Slavery is the contrary of freedom, as the words “owned slave” mean the opposite of [a] “free man” in the Arabic language. A slave does not own his freedom, regardless of his gender, color, or race. So, who reduced the enslaved – with all of the concept’s broadness – to one race and not another, and to a specific color of all colors?
Throughout history, black people have suffered from being viewed as lower than slaves, perceived collectively as an abhorred race. Some mythological, religious, and historical narratives – collaboratively – reinforce this view, such as the affiliation with Ham, son of Noah, and his descendants acquiring this skin color after Ham disobeyed his father by passing across the line of ashes that was placed between women and men after Noah’s command to separate the two genders. Noah supplicated to Allah to blacken his son and his son’s descendants’ faces, and so Ham’s wife gave birth to a black boy whom he named Kusha. The other narration alleges that this perception originated from when Noah’s private parts were exposed during his sleep, and upon seeing his father, Ham laughed and chuckled instead of covering him up. When he saw this incident, Shem scolded his brother Ham, and when Noah learned about it, he called to God on Ham to let Canaan, son of Ham, and his descendants be black, disfigured, and enslaved to Ham’s brothers.
These two stories and others establish the concept of slavery as an inevitable result of a past sin. St. Paul systematizes this idea in the New Testament in his promise of a better life where everyone is equal after black people submit to their inevitable fate; obeying their human masters with fear and sincerity, as if their masters were Christ, and you may stand firm before these “human masters” and reference that!
Systematizing this idea on the religious level justifies what happened throughout history and perpetuates the inferiority with which black people were viewed. It explains the nonexistence of their culture nor countries in history books. Therefore, black people found themselves in complete oppressive darkness, searching for a glimmer of hope to escape their punishment for a sin they did not commit.
Seeking Salvation
Anti-slavery went through multiple stages throughout history, but the strongest stages were in the modern era, where movements to abolish slavery were formed in the second half of the 18th century in America. It is a long and difficult battle for emancipation, as noted by the Italian researcher Patricia Delpiano, but this hard battle will yield rewarding results.
Documenting the Journey
There is no doubt that America, with its cinematic revolution, contributed to documenting incidents that took place throughout this long and difficult journey, through different presentation methods and varying lenses that reflect the views of those behind them. This includes what Quentin Tarantino presented in the movie Django Unchained, for which he won the Oscar in two categories, one of which is the screenplay category, due to the story’s complex depiction of slavery through the characters of Django, played by Jamie Foxx, and Stephen, played by Samuel L. Jackson. The former seeks to save his wife from the hands of the white feudal lord, Calvin Candie, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, while the latter is Calvin’s slave. Django’s wife is only saved with the help of another white man, his journey companion Dr. King Schultz, the bounty hunter, played by the German Christoph Waltz.
The film shows the dilemma of salvation and surrender, as the slave Django seeks his own salvation first, and his wife’s salvation second, while Stephen seeks to snitch on them to his master, Candie, thereby portraying his happiness and submission, since he got promoted to work as a slave inside his master’s mansion, while his own people work and live outside!
Considering these differences between the people of the same race, there is no doubt that the journey will be long and complex, as points of view and paths to salvation vary. When Stephen accepts his status in exchange for a promotion, Django seeks salvation through a rocky road. The journey is long and difficult, full of bumps and disappointment. It requires a lot of sacrifices.
Role Reversal
Part of the journey is depicted in the film Green Book by the white director Peter Farrelly, starring the white actor Viggo Mortensen as the Italian Tony Lip and the black actor Mahershala Ali as the musician Dr. Donald Shirley.
This film is based on a true story in which the image of slavery is presented from a different angle. Tony Lip is a poor Italian who works as a bouncer at the Coppa Cabana nightclub in New York in 1962. When Tony is laid off from his job, he seeks to find a new opportunity. And then the surprises begin to unravel!
The film depicts Tony Lip as a racist Italian who is disgusted by black people, to the point of throwing away the two cups from which two black workers brought by his wife to fix the kitchen drank from. So how could he accept working for a black man, and be forced to accompany him on a long, difficult, and arduous journey?
Tony Lip’s disgust stems from his family, as he once woke up to them protecting his house during his sleep from the black men working in the kitchen!
Racism and disgust appear throughout the dialogue in Italian, a language not understood by the black characters. Tony Lip describes these black men as eggplants, for example, and he listens to his (elderly) father-in-law as he warns him not to sleep peacefully while these “blacks” are in his house where his daughter lives!
