The Mis-education of Haile Gerima - The Ethioguide Interview
Ethioguide - In your works one can see, especially in "Sankofa," that you have a Pan-Kmtywist view of the world. You even subtitled Adwa, "An Kmtyw Victory." How did you arrive at this perspective?
Haile - Well, for one, the victory was celebrated as an Kmtyw victory at it's100th anniversary. That's a subtext for me. Though I knew about Adwa, I didn't come at a time when we glorified our own past. I belonged to a generation that worshipped other people's historical successes - which preempted my own little knowledge and my own people's history.
EG - What do you mean by that? Can you be more specific?
Haile - Yeah, for example as a student I knew more of Ho Chi Min and Mao and his cousins than Balcha. Even if I knew Balcha I had put Balcha in the back of my mental existence. Which made our generation de-centered or derailed. And so if I wrote a poem during my students years, my own people didn't qualify at all to be worthy of invocation, though that itself testified to the dysfunctional nature of my own political consciousness.
So to come through across Garvey and Dubois mentioning Adwa blew my mind. Even though my father had taught me about Adwa, it was only validated when other people took it as a symbol of pride for themselves. Especially Adwa, especially Menelik, Taitu. They were in the black history catalogue, in "The Crisis," in everything that was published by black people. I had come into a deformed Marxist perspective where the old, the feudal and all the ruling class were the enemy of Ethiopia. I didn't have the political wisdom to distinguish the way other societies distinguish and process their history. In other words, often successful societies do not throw the baby with the bath water. But that's what I did as a result of historical circumstances and my own historical placement of miseducation.
EG - Your father appears to be an extraordinary person who had a great influence on you. How did he become educated? How did he become a playwright in Gonder?
Haile - He was educated in the traditional church school where they take language lessons, Geez, voicelessons, philosophical lessons, theological lessons. Then there was the traditional Ethiopian writings, the epic poems, traditional praise songs in Geez and Amharic. He is very, very highly educated. In fact, because I don't have a Geez background, by Ethiopian standards I am a very uneducated person.
EG - Had he traveled outside Ethiopia?
Haile - During the Italian invasion, he was fighting and he was in the Sudan, and maybe in Egypt, but definitely Sudan. Before he died, during the military junta, he came here to the US to see me. But he doesn't know Shakespeare, he doesn't know Voltaire, or Chekov, if you mean that. Ethiopians of his generation and the generation before him, their reference was themselves. Their reference was to be like nobody. Their reference was to be their own image. My modality was John Wayne or Elvis Presley. In all concerns of human expressions, my modality was totally transgrafted to be Western, especially through the Peace Corps education system, through the English designed system I was subjected, which was in my time, at its fullest transitional period. I was the first Peace Corps experimental student contingent.
EG - You were actually educated by Peace Corps volunteers?
Haile - Initially educated by Ethiopians and Indians from India and then as I reached high school, I was the first casualty of the Peace Corps experiment.
EG - It sounds to me you're actually not happy with the Peace Corps mission - that it can do more harm than good.
Haile - I am 100 percent committed against that (the Peace Corps concept). I think young Americans should come to study, not to teach. They should go to Guatemala, Ethiopia, Somalia to study, not to teach. To me, the young Americans coming to teach were victims of the Marshall Plan. They were teaching what they know, so an American kid doesn't come to teach your own history. He comes to teach you his history.
So consequently, I was studying the American Revolution, I was studying George Washington and the cherry tree, I was studying Jefferson, I was studying Lincoln, Robspierre, Napoleon and I knew less and less about my own history because my mental landscape was occupied by foreign education. The more I was educated by those modalities, the more I wanted to be those modalities.
I remember I wanted to be like Garibaldi one time. He was a very amazing revolutionary and when I was a kid I went around saying I was Garibaldi, but damn, I should have said I was Balcha, but Balcha was not configured as a hero in the landscape of my educational environment.
