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Is Yesterday History?
by
Robert Sember
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Robert Sember
Researcher, Department of Sociomedical Sciences, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University and HIVAN Fellow
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It seems safe to say that the film ?Yesterday,? the first commercial feature film about the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, has been a critical success. When it premiered at the Durban International Film Festival in June this year the audience gave it a standing ovation as did the audience at a gala screening at the International AIDS Conference held in Bangkok in July. In September ?Yesterday? was awarded the inaugural Human Rights Film Award at the Venice Film Festival and it featured in the national cinema program, ?South Africa: Ten Years Later,? at this year?s Toronto Film Festival. Recently, the Independent Producer?s Organization of South Africa selected the film as the country?s official entry for consideration for the 77 th Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Film category. I will be surprised if it does not make it to the final round and feel certain executive producers Sudhir Pragjee and Sanjeev Singh, producers Anant Singh and Helena Spring, writer and director Darrell Roodt, and the film?s star, Leleti Khumalo, will be at the ceremonies in Los Angeles in early 2005.
Given that ?Yesterday? was listed among the top ten box office hits in its opening weeks, I am assuming it is proving a success with South African cinema audiences as well. This is likely to be only a fraction of the audience the film will ultimately reach, however, for it is set to have a long life beyond the movie theaters. In years to come hundreds of thousands of South Africans will have an opportunity to see the film on M-Net, which helped finance the project. The Nelson Mandela Foundation, another financial backer, will bring the film to thousands of other South Africans, perhaps even to rural communities in Okhahlamba, or ?the Bergville region? as it is referred to in the publicity materials, where the film is set, as part of the HIV/AIDS education component of its social development program (Nelson Mandela is reportedly delighted with the film and sees it as an important way of fighting the discrimination and stigma that is attached to AIDS). And then there are the international audiences: HBO films has already acquired ?Yesterday? for distribution in the United States, where it will be released in January 2005, perfect timing for the build-up to the Academy Award ceremony.
I enumerate these impressive achievements for two related reasons. First, I am genuinely impressed that this film has not swiftly disappeared into art house (Cinema Nouveau, in the case of South Africa) or Hallmark channel obscurity. Certainly the odds were against it being a popular success: it is filmed in isiZulu (indeed, it is the first commercial isiZulu film) and screened with subtitles; it is a drama; its central character is a rural Zulu woman named Yesterday; and, it is about AIDS. Second, given the success it has already enjoyed and is likely to enjoy in the future, the story of the woman Yesterday may well become the dominant cinematic narrative of the South African epidemic, and as we know film is an enormously influential cultural form so those of us involved in AIDS work in South Africa may be living with Yesterday for some years into the future. It is perhaps worth considering then, why the film is proving so successful and what it is revealing to viewers about the AIDS epidemic.
From the many glowing reviews, I gather the emotional impact provided by the arousing blend of suffering and perseverance is the key to the film?s success. As the critic for the International Herald puts it, ?Yesterday? is not only a ?moving film,? but also ?an unexpectedly uplifting experience.? Indeed the story is pure pathos. We first meet Yesterday walking with her daughter, Beauty, to the nearest clinic to have a persistent and enervating cough examined. The journey takes many hours and she is twice turned away because there are more patients than the doctor is able to see in one day. In desperation she consults a ?traditional healer? whose diagnoses her as angry. When Yesterday eventually learns she is HIV-positive she travels to Johannesburg to inform her husband, the likely source of her infection; he rewards her efforts with a brutal beating and she is sent home. When her husband returns to the homestead some months later to die Yesterday escapes the hostility of her neighbors by constructing a shack in the midst of a field where she nurses him. When he dies, she buries him. A single ambition carries her through these hardships, however, the longing to see her daughter begin her first day of school, the day on which the film comes to an end. For Variety?s critic the story is one of ?heart-rending compassion,? ?quiet power,? a ?universal? work, sentiments reportedly echoed by Anant Singh when he noted that, ?even though the film is in isiZulu with English subtitles, we are confident that audiences will respond positively to ?Yesterday,? as it is a universal story that takes one on a journey through one woman?s life and highlights her courage and determination to overcome insurmountable odds.?
The terms of the film?s universality certainly deserve sustained and close examination as it takes a lot to create universals from particulars. As ?Yesterday? heads off into its glowing tomorrow, however, I want to consider briefly the fate of its Yesterday and what that says about the many yesterdays that make up the history of this epidemic. In the discussions I have had about the film I have noticed a consistent confusion among viewers about whether it is a historical film, that is, whether it is situated in and reflecting on some identifiable past moment from the epidemic. South Africa has a rich AIDS history marked by many dramatic events that lie amidst the numerous significant historical markers of its pre- and post-apartheid worlds. If it is difficult for those of us who are somewhat familiar with this temporal landscape to situate the film I wonder where less informed viewers place it. My fear is that in addition to experiencing it as ?universal? they may also find it a ?timeless? tale, a rather terrifying place to be if we intend to change the way things are now with respect to the epidemic. Indeed, my experience of ?Yesterday? is that it is barely conscious of the conditions of its time or place, its context that is, despite being saturated with the particularity of its location and its moment. The result is that AIDS is rendered simply another repetition of this timeless tale. ?Yesterday? is a narrative without a history.