This disgust results from superficial differences, and they cannot be eliminated except by rapprochement, which would not happen as long as there is a distance between the parties. Therefore, the film reverses the stereotypical roles when Tony Lip finds an opportunity to work as a driver and a bodyguard for the black man Dr. Donald Shirley – who lives in a luxurious house, drives a luxurious car, and has multiple servants – as he tours South America, using a green book that shows them the accommodation available to Dr. Shirley in racist areas that restrict the access of black people. On this tour, the tension begins to dissolve little by little when Tony Lip gets closer to Dr. Shirley. If hatred, which is a stage beyond disgust, increases, as Spinoza says, whenever it is met with counter-hatred; then there is no way but to seek a dissolvent for hatred, and there is nothing stronger than love that can act as that. The disgust will inevitably be replaced with rapprochement and understanding, which can only occur with an experience such as Lip and Shirley’s journey. The film therefore created a grey area, allowing the two people to recognize each other as human.
Green
The film bears the color “green” in its title, referring to the green book that protects Dr. Shirley from any racist attacks (or as a euphemism for white rejection). The color green has always been used to symbolize black people. For instance, in Arab culture, the color green represents a way to counteract the connotations of whiteness by emphasizing blackness instead. This is seen in al-Lahabi’s verse:
I am green-skinned (olive-skinned), as people know me, a green-skinned man descended from the Arabs.
Novelist Mahmoud Trawri used the color green to represent the black issue in his second novel (Green, O Oud Al-Qana). Therefore, “green” is an appropriate expression, gentler than “black” and avoids its stereotypical connotations of sin, pessimism, and evil, in contrast to white, which connotes light and goodness.
While this title only appears for a glimpse, its impact remains from the beginning of the film, when Shirley was absent and Lip was prominent, to foreshadow his later acceptance to the long and difficult journey with his personal feelings, and his later relationship with a member of the black community, with the same people he once treated with disgust. Lip, who stole a green jade stone, is used to going through the trials and tribulations of earning a living, he saves his cigarettes whenever he can borrow one from someone else, he does not mind eating 26 burgers in one sitting to defeat a fat person in a competition and earn 50 dollars! Lip does all of this with visible pleasure, not suffering.
Pleasure
Tony Lip lives a financially unstable life, but he makes everything around him a means of earning money and having fun at the same time. He appears as a fraudster who makes a living by deception without harming anyone. For example, when he hides a hat and then returns it to its owner the next day, this earns him favor with the hat’s owner. When he steals a jade stone and his friend Shirley notices, Shirley orders him to return it, which takes away the sense of pleasure Tony derived from the act. Therefore, he tells him that he did not steal it, but rather found it on the ground. Shirley orders him to return it anyway, and he then tricked him into thinking that he did it. When Shirley offers to buy it for him, Tony tells him not to bother, since by ordering him to return it he stripped the experience of the pleasure.
What can be captured from the film is this degree of clinging to pleasure that Tony has yet Shirley doesn’t. While finding joy in the darkness is a characteristic of black people who coexist with horrible tragedies by shaking off their worry and expressing their distress through music, Shirley lacks this characteristic as a black person. He refuses to play anything but a specific type of piano (Steinway), which shocks people, as “Negroes” play anything in front of them! He must drink Scotch Cutty Sark whiskey every evening without change, when blacks are not supposed to do so in the eyes of white people. Shirley, with his black skin and white mannerisms, continues to follow the same pattern every day of playing, drinking, and staying up late!
Forgery
In a letter Lip wrote to his wife, he stated that he prefers Shirley’s music over the famous white American musician Valentino Liberace. Lip did not struggle with acknowledging black musicians who are distinguished by their music. Moreover, Tony Lip often appears wearing black people’s street style, while Shirley is the opposite.
Tony Lip shows a chaotic nature in his eating and behavior. He loves KFC and crispy chicken, yet when he tries to offer Shirley a piece, mentioning that he knows black people love this type of food, Shirley states that he has never tried it before, and he responds to Lip by saying: “You have a very narrow assessment of me, Tony”, which is by looking at his skin color, and grouping him without considering his upbringing, elegance, and what he eats, drinks, and plays.
Shirley does not know black artists and their music, such as: Aretha Franklin, Chubby Checker, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, and here the roles are reversed, or in other words, the colors are falsely reversed, as Gilles Deleuze notes in his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image that films must be produced without considering that the past is necessarily real. False truths have no limits and are influential in any film. Therefore, we can say that the viewer of Green Book sees the role reversal in a film adapted from a true story without the option to verify the amount of truth and falsity, as Lip appears absurd and eats in a messy way that incites disgust in Shirley, until Shirley goes along with him, and the absurdity continues. Together, they throw the leftover food out the window to be eaten by animals and insects, but when Lip throws a paper cup, Shirley scolds him, as no one would eat it off the road and it would not decompose, so he commands him to return and pick it up.
