Both Babel and Brother, I'm Dying illustrate how gender, race, and nation intersect in neo-colonial/neo-liberal settings to limit mobility and access of certain groups of people.
In Iñarritú's film Babel, form echoes content. The argument is for the time-space compression that Massey argues against. In seconds, we shift from scenes in Japan, to Morocco, to the U.S, to Mexico. We alternate between drugged clubbing in Tokyo to a San Diego border crossing. The world, Babel argues, is inextricably interrelated and interdependent. I was interested in how childhood was constructed in the film. The children in Morocco are shown shooting weapons, peeping at naked women, and masturbating. The white children in San Diego are shown as being naive and innocent, as opposed to their Mexican counterparts, who are entertained by a dying chicken. Part of me thinks that this is Iñarritú's illustration of childhood as it exists in each of these places, but I simultaneously believe that he is perpetuating racialized notions of sexuality and violence.
The first thing that struck me after reading Danticat's memoir Brother, I'm Dying was the structure. For the first two hundred pages or so, I was somewhat bored by the quotidian details of the narrative. The last third of the book, however, with its violence, its horrifying human rights abuses, are where the heart of the story is, for me. Danticat could have written a diatribe against U.S. immigration policies. I think, however, that the history, the intimate moments, that lead up to these final pages make it all the more harrowing. The beautiful moment where Danticat meditates on the fact that her uncle was born and died under U.S. control would not have had the same power had we not traveled through the previous eighty years or so of family history with her. The most obvious connections that I made to other texts we have read were to the history and dynamics from Taking Haiti and to the familial relationships from Children of Global Migration. Danticat writes of Marie Micheline telling her and her brother stories about her parents and she says "these types of anecdotes momentarily put our minds at ease, assuring us that we were indeed loved by the parent who left." (54) This reminded me of the Filipino children in Children of Global Migration who needed constant reassurance of love from their parents (mothers) who were working in other countries. I also appreciated the moments where Danticat related her family's experience to larger historical moments, as when she writes that "the lawyer answered that their ages were determined by examining their teeth. I couldn't escape this agonizing reminder of slavery auction blocks, where mouths were pried open to determine worth and state of health." (212)
When I look at these two texts together, I think of several themes that we have been discussing all semester. I think, firstly, of subjectivity vs. identity, as it applies to both people and lands. By this I mean that the same way that subjectivity is a person in relation to other people, bodies of land also assume subjectivities through our arbitrarily drawn borders and the meanings we attribute to those borders. In Noam Chomsky's article that we read, he argues that we should call the Western and Southwestern United States "Occupied Mexico." To me, this is completely absurd. Mexico is just as much a colonial construction/project as the United States is. Before there was Mexico there were indigenous groups with varied ideas about territory, ownership, and land-use. And there has always been conflict over land. I am by no means arguing that the United States has a right to those areas. What I'm arguing is that no one has an inherent right to any land, or an inherent right to ownership.
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