A sliver of bright white flashes on a sketched, shifting black background, the camera points up at the sky from below. The sliver shuts, as if we blink, and the perspective shifts, now seen from above, an eye appears, then two, a young Black face, sketched in the darkness, brush strokes visible, now on a white background. Viewed from below again, through the eyes of the face, a hand reaches down, palm up, extending from the silhouette of a dark body, contrasted with the white of the sky. An offering hand, and now, from the side view, the small hand from below reaches up to grasp, clasp the larger hand, the two hands and forearms twisting around one another as the child is pulled up by the hand, by the man, into the bright white light and into his embrace. But the bright white background blurs, shifting, and the camera pans out, revealing the bodies, sprawled, limbs visible, a twisting web of death. At the center, the child, held by the man; her reaching hand the only proof of life in this open mass grave.
This is how the viewer encounters the first few moments of the television series, Black Earth Rising, through sketch-like, computer-animated black-and-white images of hands and bodies. From here, the story skips about twenty years forward in time, and the viewer discovers that the child is Kate Ashby, the main character, an orphan of the Rwandan genocide evacuated by aid workers, taken to the United Kingdom, and adopted by a white lawyer. Black Earth Rising, a 2018 BBC Two/Netflix Original television series written and produced by Hugo Blick, raises questions of how to memorialize the Rwandan genocide, complicating the conventionally stark contrast between victims and perpetrators while still calling for justice for the violence committed. Although this historically-based but fictionalized show, starring Michaela Coel (of Chewing Gum and I May Destroy You), received some negative reviews for Kate’s role as “less a three-dimensional character than a walking emblem of Central African trauma,” I argue that this depiction of trauma is complex and realistic (“‘Black Earth Rising’ Is A Fascinating, If Clunky, Take On The Rwandan Genocide”). Black Earth Rising sheds new light on France’s generally-unaddressed culpability for their participation in the Rwandan genocide, especially through arming the Hutu forces before the genocide, as discussed in the Duclert report.
As in the very first scene described above, Black Earth Rising repeatedly uses black-and-white animations to show memories and flashbacks, especially those representing the violence of the Rwandan genocide. These illustrations show an attention to ethical considerations as they allow the viewer to see atrocity without it being mediated through the actors’ bodies. As Blick explains on BBC’s Writersroom blog,
I was concerned that there might be a sense of fatigue from the viewer and that the audience might, in a horrible sense, feel that they were familiar with these ideas and scenes and therefore not engage with them. I also, most importantly, wanted to pay due respect to the story, because when you research and visit Rwanda the magnitude of what happened there is overwhelming. I thought it wasn’t possible or desirable to attempt any form of recreation of those events. That all led to animation as I felt that gave it a judicious step away, a reflective step away. (Blick and Small)
Here, Blick reveals his concerns about the violence that can be inflicted through recreating and representing real violence. The potential for representation to be a form of violence brings up ethical questions about how to present violence in a way that a reader/viewer has the potential to connect to without inflicting injury. As Cathy Caruth, noted trauma scholar, has explained, this work is interdisciplinary in nature and approach: “The difficulty of listening and responding to traumatic stories in a way that does not lose their impact, that does not reduce them to clichés or turn them all into versions of the same story, is a problem that remains central to the task of therapists, literary critics, neurobiologists, and filmmakers alike” (Caruth vii).
The concern about how to ethically represent violence and trauma is twofold: both seeking to mitigate the possible violence of the work itself and wanting to be sure that the reader/viewer is able to engage with the subject matter without letting familiarity limit empathetic response, as Susan Sontag has elaborated in Regarding the Pain of Others. Choosing to fictionalize real violence implicates ethical choices regarding remembrance and depiction as well. Figurative representation avoids negative responses to traumatic and violent stories, especially when they involve historical events and real or fictionalized characters.
The choice to depict violence and traumatic events through illustrations was strategic, and Blick goes on to explain, “I wanted to remove any prurience and not to evoke violence as titillation. I also wanted to make the representations of violence as spare and monochromatic as possible. I was keen that by making these elements very spare and still I wasn’t trying to impress a viewpoint on the audience” (Blick and Small). The choice to represent violence figuratively, either through literary devices like metaphors, symbols, and metonymy/synecdoche or through these animated interpretations on screen, is often a strategic move on the part of the author or filmmaker. I see these choices as expanding the possibilities for interpretation and adding to the potential for a viewer/reader to connect to the violence without becoming desensitized. These choices have the potential to highlight what a reader/viewer shares with the characters depicted, focusing on their humanity, and this often relies on greater attention to the corporeal or embodied experiences of the characters depicted, as exemplified in Black Earth Rising.
This is an excerpt from my dissertation, La Mort dans l’âme: Depictions of Trauma in West and Central African Literature in which I argue that translating for the body involves something in between figurative and literal language.
Works Cited
Black Earth Rising. Thriller. Directed by Hugo Blick, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Drama Republic, 2018.
“‘Black Earth Rising’ Is A Fascinating, If Clunky, Take On The Rwandan Genocide.” Fresh Air, directed by John Powers, NPR, 30 Jan. 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/01/30/689892841/black-earth-rising-is-a-fascinating-if-clunky-take-on-the-rwandan-genocide.
Blick, Hugo, and Steve Small. “Black Earth Rising – Using Animation Where Words Fail.” BBC Writersroom, 28 Sept. 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/writersroom/entries/bf5734ca-ff6e-4ade-86ca-2715ed43bb63.
Caruth, Cathy, editor. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Duclert, Vincent. La France, le Rwanda et le génocide des Tutsi (1990-1994) – Rapport remis au Président de la République. Armand Colin, 26 Mar. 2021, https://www.vie-publique.fr/rapport/279186-rapport-duclert-la-france-le-rwanda-et-le-genocide-des-tutsi-1990-1994.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Picador, 2003.
