The Price of Sugar: What These Guys Need is a Honkey

[bcholmes]

Tonight, THAC hosted a showing of a documentary film, The Price of Sugar at the Brunswick Theatre. Turns out, it's the last night for the Theatre, which is closing its doors tonight.

There was a good turnout, and it was an entertaining film. It's a film about Father Christopher Hartley, a priest working in the Dominican Republic, trying to help secure rights for Haitian workers who are brought in to the country to work in the sugar cane fields. It seems to be getting some attention (I've heard that it's been long-listed for an Oscar).

But.

It's yet another one of these "white guy makes it his mission to help poor, underprivileged people in a foreign country, who would never think of organizing on their own" films. Mostly, the Haitian workers don't get to speak in their own voice: in the few instances where they are interviewed, they're talking about Father Hartley and what he's done for them.

Comments

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine during a trip to Haiti a while ago. She's an English doctoral candidate, and she was talking about the great resistance her students expressed when asked to read stuff where the point-of-view character had a very different life experience from them.

The common complaint she heard was "I just can't identify with this character."

Apparently, stories are only helpful if you can imagine yourself in the centre of them.