Content area
Full text
The Language You Cry In: The Story of a Mende Song. 1998. 52 minutes, color. A video by Alvaro Toepke and Angel Serrano. In English and Mende with English subtitles. For more information contact California Newsreel, 149 Ninth Street/420, San Francisco, CA 94103.
MARILYN M. THOMAS-HOUSTON
University of South Carolina
The search by three scholars for the African roots of a song sung by a Gullah woman, Amelia Dawley, in 1932 has the makings of an exciting scholarly adventure. The Language You Cry In weaves a story around the search for the origins of this song and ends with a "coming home" celebration held for Amelia's descendants in Sierra Leone, West Africa. The film is loosely based on the 1989 research efforts of an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and linguist who trace cultural connections between Sierra Leone and coastal Georgia, U.S. Produced by a young documentary team from Spain who joined the project of ter the research was completed, this made-for-television documentary celebrates those connections through the use of archival footage, photographs, reenactments, interviews, sound effects, and narration, and weaves a mythical story of the roots of the song.
The story opens with a powerfully suggestive visual image, the beginning of an eclipse, as sound effects, complementary to the intended mood set by the visual, and the strong authoritative voice of a female narrator move the audience back in time:
Africa. Eighteenth century. A young woman is snatched from her village by slave traders. Forced apart forever from her mother, her motherland, her language, her identity. This is the non-history of millions of African American women and men-a wall of silence, a mysterious past that memory fights to preserve from the onslaught of time but which [sound effects abruptly stop] ends up shrouded in darkness. [A quick fade to black.]
Continuing this highly dramatic and somewhat fictive expository style, the filmmakers construct (through the impressive narrative voice and often on-screen presence of Vertamae Grosvenor) the role slavery played in stripping away the identity of the enslaved Africans and their...