The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A tribute to civil rights giants Lewis, Vivian
Artist and poet collaborate on poignant ‘The Baptism.’
Are the flowers that bloom in the spring the same as those that died in the frost? “The Baptism,” a video artwork featuring a poem by Carl Hancock Rux and directed by artist Carrie Mae Weems, opens with that parable. We are not the same nor are we different, the flowers say: “When conditions are sufficient we manifest and when conditions are not we go into hiding.”
Months into a dark winter. A year into a pandemic. As the nation surpasses 500,000 COVID-19 deaths and as the refrain of victims of violence and brutality grows longer, there is hope in Rux’s words.
It is a simple idea but complicated in practice. When conditions are sufficient, flowers bloom, activism flourishes, people come together, change happens. We grow. We live. When conditions are no longer sufficient, we must wait. For the
thaw. For the spring. For a vaccine. For the winds of change to return.
Over the summer, during the height of the reignited Black Lives Matter movement, the civil rights giants John Lewis and C.T. Vivian died on the same day. In a year of immeasurable grief, it might be cause for expounding on the transience of life; the loss of two irreplaceable leaders when we need them most. But Rux and Weems’ work, a poignant tribute to Lewis and Vivian, takes a different approach. Commissioned by the Lincoln Center, the work is on view at thebaptismpoem.org.
Rux, who also is a novelist, playwright and musician, said that while writing the poem, he kept returning to images of a young Lewis on his family farm. In his unsentimental and moving poem, Lewis is “a sharecropper’s son,” and Vivian, a “boy from Boonesville.” The miracle of their lives is in their commonness. The 11-minute film is a eulogy grounded not in individual virtues, but in the collective spirit for change and the call for justice that shone particularly brightly in these two figures.
“The Baptism” is about “always becoming” — even in the moments of withdrawal, even when that becoming is invisible to the human eye. Weems, Rux’s friend and collaborator, pairs the sentiment with fast-forwarded X-ray footage of flowers growing. One bud climbing on top of another, stumbling up stairs to the sky, a race to nowhere — sped up, these skeletal forms burst into being with a life force that usually remains unseen.
“We are never born; we never die. We transition,”
Rux recites in the video. And so, too, do the leaves on the trees, the buds in the weeds and the movements in the streets.
In an interview with the Lincoln Center, Rux recalls his parents teaching him that there is one civil rights movement, but one with many iterations. Harriet Tubman was a part of it, Lewis and Vivian were a part of it, and Black Lives Matter protesters are a part of it. The video poem looks at civil rights with this sweeping approach, weaving protest footage from the 1960s with that from 2020.
Weems’ work has always been political — even if not overtly so — but in recent years, the photographer, multimedia and installation artist has become more directly involved in on-the-ground action. She is the director of Social Studies 101, a public art collective that gained nonprofit status in 2017. The group recently launched a signage campaign in Syracuse, New York, where Weems is based, to draw attention to the disproportionate effects of the coronavirus on people of color.
In other video works, including “Imagine If This Were You” (2016) and “People of a Darker Hue” (2017), Weems juxtaposes images of violence against Black people with images of peaceful protest. In the latter (from which she borrows imagery for “The Baptism”), Weems chronicles victims of police brutality — first by listing their startlingly young ages, then their heartbreaking relationships, and finally by name.
Weems is best known for the “Kitchen Table Series,” photographs of herself and a rotating cast of characters in front of a long kitchen table beneath a single, dramatic light source. In the 1990 work, the table becomes a stage for exchanges of love and disdain, camaraderie and conflict. Through the images, the artist reveals the narrative possibilities of the domestic space and captures the breadth of emotion within four walls. She finds the universal in the up-close.
The visual language in “The Baptism” does something similar. Notice how at the beginning of Part 2 of the poem, we see Rux’s hands before we see his face. Notice the recurring close-up image of hands clasped before Weems zooms out to show us the broader context — a group of demonstrators gathering on the National Mall the night before the 1963 March on Washington.
