“Radical Powers of Metamorphosis”: On Global Black Cinema

It is nighttime. There are black-and-white shots of blurry torches, dim outlines of crowds shuffling. Against these backdrops, the 2022 film I’ll Be Back! displays five intertitles, telling the story of François Makandal:

It’s 20th January 1758

fAnd a crowd is assembled in what’s known now at Cap-Haitien

The rebel slave, Francois Mackandal, is to be burned at the stake

Mackandal is condemned not only for his crimes

But for his radical powers of metamorphosis

Makandal was an enslaved Black man, burned alive at the stake by white supremacists. He was “a maroon for eighteen years,” explains Marlene L. Daut, a man who lived “eighteen years of fugitivity.”¹ The reason? Makandal was accused by colonial officials “of having ‘corrupted’ and ‘seduced’ other enslaved individuals with ‘des paquets prétendus magiques,’ or ‘supposedly magical packets,’ which he sold with ‘malicious intent.’” “Dangerously free”—to use Toni Morrison’s phrase—Makandal as a legend is “the sign, symbol, and rhythm of rebellion in the Caribbean.” Through sound and image, I’ll Be Back! reimagines and reclaims Black global histories.

Most recently on exhibition at Bristol’s Arnolfini Gallery, I’ll Be Back! (digital, 16mm) is only 10 minutes and 54 seconds. And yet, the film—made by Manchester-born Hope Pearl Strickland—exemplifies how archives and rebellion, history and geography, might bring forth a radical futurity that builds on what Katherine McKittrick calls “existing liberatory practices.”² I’ll Be Back! was commissioned by FACT Liverpool with public funding from Arts Council England and Liverpool City Council. The film weaves and unravels global Black histories on a triple axis: the enduring legend of an enslaved individual who rebelled for 18 years in 18th-century Haiti before being murdered by white supremacists; the machinery of what Stephanie E. Smallwood calls “saltwater slavery”³ that transformed stolen African people into commodities through the Middle Passage, emblematized by schematics of the 18th-century British slave ship Brookes; and colonial violence in the British-occupied 1890s Sierra Leone obscured from, yet constitutive of, contemporary natural history archives.

The things that preoccupy Strickland’s camera formally render the intimacies of Black global history.⁴ Indeed, in interviews, Strickland refers to how Makandal’s story inspires “liberatory futures around Blackness,”⁵ offering, for her, “a passageway through into something bright and alive.”⁶ And her own film, thankfully, opens that same way for us.

That “passageway” opens as far back as the Middle Passage, when Strickland’s film turns to the Brookes slave ship, built in Liverpool in 1780–81. This vessel forms the basis of “the slave ship icon,” according to art historian Cheryl Finley. In 1788, British abolitionists commissioned a schematic drawing showing the numbers and placement of trafficked Africans crammed into the ship’s hold, with no space to stand or even sit. At the time, the image quickly became widely reproduced and associated with the legal and political fights to end chattel slavery. But in the hands of Strickland, the ship now occasions the “ritualized politics of remembering” that is “a key cultural practice of artists of the African diaspora today.”⁷

The film’s repossessing and remembering of the slave ship icon unfolds in Manchester’s Portico Library. Filmed from above, the title page is too faint to read, but the stamp of “PORTICO LIBRARY” at an angle marks the book’s⁸ current ownership. Two pairs of hands make several attempts to unfold the book’s fragile flyleaf. Taking care that the seams do not rip or crack, the hands together gently open up the page to the camera: the Brookes slave ship, its plans and sections. Voice-over narration explains what we see as we see it, the camera first mimicking the bird’s-eye view of the illustration’s perspective.

But then, Strickland’s camera begins offering extreme close ups of the figures of enslaved Africans. This focus renders each as individuals, and also as representative of millions of stolen people. As we follow the camera’s quiet, careful study, we observe, as Fred Moten reflects, that the slave ship also contains the means of its own undoing.⁹

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Strickland contrasts the unfolding of the slave ship icon—the undoing, remembering, and repossessing that it engenders—with other museum objects that have received curatorial care and attention. These are not archives of or for enslaved peoples, nor of or for their kith and kin, to evoke Ramesh Mallipeddi’s language;¹⁰ instead, Stickland showcases archives of insects. An accretion of shots of storage rooms, each empty of people but stuffed full of specimen boxes, questions the archive as a neutral space. And the historical entanglement of entomology and colonialism directly presents Strickland with the material to make that challenge explicit.

