Don’t forget me. Remember Massamba (our main character).
It’s 1759, on Île de France, which is present-day Mauritius, under French colonial rule. vthe plantation belongs to Eugène Larcenet, Massamba and his 16-year-old daughter Mati are enslaved there, and the story follows Mati’s escape and Massamba becoming a “marron” (a fugitive who breaks permanently with colonial order) when he goes after her, while the slave hunter Madame La Victoire is hired to track them down.
The film is Streaming on Canal+ a french media company, but here is the trailer
Ni Chaînes Ni Maîtres Bande-annonce VF – AlloCiné
“On the 5th day God created the negro, and on the sixth he created man.”
My name is Mati, not Collette (Massamba’s daughter).
I saw Vic Mensa, the rapper from Chicago post on that same exhaustion on Saturday morning, almost word for word “I am tired of navigating race, gender, and class”
As everybody does <<breathes>>
Massamba’s whole arc teaches the same lesson, over and over: “I am tired of sanitizing the most sacred parts of myself to slave owners, so that they can treat me with dignity.”
There’s a pain deep in the chest that comes with assimilation, and it’s been there so long, embedded like a knife, that the pressing has become the baseline. You get so used to the blade that its absence feels like an abnormal thing. For some people it’s their name. For some it’s their hair, their tongue, the way they pray, the way they grieve.
But this has been the reality since well, the 1600s. 🤷🏽♀️
The film insists on names, on witnesses, on somebody staying alive long enough to say remember: we do things so that someone remembers us: our friends and family mostly, their stories become ours. Trees remember: the rings hold the record of drought years and fire years, the ones that almost killed them and didn’t. Sediment remembers, layer by layer, everything that happened on the earth above it. Remember the pain, remember who you are, where you are from.
And some of it is genetic memory. That’s why your one cousin has always been afraid of dogs and can’t tell you why. That’s why someone who’s never lived through a shootout still flinches at fireworks, or flinches when someone raises their arm; like their body has been there before, because it has. That’s why in a certain light, you look like someone’s uncle or auntie.
It beautifully captures spirits, beliefs, the supernatural world from all angles
Anyway, you should watch it. It has great cinematography, storytelling, lighting, EVERYTHING!!!
-Holiness Kerandi