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July 15, 2007

To struggle and fight and rebuild

An Interview with Walidah Imarisha

By Andrew

"The situation down here is real," says Walidah Imarisha in her documentary film Finding Common Ground in New Orleans. "Just seeing the trees bent sideways; seeing the roofs missing tiles, big holes in them..." She's describing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast, but she might as well be describing the mainstream news coverage of the disaster: reporting bent sideways to serve corporate media interests; big holes in stories where the struggles of working-class people -- and working-class black people in particular -- ought to be.

Unlike a big media news reporter, Imarisha arrived in New Orleans without the intention of selling other peoples' stories. She came to assist in grassroots relief and reconstruction work, but was so struck by the immediacy of the events -- the pain and loss, but also the struggle and perseverance -- that she knew she would leave with stories needing to be shared. "You watch it on the news," she explains in the film, "but... we wished we could just bottle it up and open it for folks."

In the past several months, Imarisha has been doing her best to make that wish come true, touring the film nationwide to undermine rampant media misrepresentations and spark discussions about post-Katrina social justice organizing. So far the film's been screened at over a dozen events and festivals, and garnered the Director’s Choice Award at the 2006 Black Maria Film Festival.

The following interview was originally conducted for a forthcoming article on anarchist video production, and so the questions are slanted towards media-making and anarchism. Imarisha's answers, however, go beyond those narrow topics, touching on how her Finding Common Ground came to be, why it had to be a film, and the everyday mutual aid and struggle that made the film -- and the collective efforts it documents -- possible.

How have you been involved with video-related media?

Finding Common Ground in New Orleans is the first film that I have made. I have done camera work for public access shows and a couple other film projects before, but this was my first project of my own. I didn’t even intend to make a documentary at first. I was going down to New Orleans to volunteer, largely because my compa (who helped organize the regional Anarchist People of Color Conference held in Asheville, NC in 2005) Suncere Shakur had gone down a few days after Katrina hit, and stayed and was sending reports about the realities down there, how we weren’t getting the real truth, and how they needed volunteers, especially people of color who had an analysis. I ended up booking a flight down there about 2 weeks after Rita hit, and my co-producer/editor on the film gave me his camera and said, “Why don’t you do some shooting and see what you come back with?” I didn’t think I would use it a lot, figured I would be too busy doing work. I also didn’t want to be voyeuristic about people’s tragedy and pain, and stick a camera in someone’s face saying, “Tell me about the worst thing that’s probably ever happened to you.” But after being down there and seeing the devastation, the brutality, the neglect, the oppression and the opportunism, I realized that I needed to find a way to bring this back, that words were not going to be enough. I ended up shooting 11 hours of footage, and this is the result.

What are/were the objectives of your work with video?

As I said, I didn’t initially intend to make a film when I went down, so a lot of the shots that I got were luck of the draw. It is what I came across, the situations that came to me or that I was able to seek out. If I had planned ahead of time, I would have created a much more comprehensive overview of the situation, but this is more part of my personal journey down there, because that’s all I felt equipped and qualified to make. But once I came back and we started editing and putting information together, I had two goals. One was to show people the realities of what was going on, that are so very different than what the media was showing. You didn’t hear a lot about Houma, a largely indigenous area that was horribly neglected two hours outside of New Orleans. You weren’t hearing a lot about rural locations. You weren’t hearing about the criminal justice system, the fact that they made the Greyhound/Amtrak station into a jail dubbed “Camp Amtrak,” or that they were arrested people for small infractions of the law (speeding violations, curfew, public intoxication), and getting them to plead guilty and using their community service hours to get free labor to clean up New Orleans. These are the stories I wanted to bring back.

But most importantly, I wanted to do a reframing of the issues. I think that media is incredibly powerful, because it shapes what information we get, and how we process an issue and therefore how we think about it. I knew I wasn’t equipped to tell people’s stories or show the entirety of what happened. So I wanted to add to a radical reframing of two issues specifically: one, that this was not just a case of governmental neglect or oversight, that this was not a natural disaster compounded by ineptitude. The president was briefed that the levees would break days before the storm hit, and did nothing. The governor, the state officials, the city officials and the mayor all knew ahead of time that it was coming. This was a man-made disaster, with the vast majority of the devastation in New Orleans happening not because of the storm but from the flooding when the levees broke. And that rather than being seen as a national tragedy, for many corporations and investment companies, this is being seen as a huge boon, to buy up this land cheap and rebuilt New Orleans as a sort of McDisney/Mardi Gras land.

