thaumaturgic device of art by delving in the traumatic spaces of violence suffered and perpetrated over the centuries is nothing less than a heroic act. Such act not only redefines your skin but also life and humanity as a whole, as it succeeds in escaping centuries-long omissions.
The documentary varies in register, stitching together pieces of the director’s biography, interviews with academics and activists, passing through the documents and the places of this vast history.
The documentary has a few technical flaws, such as the excessive speed of some of the credits which does not allow for ease of reading, and certain passages where the arguments the director is making are not immediately clear. Finally, there seems to be a lack of narrative resolution in answering the narrator’s initial question (either that or we are to understand that his story becomes all the forgotten memories). Despite these shortcomings, the expressive power of the documentary certainly comes through strongly.
What we discover is that history is a lie and that the narrative, like a Mercator projection map[ii] , attempts to redefine anthropological and cultural boundaries with reviled falsehoods.
Do Blacks exist?
Starting from a well-known diaspora, director Kuworno retraces the boundaries of a Black anthropology that spreads radially throughout the so-called colonialist-imperialist-supremacist West.
What strikes audiences in the narration is the number of forgotten facts, where Blacks are not only enslaved people but rather the protagonists: the painter Lazaron de Torres (with a Black adoptive father), Juan Latino (academic), Duke Alessandro De Medici (the Florentine aristocrat killed by Lorenzo), the Quilombos of Palmares (the glorious story of a large, autonomous community of fugitive slaves in Brazil), St. Benedict the Moor, etc.
The film speaks, excites, and shows important issues that are still completely open and need to be addressed with precision, so that one can finally conclude, “the subaltern has learned to speak.” Above all, it is now necessary to rewrite history from a Black perspective (and, I would add, from a women’s perspective)[iii] . With an objective sense of reality.
This is most certainly a film, a document, a story to which we shall return. In the meantime, however, Fred Kudjo Kuwornu, the director of Inside Bufalo (2010) and Blaxploitalian (2016), among others, deserves credit for having added another brick to the wall of collective and Black memory.
ENDNOTES
[i] After its first screening as a short in the Central Pavilion of the 2024, 60th Venic Arte Biennale, and subsequent screenings held in October in London, New York, and Durham, and in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro in November, the documentary was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature, (Evidence and Documents) section, of the upcoming Academy Awards. The selection will take place in February in a worldwide event, most certainly worthy of mention.
[ii] The Geographer’s errors have been considered and made public only in recent years, and rectified in 1973 thanks to the new projection by cartographer and historian Arno Peters, who, after more than four centuries later, (the Mercator projection was made in 1569), proposed a map that is faithful to reality, free of subversion and prejudice, and promoted by UNESCO.
[iii] This narration has been underway from Africa and all other diaspora locations, resulting in an enormous and multifaceted quantity of publications and events, reclaiming memory and identity.