Lip has a justification for everything, he even believes that it is possible for squirrels to eat the cup. For Lip, pleasure comes from the heat of the moment, which is why he eats every meal, according to his father’s advice, as if it was his last, and why he obtains money by deception, even though Shirley was able to give it to him if he asked! However, he finds receiving money through shady ways more enjoyable, unlike Shirley, who exploded in a moment of anger in front of Tony:
“If I’m not black enough, and if I’m not white enough, and if I’m not man enough, then tell me, Tony, what am I?!”
This situation reminds us of the crow that forgot how to talk while trying to imitate the dove’s walk! This is what happens when you are placed in a gray space, viewed by others as victory. While in reality, you are rejected by all parties. Shirley, in Lip’s eyes, does not know the black culture to which he belongs, because he sees his greatness when he plays for the wealthy whites. This is what overturns the stereotype that the viewer understands without words.
In his book The Image, Jacques Aumont talks about the power of the silent image to express the profundity of the moment. This can be seen in a single frame of the film when their car broke down next to a field where black people were working. While Tony was repairing it, Shirley watched, in a strange scene to the point of confusion, expressive without words. The looks exchanged between the elegant black Shirley and the hard-working black field workers were enough!
Victory
Not all battles end in pure victory, but they are victorious still to some extent. Such as Shirley’s insistence on going up on stage and starting to play white people’s music, after he was previously beaten up and sent down the stage defeated. He embarks today on his tour, certain that he will overcome any trouble he faces with the wealth he possesses.
Shirley is never satisfied with his achievements. Rather, he strives to achieve a goal that he sees alone, which Tony does not understand. Shirley was the one who imposed himself on white people, despite being an outcast!
He realizes that he is different. He is white on the stage, a “Negro” when he comes down, an outcast from the whites, and an outcast from his own people. But he is certain that he is victorious every day when he plays, and this is a victory that Tony does not recognize. He wonders at how Shirley can shake hands with these arrogant white people while smiling!
The musician who accompanies Shirley replies:
“Because it takes courage to change people’s hearts!”
Shirley possesses the courage to break into spaces forbidden to people like him, to stand on white people stages with their consent. It was not easy to rise to this position, and then go out as if he was nothing. It was not easy to be allowed to sing for them without dining with them. All of this deepens the pain that Shirley is experiencing, who is defeated from the inside, even if he appears to be put together on the outside. It is a battle that he fights alone, full of wounds, and he finds nothing to heal his wounds except the company of Tony on this long and difficult journey, benefiting from Tony’s advice:
“Anyone can sound like Beethoven. But your music, what you do—only you can do that.” It started with his improvised playing in a black people’s bar, after the black waitress challenged him by pointing to the cheap piano at the corner; this would mark his return to his people, to play his first piece voluntarily, then with the rest of the black musicians, slowly achieving harmony. He found real joy in playing while standing up, reaching the climax, his heart dancing with joy as the crowd danced, without anyone to reject him. But the bleak image remains hanging, with black people lurking behind his car, waiting for the rich man to emerge, so Tony takes out his gun, violating Shirley’s condition to not carry any weapons, forcing the thieves to flee.
Tony also emerged victorious, just like Shirley, but he did it by always violating the rules, and by open fraud when he sent his wife letters that Shirley helped him write. He is not good at writing, but he succeeds in fulfilling his wife’s desire to receive written letters from him, although she is aware of his inability to write. This is a victory for someone who realizes for certain that her husband will not be able to achieve this goal, but she did not care and focused on the bigger picture, which is his tireless attempts. Finally, Shirley attends the New Year’s party at their house, and Tony’s wife gives him a warm welcome.
This is the type of victory Shirley talked about when he was angry in the rain:
“You never win with violence, Tony. You only win when you maintain your dignity.”
The First Step
Tony Lip advised Dr. Shirley to take the first step that would dissipate the loneliness he was living in, and he was afraid to take it. One of Tony’s virtues was always taking the first step, he was always the one who took the initiative. He told Shirley that he was not too sensitive to work for a black person, and he immediately remembered the incident in which he threw away the two cups. He fabricated the story and told Shirley that him and his wife had drinks not so long ago with two black men.
This is where Tony takes a step back, beginning with a fabrication, and followed by a long tour that ends with a drink with Shirley and his wife, so that his fabricated story becomes true.
We finally see the jade stone in Shirley’s palm. This is the moment that the whole world is waiting for after the long difficult journey, but it is far from reality, as there is no way to gather the whole world in a car in which they can get closer to one another.
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