Now out on DVD, John Ridley’s Guerrilla is an amalgam of facts, factoids and
fiction.
Written and directed by Ridley, the 6 part mini-series is primarily about how a
group of civil rights activist from the British Black Panthers set about to challenge
and overturn racist English immigration laws of the 70s.
The absence of black women in the lead roles and the depiction of those in the
supporting cast has been a matter of much debate and rancour.
On one level, it is absurd that we look to fiction in films and books to confirm,
and even enshrine real life events: as though every pain felt and every blood
spilled and any laughter, not passed through a fictional prism, has yet to fully
achieved its complete relevance.
Yes, there is no law that requires Ridley to provide prominent roles for women,
based on those from the British-Black Panthers, but there is a moral duty to do
so.One crucial difference between the British Black Panthers and its American
forebear is that the Brits never took up arms, while militarised self-defence was
central to that which was founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton.
Ridley has chosen to not only ignore this fact by arming his own British Panthers,
he has gone further to make at least one character, Dhari (a convincingly shift
Nathaniel Martello-White), occasionally violent.
One fact of fiction is that one does as one pleases. If Ridley has the creative
freedom to raise the stakes, however he wishes, so as to make for an engaging
drama, he surely has the scope to portray many or no black women. It is also his
own time and effort that is ploughed into the project so he has a sturdy defence
in this sense.
The problem then becomes a moral one of rendering truth. This, to start with, is
a bizarre expectation we have of storytellers, especially one who has been
rewarded with an Oscar for doing so. Yet, it is one that must be demanded of
him, and any storytellers who chisel blocks of historical facts into hours of fiction
—if only to limit or guard against the too many untruths.
The decision to leave out (as different from eliminating) the black women from
The Movement, in Guerilla, is an untruth. The contributions of Darcus Howe,
Linton-Kwesi Jones, Obi Egbuna, Mala Sen, Farrouk Ghandry, are no more
important that those of Olive Morris and Altheia Jones-LeCointe. Choosing to omit
them from this canvas is tantamount to an ethical failure in storytelling.These charges are levied against Ridley the story-teller, not Ridley the individual.
Only his decision-making is on trial here, not his beliefs or moral constitution
which many couldn’t confidently attest to.
Invoking his marriage to his wife of Japanese heritage at a London Q & A session
was given as an inspiration for making his leads a Black and Asian couple.
True and touching as this was, it also has the inverse effect of exposing him to
even more tension from those who will see this as a cop out, or a contributing
factor to why he hasn’t prided the likes of Morris and Jones-LeCointe in his show.
The vitriol this has drawn distracts from what is truly remarkable tv, in an era
awash with the stuff. The plotting, between scenes and episodes, and the clever
characterisation make for a gripping watch.
Ridley’s Guerrilla is presented as a tv series that deals with confrontation. The
charged title invokes racist allusions to apes, combined with the activities of
small groups using unconventional fighting methods against larger ones.
One scene, in episode one, perfectly sets up the hot contact points of the story.
Two couples—one of a Black man and an Irish woman (Nicholas Pinnock and Denise
Gough), and another of a Black man and a South Asian woman (Babou Ceesay and
Freida Pinto)—on their way back from a night out are stopped by three English
police men.
Of course nothing goes well. The policemen antagonize the group who wisely
show restraint. The Irish woman asks for them to be left alone. One of thecoppers took this as an affront and strikes her with his baton. She staggers in pain
and bleeds from the nose.
The first shock is the ease with which the policeman beats the woman. The next
is that a white woman has been physically and sexually violated by a white man,
and right before a Black and Asian group. This is uncommon in any films that deal
with racial oppression.
More often than not, it is black bodies that are shown being beaten and bloodied,
meant as true-life depictions, but which over time has been fetishised by one
director after another. Ridley surely knows this and it says a lot about his head for
charged drama that he has chosen to put this scene there.
This officer then makes as if to frisk the Irish woman, but ends up molesting her,
further deepening her humiliation and that of her boyfriend who has been made
to kneel down and watch. This same character is later bludgeoned to death by a
policeman.
The cast of horrors is the enduring one of English oppression over Blacks, Asians
and the Irish. The writing and directorial choices made in this episode, and
elsewhere, are what elevates Ridley’s show above the many others that have
tackled the same subject.
All factors taken into account, Ridley scores high marks in delivering good TV, as
engaging as any that has been made in this current boom of long-form television.
The decision, to relegate Black female leaders to subsidiaries and absenting
others altogether, is where he has undoubtedly failed.Afua Hirschis a London based writer and broadcaster, and the author of Brit(ish),
which will be published Spring 2018.
I ask Hirsch if, away from the controversy, she has enjoyed the series to which
she says “I struggled to find characters I could relate to.” Frieda Pinto’s
character “Jas” is based on Mala Sen and Hirsch praises the casting and the
alliance of Blacks and Asians under the political banner of “Black” in 70s England
which was needed to combat the country’s racist immigration laws.
To Hirsch, Jas has been portrayed as “the mastermind, fundamental to the story,”
but there are “no black women with an equivalent voice.”
One of Ridley’s defence is that “if there are aspects of my show that are difficult
to understand or accept, I feel like I have done my job”—a clever response meant
to also gag further interrogation.
Hirsch believes we all have a “shared history” and that “just telling the story is
important,” but she finds Ridley’s own defence as “more troubling” especially in
the UK where there aren’t “luxuries of diversity of stories.”
Hirsch adds that, “I have less trust that he’s coming from a position of
consciousness in telling the black power story, and it would be wrong to assume
he would win that back by just including a prominent black woman in the next
series. Having said that, I had a lot of goodwill towards him based on previous
projects and that’s not all gone, either.”