The Luck of the Draw: What Ben-Hur and Septembers of Shivaz reminded me about Tivoli Gardens and Black Lives Matter

Violence and governance is so intertwined I don’t need to explore the entire length and breadth of it for you to know the truth in the idea. Everywhere in the world you look you can see the correlation between policy, policing and politics on the very lives on the citizens. In Jamaica the continuous war on the citizens of the garrison areas specifically Tivoli Gardens, in the United States the war against the black bodies that occupy the space without recognition just fear of death by cops are just a few examples that I can relate to as regards proximity to skin and neighbourhood.

But what do I know of violence on personhood besides the few fist fights and squabbles I have experienced in the world. Tonight I watched two movies about the relationship between religion, politics and violence and if Marx is right that religion is the opium of the people then what these movies offer is a drug as dangerous as Meth in both its making and it’s taking.

The two films though made by Hollywood are really about Jerusalem in the time of Christ (Ben-Hur) and the other set in the 1979 revolutionary state of Iran (Septembers of Shiraz). The political upheaval of both movies are juxtaposed with a Jewish God and an idea of forgiveness but so laden with violence that in the end all  I was left to think of Tivoli Gardens and blackness in this the time of our own revolution.

As the luck of the draw would have it, there is a way short and long straws indicate not just or lifespan but where we are born the colour of our skin and the parents who will train us to adhere to culture religion and help us choose our politics in the most detailed way we can define politics. In these movies the divide between the haves and the haves not is discussed in a way that shows how the ideas of self and position can influence the way we occupy the world be that in a peaceful or warlike fashion.

Ben-Hur’s adoptive brother in search for a place of belonging brings destruction on the people who rescued him from starvation as does Morteza whose separation from the class his mother serves leads him down a path of robbery, treachery and his own destruction.  The divide between the classes is the very fuel for the conversation between the two women in September of Shivaz.  As I watched these two shows the thing that haunted my thought was the fact that the divide in Jamaica is not much different and while religion provides a drug to coat the wounds of lack and death and poverty the question of disparity and its source still remains.

Just a few days ago I walked through the broken community of Tivoli Gardens as guest of a researcher and academic and there I found the place to be in my opinion at the very heart of poverty and lack. And the places where there was nothing the people sat dreaming of more and aware of the distance between them and opportunities.  In the movies the right to wealth and the silence that comes because of comfort is questioned. How can the people in positions of opportunity sit silently while people live like rats in squalor, decadence and violence convinced that these people don’t want more or are resigned to being pawns of the politicians? A few miles away at the other end of the parish these are house packed with necessities and abundance; and to think that their wealth is built on the backs, pockets and hearts of these people. 

In these two movies I wondered, what would happen if there was to be, as there was in Iran a switching of the guards, a coup to empower the disenfranchise and to curb the strength of the wealthy? Two prisoners in the movie Septembers of Shivaz said the problem we are having is that we think we are something because we were once great. And this sounds so black to me between the African and the Jamaican ideas of grandeur before slavery or in the fight for freedom. What the Tivoli incursion and the Black Lives Matter protests have taught me is that the possibility existed. But coups are not only coups if they happen like they do in Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago; that is in the very house of parliament not in the streets or in small garrison communities where women and children live. 

Here is good time to quote Fannon or Rodney on the systematic and societal manipulation to keep the wretched, wretched: the idea of the poor being brainwashed to stay in the places of lack and to think of themselves as being unworthy of nothing else. Even in the movies there is a realization that the mind of the people creates the difference. Be that the people with plenty or the people with less.

But in the end the thing that struck me is the fact these places are peopled to provide politician with power, like a vote farm. And the vote farm is invested in gifts and the gifts are what keep the people straddling between sensibility, desire and survival. And we who call them other cannot see that the addiction to nothing is as strong as the addiction the rich have to more. So as in the movies either Christ will change their hearts or a change of luck will save them from the certainty that death and nothingness is.

Violence is a staple and religion its balm and poverty the lock on the gates the politicians the gate keeper and us the audience in a movie. Look how lucky we are….