Saw the 2nd half of The New World on 42nd St. Young Q'orianka Kilcher is the entire movie. The entire drama takes place on her amazing face. The movie is that and a bunch of metaphorical shots of birds soaring and sunlight through trees. No wonder the 42nd St. crowds were frustrated. Where were the battles, the raping and the pillaging? The revenge and the desperate struggle for survival? The guts and the glory? Wasn’t all that in the trailer? Where’d they go? Not here. Instead we watch her smile, and the mood lightens, the audience becomes optimistic and then her face goes blank, and we sense trouble, tears — and we sense she and her whole culture are falling to pieces. It’s like Carl Dreyer’s Joan of Arc film disguised as a commercial movie. A movie made entirely of close-ups of a beautiful face intercut with nature footage. What a concept! One face tells the whole story. And it does.
Time limits on Justice?
The people of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, have been attempting in recent years to reclaim the farming lands taken from their ancestors by the white settlers. The whites have sometimes lived on a farm for 3 generations or more and naturally they think of it as theirs, that it is their homeland now too. The whites accept that the nation should not be ruled by outsiders anymore, but they see their homes as their own. They have raised children, built infrastructure and improved the fields. But as the political tide has recently turned and they are no longer the bosses, their right to hold on to the 80% of the arable land in the area that they claimed seems less likely to continue.
Is this fair? Not exactly, but neither was the appropriation of the land years ago. Justice, one might say, was simply delayed. If I can steal from you and you are powerless to reclaim your property or land for generations does it then become mine? At some point does time itself transfer ownership?
Most likely justice will be skewed. Whites will be forcibly removed, land will go unused and some of it will be wasted by the new owners, unaccustomed as they might be to managing it. There will be unscrupulous land grabs and struggles for property amongst the new owners. But maybe after some time, if things don’t get completely out of hand, a kind of balance will be achieved. Some will argue that not even a single white person belongs on this land, and they have a point. But with some compassion and forgiveness the descendents of thieves might find a place and a home.
Historical Justice
When does the clock run out? Can the Lenape, or their descendants, claim a share of NYC? If they somehow became fabulously oil rich, let us say, would that make it seem less ridiculous? Can Miami Cubans claim their ancestral homes in Havana in the not too distant future? German Jews their houses in Leipzig and Berlin? Russians exiled since the revolution their beautiful homes in St. Petersburg? Chinese their family homes, where they’d lived for generations, that they were tossed out of during the Cultural Revolution? Can everyone simply make history go backwards — and is that justice?
