As The Ocean Tells Me So
I’ll start with the ending. Black revisits his childhood friend Kevin, in his now distant home town Miami at a diner where Kevin is now working. Of course he is anxious, as I would be too. Seeing a past someone who conjured liberating feelings I’ve never felt before that affirm that being me is right and I am not alone in those feelings, can be overwhelming and that alone can make a human become overwhelmed with nervousness and uncertainty. Black talks to Kevin, they get reacquainted, they flirt, and they question, but the moment that made me feel like poetry was not the moment in the diner, or the post diner travel to Kevin’s apartment, or the exchange they had in Kevin’s apartment, it was at the very end that made me gag into a soft blue as I vicariously catapult myself into Black’s expression, as he is held and comforted by the hands, the love of Kevin.
An adaptation of the play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue" by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Moonlight, is an independent film directed by Barry Jenkins. In a sequence of three, the film is a journey that serves as a lens into the stages of a person from the streets of Miami, Chiron, who is other and through each of these stages we see them grow from a child into an adult, as they endure universal feelings; pain, joy, sadness, love and some indescribable. The familiarities of this film and my life was a bit overwhelming to take. It’s been a long time since a film made me cry. I think the last film to do that or to ever do that, was The Color Purple. You don’t understand the anxiety I had before and during watching this film, as I didn’t want it to trigger any trauma I received in this world due to the fact that I am other. From “Little” Chiron to grown up “Black” Chiron I saw moments of myself. As I see Chiron lay in bed in each phase of his life, the morning after another day and night, living as the other, I saw my life. I saw my friends lives as they too often travel miles and miles just to be reaffirm themselves through a rare love to be found in our lives. I saw everything, honestly, truly, as I feel like him every damn day of my life, an enigma enduring the navigation of living in blurred spaces that seem to belong to me but they don’t. If they did belong to me, I would feel safe when traveling within these spaces but I don’t. I live in violence. I live in a micro war. I live unprotected and never have the privilege to let go because I feel secure. No, it doesn’t happen ever.
But I became more and more relieved as Moonlight played out. Sadly when we are placed in film, as the audience we expect to experience, something that is explicitly violent and traumatizing but this was a different. Affliction did occur within the film but Jenkins, delicately manipulated the trauma through silence, slow motion movement, love expressing characters, and tightly framing body expressions as passionate black soul music play in the background throughout the movie, to humanize the characters as we develop empathy as the audience (no matter what kind of person who are) and we thus humanizing ourselves. Just in case if you didn’t understand why, Jenkins showed compassionately why we, the other, sometimes go against our inner god which is usually is induced by constructed forces created by powers outside of ourselves. Jenkins did not exploit me, instead he me let breathe. Every scene that went by I took a breathe and then released without shame, without fear, and without spectators. I was thankful to see that he revealed to everyone what is black love and gave it a platform to be protected from the chance of it being spoiled as it is so often. After the film ended I felt armoured, for once. Isn’t that what is art?
The characters that were in the film are typically demonized or their (our) pain becomes lust for foreign views in the usual movies we grew up seeing. Jenkins carefully did the other with Mcraney’s poetry, we witnessed suffrage turned into sacred moments for healing. I felt like someone just gave me a kiss on the forehead after lovingly placing a bandaid on a fresh wound. For me Moonlight was an ocean. It was a clear sky as I see the world within it under me.