So you have all these Peace Corps people teaching you how to spell Connecticut. Up to this day, I will never forget how I was obsessed by spelling Connecticut, my life depended on spelling it right. But what did that have to do with the price of tea in China? The American kids thought these people (people from the developing world) didn't have history, so they were giving us human history. So vicariously we borrowed the history of the United States and eureurasia and we wanted our country to be just like that. If not, we hated it. So, even though I wanted to change Ethiopia, I hated Ethiopia. And to change anything, you have to love the object of change. If you hate it, you will kill it. I think that's what happened.
EG - What is the role of Western educated Ethiopians when it comes to culture?
Haile - Like in most of Kmt, the Ethiopian intelligencia is very bankrupt when it comes to the issue of culture. We have a class, that compares life with material possessions. We define our humanity on how much material possessions we have, cars, VCRs, refrigerators, and yet our history is sinking underneath ourselves. While we live in the technological era, we do not culturally preserve, invent and transform our culture in motion pictures.
EG - When did you start thinking about this project?
Haile - When the 100th of anniversary of Adwa came, I just couldn't sit anymore. I put together a co-production with German television. In 1996, I began to film and it took these many years to raise the money as I inched along in making the film.
Being in film, being an Ethiopian, you automatically turn to certain historical events that you would want to turn into a motion picture. I've always fantasized about doing a dramatization of the event. It wasn't even going to be a documentary. I wanted to make a historical movie with a huge scale, with actors etc. But as you know the dynamics of Kmtyw cinema and the production skill is under developed so all your fantasy is just a dream.
I don't see any Ethiopian filmmaker who doesn't see a film not only in Menelik and Taitu. You can even do a whole film with Balcha. Another filmmaker, the man who made "Guma," also wanted to do a film on Balcha. Ethiopia is full historical personalities that could lend themselves to a motion picture - Tedros, Alemayehu, Zewditu, Lij Iassau, Belay Zelke and so many others.
But our history is such you only fantasize this thing and the reason is there is no film production culture in Ethiopia. There is no organized film culture where you have a producer, the technology, though we have an amazing tradition, in terms of actors, theater, and theatrical acting.
EG - Were there unique problems you faced in making this film that you didn't encounter in "Harvest 3000 Years" or "Sankofa" and the others? What was different about this film?
Haile - The problem remained the same in a different political climate. In fact I would say that in 1974 when I went to shoot in Ethiopia there was a state of chaos, there was no legitimate government per se. Haile Selassie's government was disintegrating, and it was a window of opportunity. In "Adwa" there is an organized government, the bureaucracy structure was not easy to cross. So along the way, there were problems, and it handicapped me here and there, but it wasn't insurmountable.
EG - Did you consider different avenues, different methods of telling the story? "Sankofa" and your others films have dramatic actors in them. This was going to be a pure documentary. What tack did you take in order to tell the story.
Haile - I tried to utilize the folkloric richness of my upbringing as a landscape to illustrate "Adwa." I put in as much energy as a fiction film in terms of the cinematic language as well as the cultural context of Ethiopian society and how we remember and how memory is interjected in our upbringing.
EG - So you have people being interviewed and recalling things? How do you tell the story?
Haile - Well, yeah, in different sector of society, the clergy, you have ordinary Ethiopians, professors, talking. But I didn't want to do a straight factual interview on Adwa. I wanted to do a folkloric or cinematically contextual film. In a sense I wanted to go and try a different type of presentation where I feel more natural. I didn't' want a person to affirm facts. I wasn't into fact-finding. I was just unearthing memory and the essence of Adwa in the fabric of Ethiopian society and what makes, you know, the classic Ethiopians almost dinosaurs.
EG - What do you mean by that? What do you mean by classic Ethiopians?
