by Cyrus Fard
In the 1976 film Bush Mama, Ethiopian director Haile Gerima explores the struggles and oppression that African-Americans face living in the ghettos of Southern California. Centered on a black female welfare-recipient and her broken family living in the Watts neighborhood, the film offers a raw perspective not typically glimpsed among the tendency of mainstream narratives to leave questions of class, race and gender inequalities unaddressed. By daring to raise these issues, Bush Mama functions as a powerful polemic, challenging the values of some of the dominant ideologies perpetuated by white hetero-normative standards. As the film progresses and the audience comes to understand the hopelessness of the poor black experience as it is presented here, the film reveals a view of structural and institutional oppression by state powers that becomes increasingly apparent as Dorothy, pregnant and poor at the start of the film, begins an even greater descent that ends with her in jail for murdering a police officer who attempted to rape her daughter.
Arriving in the second half of the 1970s, Bush Mama stands as an oppositional force to the dominant narrative ideology that pushes forth negative views of black women, the black women on welfare in particular. Furthermore, the film not only successfully deconstructs such normalized beliefs as white dominance as a naturally occurring phenomenon and patriarchy as the accepted hierarchy, but also the very notion that every individual controls their own destiny.
Rather than following a more common cinematic strategy of emphasizing the power, or lack thereof, of the individual, Bush Mama utilizes a few select characters as a means of standing in for the collective mass of blacks in Watts. “Individual” is a term used negatively by African-American studies researcher Wahneema Lubiano, who argues that, “individuals are always wrapped in larger world narrative contexts. The problem with constructions of mythic individualism is that their ties to power go unnoted.” This is important to consider in relation to the film because Dorothy’s narrative trajectory does not follow the path that most narratives (as defined by Tzvetan Todorov’s narrative theory) take of equilibrium, disequilibrium, equilibrium (restored). Instead, from start to finish Dorothy is trapped in a world where moments of peace are rare amidst a constant struggle to keep afloat in a dire economic situation. She is not alone in this struggle, as the film shows many blacks (both female and male) experiencing the similar problems of waiting in the unemployment line, living through poverty and being harassed by police. This stands in stark contrast to the tendency of mainstream narratives to offer audiences exposition, conflict, closure and other means of aligning the story up with the audience’s ideological expectations. Instead, Bush Mama’s path is one of conflict, conflict, and more conflict, presented matter-of-factly and never in a typically melodramatic fashion.
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