Hands “baptized in blood,” hands reaping the soil, hands “swelling” — Rux’s words conjure vivid pictures of these instruments of work and creation. As he narrates the poem, his own hands appear as if almost separate from his body. They rest on the table like washed tools laid out to dry. “I am not me; I am watching me,” he says. This could be read as an allusion to death, but there also is a sense that Rux, too, is somehow outside of himself, as if he has given up his hands to the collective.
At one point while reciting the poem, Rux, referring to Lewis and Vivian, asks us to consider “these two men as one building.” It’s a strange comparison, but buildings still stand long after their occupants and purposes have come and gone. They — like powerful ideas, like movements — are meant to be inhabited.
Seventy years ago, Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm band recorded what many music historians consider to be the first rock ‘n’ roll record: Turner’s composition, “Rocket 88” — an ode to a make of Oldsmobile popular among young people at the time.
Despite being stiffed on the label — “Rocket 88” was mistakenly credited to Turner’s saxophone player, “Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats” — Turner’s work would catch the ear of both record buyers and other musicians: Five years later, his piano intro for the single would be ripped off by Little Richard for “Good Golly, Miss Molly.”
Sales of the 45 single would peak in 1974, when 200 million were sold. In the 1980s, they would be slowly phased out by 12-inch singles and cassette tapes.
Taking its core inspiration from the naga of Asian folklore — semidivine beings that shapeshift between serpent and human form, a la Nagini of the Harry Potter universe, which most famously borrowed the idea — Disney’s gorgeously animated, entertainingly told fantasia “Raya and the Last Dragon” is a visual feast. If the ingredients of the story itself, which centers on a plucky warrior princess on a quest to unite five widely scattered pieces of a magical, broken gemstone, are a bit familiar, the stirring sweep of this adventure, set in the fictional Southeast Asian land of Kumandra, and told with both cheeky humor and heart, is transporting.
Its titular teen heroine (voice of Kelly Marie Tran) is, along with her father, Benja (Daniel Dae Kim), a guardian of the aforementioned power-stone: the sole remnant of a battle that took place some 500 years before the main action of the film begins. In response to an assault by sinister beings called Druun, we learn from a prologue that several benevolent dragons once sacrificed themselves to save Kumandra, leaving behind only that mystical crystal — and a legend that one of the dragons, a water spirit named Sisu, may have somehow survived.
In the aftermath, Kumandra has fragmented into five separate kingdoms, each maintaining a kind of cold war with the other four. When peace talks organized by Benja collapse, and an attempt to steal the stone causes it to break apart into chunks — each of which is spirited away to a different kingdom — action must be taken.
That mission falls to Raya when the Druun — described as a plague “born of human discord” — return, transforming Raya’s father and many others into stone statuary. (The textures of this world are vividly rendered. But be advised. The Druun are the scariest: Dementor-like swarms of swirling, dark, destructive evil. They’re an effective, and chillingly relevant, metaphor for human divisiveness.) Armed with a sword and a piece of the stone, which has the ability to repel Druun, and riding a giant pill bug named Tuk Tuk (Alan Tudyk, making, um, giant pill bug sounds), Raya sets out to find Sisu, steal back the other bits of crystal and save the world.
As with many a heist film before it, this film’s protagonist accumulates a few accomplices: an orphaned boy-chef (Izaac Wang), a gentle man-mountain (Benedict Wong), a baby con-artist (Thalia Tran) and several adorably acrobatic, monkeylike sidekicks. Oh, and a dragon.
Raya finds and resuscitates Sisu (Awkwafina) early on — which is great because the character is a gem herself. Morphing between dragon and somewhat goofy adolescent human with a mop of blue hair and oversize clothing that make her look like a cartoon cousin of Billie Eilish, Sisu brings spunk and comedy to the dark tale. Awkwafina’s raspy, endearingly dim-bulb performance adds enormous, quirky charm to the film.
Of course, besides the Druun, there’s also a human nemesis: Namaari (Gemma Chan), a warrior princess from another kingdom who’s a complicated foil to Raya: part Sisu fangirl, part frenemy.
In its broadest contours, “Raya” isn’t all that different from stories we’ve seen before. But it also evokes a world, one of sight and sound — even, at times, of smells and tastes — that we haven’t seen before. Kumandra feels vibrantly real. Its overarching theme of sacrifice is also a powerful one.