The Power Of Memory. - Review - movie review

The first frames of the documentary film The Language You Cry In reveal an eclipse of the sun. Nomadic clouds obscure the heavens, concealing and then uncovering the phenomenal layering of shadow and light. The prophetic swirling of the wind haunts one's ears and soul, even as the voice-over of Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor stirs the consciousness: "Africa, 18th century. A young woman is snatched from her village by slave traders, forced to part forever from her mother, her motherland, her language, her identity. This is the nonhistory of millions of African-American women and men: a wall of silence--a mysterious past that memory fights to preserve from the onslaught of time, but which ends up shrouded in darkness."

In a mere 52 minutes and 34 seconds, The Language You Cry In makes plain the force of memory and the power of storytelling to recover lost truths. Directed and produced by Alvaro Toepke and Angel Serrano, the film tells the story of how a single word, contained within a simple African sorrow song, helped lift the veil that concealed one American family's African past.

The quest began with a simple song--a funeral dirge, an African blues song. During the 1920s and 1930s, Lorenzo D. Turner, a noted African-American linguist who was then a professor at Fisk University, began researching African retentions in the speech patterns and dialects of African Americans in the Southern United States. He was particularly interested in the language of the Gullah peoples who had inhabited the Sea Islands and coasts of South Carolina and Georgia since the 18th century.

Isolated from mainstream culture and maintaining their distinct social structure, the Gullahs had preserved more Africanisms within their traditions than had any other group in the United States. Much of the early analysis of the Gullah dialect was tainted by racist suppositions about the inability of former slaves to maintain their African identities. Turner noted in the preface to his 1949 book Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect: "The assumption on the part of many has been that the peculiarities of the dialect are traceable almost entirely to the British dialects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to a form of baby-talk adopted by masters of the slaves to facilitate oral communication between themselves and the slaves." However, Turner's study of Gullah culture, music, folklore and linguistic patterns made a convincing case for the existence of African retentions in North America.

Turner's travels took him to the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. He tape-recorded the region's distinctive language and folklore and cataloged more than 3,000 Gullah names and words that had African origins. It was the research he conducted in 1931 in the fishing village of Harris Neck, Ga., that unearthed the seed that decades later would inspire the makers of The Language You Cry In.

In Harris Neck, Turner discovered Amelia Dawley, a 50-year-old woman whose family had moved to the region after their emancipation from slavery. Turner's recording of Dawley included the woman's rendering of a song she had learned as a child. The melody was haunting, but the words, part of an unfamiliar language, could not be understood.

According to scholars, the words of Dawley's song constitute the longest known text in an African language introduced by slaves into North America. Solomon Coker, a Sierra Leonean graduate student who was working with Turner, recognized a word in the song that belonged to his own Mende language: kambei, a word that means "grave," supplied an important clue. Coker suspected that Dawley had passed along a funeral song.

With this historical backdrop securely in place, filmmakers Toepke and Serrano draw recent players and events onto center stage. During the late 1970s, Joseph Opala, an American anthropologist working in Sierra Leone, set out to study the "Gullah connection"--the relationship between slavery in coastal South Carolina and Georgia and the thousands of men and women abducted from the Rice Coast of West Africa. Expert rice farmers, these people brought a high price on the slave market. They also arrived in America armed with their own traditions and, of course, their songs.

Persuaded of this cross-Atlantic bloodline, the government of Sierra Leone in 1989 invited a delegation of Americans from the Gullah region to visit Sierra Leone. OPala was asked to help plan the welcoming reception. He enlisted the support of the Freetown Players and began searching for music that could serve as a tribute. It was then that Opala discovered the tapes of Lorenzo Turner and the song of Amelia Dawley.

The song's power continued to transcend the questions about its words' meaning. Following the performance for the Gullah visitors, Opala convinced ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and linguist Tazieff Koroma to join him in a search for the song's origins.

In 1990, Opala, Schmidt and Koroma began traveling to villages in the Pjuha District, to areas inhabited by the Mende people. At each village, they talked with the village elders and played the tape of Dawley's voice, hoping for a moment of revelation. The initial results were discouraging. "They recognized one or two words, but not the song," Schmidt recalls.