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LEADER 00000ngm a2200433 i 4500
003 CaSfKAN
005 20140402113757.0
006 m o c
007 vz uzazuu
007 cr una---unuuu
008 150408p20151998cau052 o vleng d
028 52 1116274|bKanopy
035 (OCoLC)914225160
040 CaSfKAN|beng|erda|cCaSfKAN
043 e-fr---
099 Streaming Video Kanopy
245 04 The Language You Cry In.|h[Kanopy electronic resource]
264 1 [San Francisco, California, USA] :|bKanopy Streaming,
|c2015.
300 1 online resource (1 video file, approximately 53 min.) :
|bdigital, .flv file, sound
336 two-dimensional moving image|btdi|2rdacontent
337 computer|bc|2rdamedia
338 online resource|bcr|2rdacarrier
344 digital
347 video file|bMPEG-4|bFlash
500 Title from title frames.
518 Originally produced by California Newsreel in 1998.
520 The Language You Cry In tells an amazing scholarly
detective story that searches for -and finds- meaningful
links between African Americans and their ancestral past.
It bridges hundreds of years and thousands of miles from
the Gullah people of present-day Georgia back to 18th
century Sierra Leone. It recounts the even more remarkable
saga of how African Americans have retained links with
their African past through the horrors of the middle
passage, slavery and segregation. The film dramatically
demonstrates the contribution of contemporary scholarship
to restoring what narrator Vertamae Grosvenor calls the
"non-history" imposed on African Americans: "This is a
story of memory, how the memory of a family was pieced
together through a song with legendary powers to connect
those who sang it with their roots." The story begins in
the early 1930s with Lorenzo Turner, an African American
linguist who cataloged more than 3000 names and words of
African origin among the Gullah of coastal Georgia and
South Carolina. He discovered that some Gullah could
recite texts in African languages, including almost
certainly the longest, a five-line song he learned from a
woman living in a remote Georgia fishing village, Amelia
Dawley. Although Amelia did not know the meaning of the
syllables in the song, a Sierra Leonean graduate student
in the U.S. recognized it as Mende, his native tongue.
These dramatic clues were taken up again in the l980s by
Joseph Opala, an American anthropologist at Sierra Leone's
Fourah Bay College. Studying Bunce Island, an 18th century
British slave castle, Opala discovered that it sent many
of its captives to Georgia and South Carolina where
American rice planters paid a premium for experienced
slaves from Africa's "Rice Coast." The comparative
coherence of this slave community may account for the high
degree of African cultural retention among the Gullah. In
1989 Opala helped organize a gala homecoming for a Gullah
delegation to their long-lost African sisters and brothers
documented in an earlier California Newsreel release,
Family Across the Sea. Opala joined with ethnomusicologist
Cynthia Schmidt and Sierra Leonean linguist Tazieff Koroma
in an arduous search to see if Amelia Dawley's song was
still remembered anywhere in Sierra Leone. Although the
Mende are the largest ethnic group in Sierra Leone, Koroma
recognized one word as unique to a dialect spoken only in
southern Sierra Leone. On their last day in the area,
Cynthia Schmidt discovered a woman, Baindu Jabati, living
in the remote interior village of Senehum Ngola, who had
preserved a song with strikingly similar lyrics, a dirge
performed during a graveside ceremony called Tenjami or
"crossing the river." Her grandmother taught her the song
because birth and death rites are women's responsibilities
in Mende culture. At the same time she made the uncanny
prediction that there would be a return of lost kinsman
and that Baindu would recognize them through this song.
Schmidt and Opala then went to Georgia where they found
Amelia Dawley's daughter, Mary Moran, age 69, who
remembered her mother singing the song. Though transformed
in plantation culture to a children's rhyme, there was
also continuity since the song was passed down by women on
both sides. A reunion between Mary and Baindu had to be
postponed because of a devastating rebel war in Sierra
Leone which left millions homeless, including Baindu
herself. Finally in 1997, Mary Moran and her family could
travel and, after a painful visit to Bunce Island, were
received with jubilation in Senehum Ngola. The village's
blind, 90 year old chief, Nabi Jah, organized a teijami
ceremony for Mary, even though it had been in desuetude
since the introduction of Christianity and Islam earlier
in the century. Thus Mary's homecoming became a catalyst
for Mende people to rediscover a part of their own past.
When Opala asked Nabi Jah why a Mende woman exiled two
hundred years ago would have preserved this particular
song, he replied that the answer was obvious. "That song
would be the most valuable thing she could take. It could
connect her to all her ancestors and to their continued
blessings." Then he quoted a Mende proverb, "You know who
a person really is by the language they cry in." The
Language You Cry In shows the significant benefits of
multi-disciplinary research. It also is a striking example
of scholars working with their informants as colleagues;
the "research subjects," African and American, were not
just observed but actively recruited into researching and
analyzing their own histories. Events, sometimes national
in scope, were organized so that individuals and
communities could make new research findings their own as
part of a "usable past." Meaning thus emerged out of the
deliberate clash of present and past. As we watch Mary and
Baindu reunited in a tearful rendition of this ancient
song, we realize how 20th century scholarship and media
technology are making their own modest contribution to
preserving bonds within the African Diaspora.
538 Mode of access: World Wide Web.
650 0 Mende |zAfrica|zSierra Leone.
650 0 Funeral rites and ceremonies|zAfrica|zSierra Leone.
650 0 Ethnomusicology|xFolk songs|xGullahs|zAfrica|zSierra
Leone.
650 0 African Americans|xRace identity|zUnited States|zGeorgia.
655 7 Documentary films.|2lcgft
700 1 Serrano, Angel |efilm director.
700 1 Toepke, Alvaro |efilm director.
700 1 Grosvenor, Vertamae |enarrator.
710 2 Kanopy (Firm)
856 40 |uhttps://naperville.kanopy.com/node/116275|zAvailable on
Kanopy
856 42 |zCover Image|uhttps://www.kanopy.com/node/116275/external
-image