Green Border, which is showing until Thursday in NYC, is my idea of counterprogramming to the RNC. You won’t get out of the flic without tears, but it’s not for goodies only. While the movie leaves the implication that human beings may be “cured by altruism” (per Stanley Corngold’s First review), it also implies that such cures are not matters of opinion. What’s “good for body and soul” is “to risk your well-being in caring for others.”
One Brit critic had caveats and I’ll allow Green Border might not be a work of art that will work a century from now. Director Agnieszka Holland hasn’t come up with a genius metaphor for Fortress Europa. (There’s no cinematic equivalent to the hi-tech marijuana factory run by gangsters in the Dardennes’ immigration saga, Tori and Lokita.) But right here, right now — as I flash on the charmer Nur (a Syrian boy who drowns in a Polish swamp) — Holland’s humanism without borders is undeniable.
What follows is the soulful song that soundtracks a minute of joy in Green Border. A couple Polish teenagers nod their heads with three African refugees who rap along to Youssoupha’s testament…
“Mourir mille fois” is the final track on Youssoupha’s CD NGRTD (2015) — short for Negritude. Youssoupha is a natural-born African humanist. (His late father was the great Congolese singer and band leader, Tabu Ley Rochereau.) Youssoupha glossed his own song in a 2015 interview…
The one that touches me the most is “Die a Thousand Times.” The title of the song is borrowed from Oxmo Puccino because it describes the situation perfectly. When I went to my father’s funeral in Kinshasa [Democratic Republic of Congo], I realized that I had lost my father, and before him my mother, my grandmother, many of my aunts and quite a few friends in Cergy-Pontoise [Val-d’Oise]. I’ve lost a lot of people, but life goes on. For the first time, I feel like I’ve found the words to say that we die every time we lose loved ones, but that we always stay alive, that life goes on. Even though sometimes it’s hard, we always get through it. It’s a paradoxical feeling.
Blues people will grasp his double truths.
And Africans will identify with Youssoupha’s imperatives too. You can watch him dance with people on the street in videos set in the Congo and South Africa, which remind me of a summative line from an essential ethnography of African societies in transition: “life may be hard, but it’s still swell.”
Youssoupha is a race man (and a Muslim) but he’s also a universal souljah. And there’s nothing namby-pamby about his clarities. Back in 2015, in the moment of Charlie Hebdo, he mused…
It is too easy for Muslims to be indignant for Muslims, Jews for Jews and Christians for Christians. And it would be good for the “Charlie” to talk with the “not Charlie”, for them to try to understand each other, to discuss to get closer. But that’s not the state of mind at the moment.
Is it ever?
Parochial fucks will always be with us. We’ll beat our America Firsters like a drum some one of these days (and then we’ll have to do it all over again)!