This is the last article you can read this month
You can read more article this month
You can read more articles this month
Sorry your limit is up for this month
Reset on:
Please help support the Morning Star by subscribing here
Abigail Yartey (AY): Becoming Black explores issues around identity, social norms and family ties. What inspired you to make this documentary?
Ines Johnson-Spain (IJS): Originally I was working on another film about my grandfather who fought against the French colonial powers in Dahomey, now Benin. The plan was that I would be in the film.
With Becoming Black I wanted to use the documentary format to put myself in the double position of the director and the main protagonist to be simultaneously on the inside and outside of the narrative.
AY: In what sense were you looking at yourself?
IJS: As the filmmaker I felt the necessity to contextualise the personal story and not get lost in this emotional side of things.
AY: Can you tell me about your reaction when you went to Africa for the first time?
IJS: As you can imagine, after having had no contact with my biological father for 28 years I arrived in the country and on the first day found my family who welcomed me so warmly. It was overwhelming because I wasn’t used to it.
AY: Tell me about your experience of being black and a woman to white parents in East Berlin?
IJS: It was never a topic, it was never spoken about. My experience as a child was that people would notice it but not talk about it.
Children would comment that I didn’t belong. The adults were different, they never spoke to me about it. I felt that I’m not right, but it wasn’t a subject of conversation. It was very difficult for me as a child to understand such attitudes.
AY: Your documentary explores the traumas people of colour have experienced as a result of a colonialism. Has anything been changing for the better?
IJS: It’s not just a question of East Germany, it is a wider German problem and also a problem in the West.
Germany, France and Great Britain try to avoid facing up to their colonial past, and assuming responsibility for what has happened.
An argument that “yeah there’s racism, because people don’t know other cultures,” was often used in the GDR, but the underlaying problems are much older dating back to the colonial past. So it’s really about Germany wanting to face its responsibility as former colonisers.