The second reframing is to show the people down there, mostly black working class folks, not as helpless victims but as folks who did and are organizing themselves for their own survival and growth. The media portrayed everyone down there as either savage animals killing and looting indiscriminately, or as crying black faces begging for someone to come save them. But through stories like the Soul Patrol, I learned of brothas in the seventh ward who went and got boats and saved a thousand people, because no one else was doing it. I wanted to show the power of the people involved, because folks are still continuing to struggle and fight and rebuild New Orleans in a way that is sustainable and healthy and nurtures life, and that is the example, the strength in the face of the worst hell you have ever seen, that inspires me and makes me continue to move forward. And that is the example that is also very frightening to this system, because if people recognize their own power, they also recognize they can change this world.

What advantages does video have, as a medium, for your objectives? What disadvantages?

I have been a poet for over 10 years, so I am used to dealing with words. It was challenging for me to move to images, to let images convey when I am used to writing about it. I am featured in the film, not because I think I did such an amazing job as an interviewee in my self interviews, but because there were things I wanted explicitly spelled out, so there would not be any subtlety lost.

On the other hand, seeing the reaction of people to the film is so much more powerful in many ways than to poetry, to words. Having them see the conditions in Camp Amtrak, people sleeping on concrete floors in the sweltering heat, has more impact than me telling them about it. And there is no way I can convey the emotional pain of seeing your loved ones’ casket unearthed from the ground, as happened in Houma, and which I filmed.

There are times, I have learned, when words fail you, when there is no way to put into expression the pain and the loss that your eyes are taking in. Breath balks at the enormity of the task. This is the beauty of film.

How do anarchist ideas inform your work with video? Is your work explicitly anarchist? Why or why not?

Well that’s a huge debate huh as to what is explicitly anarchist... I guess I’ll be an anarchist and just answer it from my viewpoint then… I think the way that I made the film was pretty anarchist. It was a project of mutual aid, from my borrowed camera, to the folks whose donations I brought down with me for Common Ground, to sleeping in a tent and sharing communal food while I was there, to the distribution of it, folks just setting up screenings and sharing it with one another.

I think, if I had planned it out, I would have liked to talk to folks more about their vision for a new New Orleans, a new gulf region, a new world. For me, anarchism is about a new reality, about building it in the here and now. But I do think showing oppressed peoples organizing themselves organically, doing what needed to be done to support one another, is revolutionary, and anarchistic. And more important than both of those labels, deeply human.

What work by others has influenced your work in video?

As I said, this is my first film (but hopefully not my last. I’ve been really touched and moved by the power of film, and have tons of ideas for more docs in the future). But I’m really moved by other film-making coming out of and about New Orleans. Mary Beth Black and the New Orleans Film Collective have done a number of powerful films. Danya Abt's Food, Water, Revolution (I’m actually going on tour next week with my film and Danya’s on the west coast), about the Iraq Vets Against the War’s march in support of the gulf coast in 2006 moved me so immensely, and makes a deep connection between the war and Katrina. And Ashely Hunt’s You Won’t Break My Back and I’m Not Gonna Drown On Your Levee, about criminal justice issues during and post-Katrina, was incredibly insightful and a powerful piece of investigative film-making. There are so many more, shorts and experimental pieces, out there about what happened in the gulf region, linking it up with the other important issues that are all interconnected.

In what ways have people been able to view your work? How have you distributed it?

There is a seven minute version of my film at www.myspace.com/channelzeromedia (The full length is 24 minutes). I also put up different screenings and events there. I have distribution through Third World Newsreel, and I also sell the film too, you can send an email to channelzeromedia [at] gmail.com for more info. Lastly, I’m always down and willing to come out and do screenings and dialogues/building sessions, try to figure out what to do about this and how to continuing building and being the world we want to see.

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