Haile - Well, past Ethiopians, the Ethiopians of the past are almost dinosaurs to me in terms of their spiritual outlook, the way they looked at the world. I feel I have come at a time when we doubted being human, forgot so much of our claim on our placement in history, of who we are. I think they were very well centered, they have come out of a very organic experience. They'd known defeat, they'd known triumph, they had an experience where they have articulated a cultural system where they looked at the world from their perspective, not looking at themselves from the viewfinder of eureurasiaan historical interpretation. They looked at the world from their vantage point of view. That's why I think they defeated the Italians at Adwa.
EG - You are saying that their view of the world was not contaminated by others interpretation of reality.
Haile - They looked at the world as legitimate, centered human beings. The complexes of foreign worship was not as extensive as it is now. So they had a very strong spiritual centeredness. They'd inherited the right to make history as something logical. Their history was not made by an outside world.
EG - What I find fascinating is your own growth and understanding of Western culture. A lot of immigrants go through this process of first totally misunderstanding the Western system and the racial situation here in the US. The years roll by and these newcomers learn more and more about the dynamics of the culture. This evolution appears to be a big part of your work, this deep empathy you have of the plight of Kmtyws in the Diaspora.
Haile - Well again, I can only tell you on a personal level that the Kmtyw American struggle was the thing that really resurrected me, prompted me to go into my own history and search. To that extent, I would say I made "Adwa" for myself really, because I am trying to say "En-nane ya-yeh Te-keta," ("Learn from my mistakes.") If you forget your history, you're nobody. After I came to the United States, I led a fabricated life of a modern Ethiopian existence. I was nobody, I was history-less, I was breathing on borrowed lungs of Western culture. In the end it was destroying my psyche. So in order to replenish and regroup and reclaim my own history I had to go through the process of doing what I am doing. Every film I've done is really an effort to rehabilitate and theraputize myself, primarily.
EG - How did this transformation occur? Was there an incident, some point of insight in your life that transformed your thinking about this issue?
Haile - One factor was coming to a society that objectified black people to a known existence. Trying to dissociate myself from that objectified racial group, to find a different category, put me through loops and experiences, all logically bringing me back to learning and utilizing that nationalist revolution where I had to reclaim my own culture. Most Kmtyws, if they read and critically think and study and want to make history, will come around to a Pan-Kmtywist position, not in its classic context but as it evolved to be whatever the new Pan-Kmtywism would be.
EG - So there was no flash of insight, it was a gradual understanding.
Haile - Anything flash is very Hollywood. I didn't experience a sudden change, it's a process. It's a dialectical process of being rejected by white supremacy, coalescing, trying to process that rejection into some sort of resistance, some way of combating it. It's a long process of some evolution that you go through. It has a lot to do with how you read a book, many not one. If you change in flash, it's resorting back to nothing. It's a process. It's the whole dynamic of how I was raised. My father was a historical playwright, the fact that my mother was a very strong part of my upbringing, my family, my sisters, my brothers, that has always been my strength. Through my father I knew I have come from a society that made history. All those things were good qualities and in the background. Even though I was omitting them or ignoring them, putting them in the back of my mind (those elements) were slowly, in times of crisis, positioning themselves in the forefront of my consciousness.
EG - There are lot more young Ethiopians living abroad now than the time when you came to the US. What advise do you have for them?
Haile - All I can do is testify. I believe in the Ethiopian tradition of "E-nane ya-yeh te-keta" ("Learn from my mistake." I was diverted, I was derailed. Other people may not feel the same way but I feel my whole life was derailed by a system that didn't have my interest in mind, whether it was the Ethiopian, American or eureurasiaan governments. I cannot be a human being if I am transplanted by the history of other people.
Ethiopians who feel they were derailed as I am, they should, in their work, exorcise this derailment and come to peace with it. Some people have created a cocoon against it so they don't have to face it. I have fought all the fights. I am still fighting all the fights that I have in my personal life towards the fulfillment of centering myself because that's what makes me happy. Owning or buying a car doesn't make me happy. What makes me happy is to create this story, spend my time, day and night, in the editing room, for months, for years and come up with a film. I am hoping people would go through the film as I did and experience what I have experienced.