In two connected scenes, the film juxtaposes voice-over narration that perpetuates archival violence with images that teach, in Sylvia Wynter’s sense, the need for redescription.¹¹

In the first, an entomology curator matter-of-factly issues jarringly apologist statements: “during the colonial past of British Empire when people who were not necessarily involved in anything like slavery”; “nothing with slavery”; “they were doing their duty”; “officers who were sent to do their certain jobs.” As this voice intones its narrative of neutrality and the happy progress of science—purposefully forgetting the “scramble for Africa” by European nations, both violently named and violently executed¹²—we watch unidentified 16-mm archival black-and-white footage of a white man in a white suit and hat, standing on the ocean’s shore.

The second voice-over narration again reproduces racial harm, but, again, the film simultaneously introduces the means to reclaim, repurpose, and reimagine the violence of the archive: research. Again, the curator’s voice-over obfuscates the collection’s colonialist genealogy: for instance, the collector “was basically a topographer making borders and collected insects”; “we have a nice historical record of what was going on in Sierra Leone in 1891 and in 1893.” Here, again, Strickland fills the screen with successive images of research, in the process teaching viewers:

a computer screen of a Google search for “Sierra Leone”;

a computer screen of a Wikipedia search for “Sierra Leone”;

a computer screen of a Britannica.com article, “Claims of territorial boundaries,” under the heading “West Africa”;¹³

scrolling down the article;

highlighting this text in blue on the computer screen:

The political boundaries established by the Europeans by 1898 (though usually not surveyed or demarcated on the ground until much later) largely determine the political map of western Africa today.

a computer screen of the title page of a scholarly article¹⁴

highlighting this text in blue on the computer screen:

The imperialists destroyed the Sierra Leone-Guinea system: beyond establishing the boundary, they interfered with the movement of traders and broke links between people and towns.

About a century earlier, abolitionists established Sierra Leone as a British colony for freed and repatriated enslaved Africans. In the 1780s, Olukunle P. Owolabi explains, the country was settled by “black loyalists from the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, African American settlers, emancipated Afro-descendants from the British West Indies, and more than 80,000 liberated Africans that the British Royal Navy rescued from slave ships destined from the New World.”¹⁵

But then, in the 1890s, British imperial and economic ambition cut Sierra Leone in two, dividing it into a colony and a protectorate. This is the period when one “Ellis Joynson Chalmer Leech” from Manchester traveled to Sierra Leone as a Second Lieutenant in the 1st West India Regiment and later worked as an Assistant Inspector of Frontier Police (“The Frontiers”) around Freetown.¹⁶ “The Frontiers” was one of several “lightly armed paramilitary forces” in Sierra Leone supported by the British government that drew trade borders, collected taxes, and policed political borders.¹⁷ Leech was one of numerous British men who gathered a “casual record of species encountered during an overseas military posting.” Thereafter, Leech’s collection was donated to—and still resides in—the archives of the Manchester Museum.

Strickland lets the curator featured in the voice-over talk at length. And yet, as much as he protests, the film reveals that the study of insects can’t be extricated from the study of colonialism and the legacies of saltwater slavery. Even the study of insects in 17th-century microscopy confirms these intimacies.¹⁸

A different insect is taken up by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga. The tsetse fly, for Mavhunga, demonstrates how intellectual appropriation and colonialization obscure the centrality of African scientific knowledge production to 20th-century epidemiology. As he does so, Mavhunga reflects, he also “seek[s] to reclaim my own humanity through an insect—seemingly innocuous, inconspicuous, grossly underestimated, and yet. …”¹⁹

For Mavhunga as for Strickland, the study of insects can be a conduit to “reclaim my own humanity” and, as such, can animate “existing liberatory practices.” And this possibility is what leads to the film’s conclusion.

Against a dark sky lined with streams of comet-like bursts, intertitles read:

Legend has it

Right before his execution,

Mackandal transforms into a fly

Zooming above the scene of his execution

And crying out

‘I’LL BE BACK!’

Strickland’s I’ll Be Back! opens and closes with Makandal’s “radical powers of metamorphosis,” specifically the legend that circulated from the moment of his murder. Makandal, who evaded colonial control in life, now—it was said—evades colonial punishment in death, transforms into an insect, and slips away. In the process, Makandal, too, reclaims his humanity, inspiring “liberatory futures around Blackness.” Makandal’s promise to return—“I’ll Be Back!”—reverberates in the film’s final image, a cloudy, gray, daytime sky with a fly buzzing in the distance that shows us the way toward “a passageway through into something bright and alive.”