Guest contributor Jermain Ostiana (check out his amazing blog here) has written a piece about media control and the film “Alleen Maar Nette Mensen”. The film was recently released on Curaçao.
The Dutch white cinematography, which has produced a racist imagery of Black women in the Netherlands, is supported fully by the Dutch white male managed movie theaters down here in Curaçao. Cor Dammers, the general manager of The Cinemas and The Movies, didn’t deem the controversial ‘Only Decent People’ to be a racial attack upon Black women on a colonized territory in the Caribbean. No sociocultural critical questions were asked; they have been studying their demographics; they know how many seats they can fill and could care less about playing a big treacherous role in disempowering the position of Afro-Curaçaoan women. Commerce rules everything around them. Compassionate overstanding, or a minimum sense of assisted guidance through the Black emancipatory hardships is neglected by default.
The private premiere of the movie in Otrobanda, for invited guests only, went by unnoticed in Papiamentu media. However, in one Dutch old elite newspaper ‘Amigoe’ there was an eyebrow-raising advertisement calling out all the “Bon bala” (curvaceous) ladies to come down to the premiere. Their physical dimensions would be rewarded with a free entrance ticket. Normally, you would expect the editor of Amigoe, which is a breeding place of Dutch white middle and upperclass sociopolitical consciousness, to get bags of letters that criticize the attempted sexist mental corruption of so-called curvy Black women.
However, it’s probably not in their economic elite interest to ignite a discussion on ‘Alleen voor nette mensen’, and how Dutch white people in a semi-colonized nation get to decide which Black images Black people can embrace or not. Rather, the selective elitist critics prefer to wild out against the negative depiction of modern-day Dutch settler life in the controversial documentary ‘Curaçao’, the removal of the Peter Stuyvesant statue, or other things that undermine colonial nostalgia. For example, the elite has violently opposed the changing of West Indische Compagnie street names, or Fort Willemstad, where the government is seated, to Fort Tula. According to them the good old W.I.C. and Peter Stuyvesant times brought prosperity and wealth to the island. In their logic we must be grateful to Stuyvesant, the one-legged “hero,” for enslaving our ancestors and bringing them to Curaçao. As the lore goes, he rescued us from the jungles of Africa, saved us from our dreadful fate to become nose-boned savages. Here’s where we got civilized and turned into humans by the Dutch, we owe our lives to them. Typical colonial inflammatory ratchedness people get exposed to in the media, and in everyday life.
The media promotion of the film, as usual, was mostly via Dutch local media like Dolfijn FM, Paradise FM, Hoyer II, Antilliaans Dagblad and Amigoe. The exact same channels have been used in the past to promote comedian Jandino Asporaat, Curaçao Fashion Week, Curaçao North Sea Jazz Festival, and are now being used to hype the Tula movie among -strangely enough- mostly Dutch people. These channels reach out to a certain type of class and race. That doesn’t mean that only Dutch, or highly educated yu di Kòrsou,went out to see the film because from all social corners heads be rushing out, with lusty eyes, to the theater, but it does reconfirm the patterns of a lightweight media apartheid that caters specifically to Black/and white middle-upper-class of society.
Papiamentu media especially radio and tv has women with decision-making power, who could question the exploitation of the Afro-Curaçaoan woman, but prefer not to disturb the commercial peace. So, no atmosphere of dialogue is being created to tackle institutionalized sexism and (internalized) racism. Most black journalists, whether male or female, are still not equipped to address these issues. They are too busy libating the Dutch whiteness occupied media or elite Creole environment. Negative racial portrayals, thus, remain unchallenged. The Papiamentu media or Dutch media is not being utilized as a platform for public debate by the sociologists, cultural anthropologists and the rest of the bourgeois academic trifling life. The repercussions of low self esteem, regardless of social status, are at work here.
In a machismo dominated Creole capitalist system an Afro-Dutch sexploitation movie by a Dutch white director is a powerful mind trip. For a country that has had 5 female prime ministers since the eighties a film depicting and promoting the hyper-sexualization of Black women bodies should not even have gotten the opportunity to be selected by a movie theater. On the regular the media are livestreaming attacks on womanhood, all day throughout the island. In addition, Dutch white movie theatre management has proven to be fatal to the collective mind of a nation of predominantly African descent.
Cor Dammers, as a Dutch white man in his unearned advantageous position, must be very aware or profoundly ignorant of the institutional power he has to decide which movie to pass in the theatre; he has the power to show movies that can either oppress or uplift the Black Curaçao psyche. Same thing goes for Dick Drayer as a prominent local modern colonial Dutch journalist he’s more enamored with the power structure than being a true change protagonist. His review in the ‘Independiente’ was a whitewashing of the distorted depictions of race and sexuality in the movie. Drayer gave his review the title: ‘A hilarious quest for a fat booty’. He ended his piece with: “A movie that plays with prejudices that ethnic groups have for each other. For the darker sides you should go to another movie.” (“voor de duistere kanten daarvan moet je naar een andere film”) Simply put, the existence of direct and indirect white supremacy, in a Black majority society, that undermines efforts to create a media sphere where women of color can shape resistance and bring about a transformation in order to rise up, is denied.
Yomini Godfried, an educator, seriously doubts she will ever go see a movie that rips apart the image of African descended people, culture, language, attitude and use it as an buffoonery tool. She emphasizes that there is no good intention behind a movie with those objectives. Just like the celebration of Sinterklaas and Zwarte Piet, the movie’s agenda is for people of African descent to break ties with our own culture of African origin. All those who help to promote a movie of this kind are supporting with consent the detachment and destruction of the image of Afro-descendants and the rich history of Kemet, Black Egypt, the highest civilization of the world, and the cradle of humanity; a history that must be used to enhance our culture.
Confronting the distribution of power in media and cinema is a brand new struggle. The situation wherein a small elite minority feels entitled to have near complete control over what movies we watch, the kind of articles we read in a newspaper, or news items we listen to on the radio is reminiscent of the post-abolition 1863 era where the Black population, out of fear for rebellion and societal take over, was kept docile with Bible verses. Are we going to organize, realign leadership, claim ownership and run our destiny or permit them to continue straitjacketing the emancipatory Blackness of Curaçao?