Without history it is hard to provide analysis and without analysis there is little foundation for intervention. Given the timeless universality of the film, I find Anant Singh?s claim that ?it gives audiences an in-depth look at life in South Africa? profoundly ironic?universal and in-depth at the same time! Even more troubling is his claim that ?it celebrates South African women and the moral strength they have to deal with the hardships,? for what I see threatens to lock women into an outmoded romance of unwavering sweetness and dogged optimism in the face of suffering, the sentimental character of the poor. This misstep is magnified by the fact that the film is presented in isiZulu which suggests a special intimacy with local experiences of the epidemic. At this point I could offer up a long list of counter images of the AIDS epidemic in Okhahlamba derived from the many visits I have made there under the auspices of a HIVAN-run research project on the community-level experience of the epidemic. While presenting a counter narrative may be a valuable exercise I would rather understand how Yesterday is de-historicized, as this is a special trick of popular narrative film and one the AIDS epidemic may be subject to again at some point in the future.
I am struck by how frequently the film turns away from the threshold of a historical analysis that would give context to the narrative. For example, by labeling the seasons in the film without providing a particular year, ?Yesterday? is confined to agrarian time. This naturalizes the visual landscape and silences the plethora of historical markers we observe, not the least of which is that the very apportioning of lands in the area, the landscape itself, tells a complex tale of forced removal, racist privilege and unequal access to resources, such as transportation and health care. What I am saying is that the world in which Yesterday lives has a history that can reveal the terms under which it was made, including the terms under which the AIDS epidemic developed and is (not) treated so that in 2003 infection rates among women attending antenatal clinics in KwaZulu-Natal, the province where ?Yesterday? is set, reached 37.5% (see reference 1 below).
There are, in fact, multiple histories at play in Yesterday?s landscape, more than any single work could unfold for us. To name a few: there is the colonial temporality epitomized by the beautiful ?traditional? Zulu pinafore Yesterday wears on the way to the clinic (yes, tradition has a history too); or the time of the missionaries suggested by the Rookdale church which is used as the setting for the clinic; or the post-apartheid redevelopment process suggested, perhaps, by the communal water pump. As much as these rub up against each other so they rub up against the other temporal conditions that even a cursory, let alone in-depth look at AIDS in South Africa would reveal?such as the fact that anti-retroviral drugs have been available to a limited few in South Africa for many years now and Yesterday?s lack of access is not unchangeable. But the politics of treatment access is just one of the many silences the film holds, casting a cynical pall over the claim made by John Samuel, Chief Executive of Nelson Mandela Foundation, that ?In our fight against HIV/AIDS, we need these kinds of stories which tell us about challenges, about difficulties and the tragedies ? We also, at the same time, need stories that tell us about hope ? and ?Yesterday? is about hope.? What are the terms of Yesterday?s hope, I ask? Is there sense that Yesterday?s world might include The Treatment Access Campaign, for example? Image if at the conclusion of the film we had been provided a few seconds of footage of the treatment access demonstrations that took place in Durban during the International AIDS Conference held there?
The most astonishing turn away from the possibility of history is Yesterday herself. Darrell Roodt has explained the film?s title comes from a Zulu naming custom, where people give their children names like Confidence, Innocent or Tomorrow. The portal of history is open. Roodt even has Yesterday explain that her father gave her the name because he believed yesterday to have been better than today. This is the beginning of a critique that could have shown viewers how the AIDS epidemic follows the contours of the history of a place, illuminating the mechanisms of social suffering. But the reason Roodt likes the name is for its ?beautiful melancholic reverberations? and not because it suggests a dissatisfaction with the present that could open it to the possibility of new tomorrows.
Yesterday?s name reminds me of the one given another great fictional AIDS character, Prior Walter from Tony Kushner?s stage play Angels in America, the film version of which was released on HBO earlier this year. As a prophet with a name that can be traced back to the 13 th Century and beyond, Prior has one foot in the past and the other in the future. As a gay man living with HIV in the United States he also knows what it is like to look at the world from the margins. While not immune to certain nostalgic romances, Kushner places Prior at the intersection of numerous historical, political, sexual and mystical forces so that we cannot avoid knowing that his is a constructed world and there is room for struggle. At the end of the play/film, Prior, having lived with HIV for five years addresses the following speech to the audience: ?this disease will be the end of many of us, not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won?t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.? (see reference 2 below). The time has come, I think, to give Yesterday the citizenship she has claimed following years of struggle for her rights.
I am inclined to slightly revise the diagnosis the Sangoma provides Yesterday and say that the problem with ?Yesterday? is that it is not angry when it has every right and need to be. Perhaps the Singh/Roodt team will consider making a sequel, one of the more positive possible outcomes of the success the film is now enjoying. ?Tomorrow? will show Yesterday working with other women in Okhahlamba and members of the local hospital there to set up an anti-retroviral treatment program ahead of the scheduled government roll-out. Which is indeed happening. It will show how not all the men in the community are absent, hostile, and sexually violent but actually work to educate the community about the epidemic. Which is indeed happening. And Beauty will participate in theatre productions with other children in which she will be able to voice her experience as a child affected by HIV/AIDS. Which is indeed happening. ?Tomorrow? will not pay homage to the moral strength of South African women to deal with suffering but to the history of collective struggle and resistance that have place South African women at the forefront of social transformation. This is citizenship and its time has come.
References:
1. South African Department of Health (2004) National HIV and Syphilis Antenatal Sero-Prevalence Survey in South Africa 2003. Directorate: Health Systems Research, Research Coordination and Epidemiology.
2. Kushner, Tony (1994) Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (Part Two: Perestroika). New York: Theatre Communications Group, p.148.
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