To Hold and Be Held

I hate beginnings.

Not the concept but the conventions around them. The authority and historical determination they command, the kinds of beginnings that cannot conceive of time, space, and life as anything other than linear. These beginnings evoke images of a flag planted into the earth on behalf of a conquering empire, a seal of approval, jump-starting a history—a narrative—of conquest and ownership. They are often just plain dull; think of your typical origin story in Hollywood franchise films: uncomplicated and always predictable.

Consider the film that opens with the sensation of multiple moments in time, as unending as soil gripped and poured between your hands. Hope Strickland’s film, If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever) (2021), starts with the sound of wind passing through trees and subtle sounds of breath being drawn in and out. The scene cuts back and forth from black to this image, quickly and softly; a Black woman’s hand lets a fist full of soil pour between her fingers. She is the film’s protagonist; she and the mostly disembodied narrator reciting the film’s poem (presumably voiced by Hope Strickland) are the audience’s guides into the story. We hear in the background, as the scene cuts back to black, gentle humming followed by archival footage of an oceanic body of water. The frame gives the sense of looking out from a window on a boat. Layered over this is a duplicate of the same footage with a slightly larger aspect ratio; the images flutter over one another. Cut to black, then to the film’s title over the still image of a cotton flower.

If I could name you myself meditates on the cotton plant’s delicacy and its historical implications, yearning to treat what has been untended. The film feels literary; Hope’s narration supports the film with a poem, which—along with assembled sounds and images—felt like reading an Octavia E. Butler novel, by way of its jumping timeline, and the saturated imagery of fruit and foliage, like a Jamaica Kincaid story. When I chose this WUFF entry to review, it meant agreeing to slip into an experience of time as a physical place. I felt like I was going somewhere where memories had textures and hands to grip. A scene depicting the silhouette of the Black woman moisturizing her body reminded me of how my mother would lotion me as a child: both lovingly and vigorously, or, borrowing the lines from the film, “warm and rough.”¹ Hope’s film invites you to conceive of time as an amalgamation of beginnings, middles, and ends, layered with rest in the face of oppression, a reprieve in light of suffering entangled in earth, fruits, and flowers. If I could name you myself surrenders to pleasure and kinship in place of all-too-common representations of blackness and cotton—unfettered violence, suffering, and hardship. Instead, the film visualizes the dense emotions born from recollecting these rituals of care and profound love.

Hope’s use of archival footage—intersected and superimposed over images of the Black woman eating, breathing, and resting—succeeds in depicting a history that does not exist in stasis, that is neither finished nor dead. Archival footage of cotton weaving machines is overwhelmed by the saturated colour of the cotton flowers in the background. Archival footage, as representative of things that are no longer, is confronted with the sounds of laughing children and the wind breezing through landscapes. We return to our protagonist, the Black woman, cutting and eating what looks like a cherimoya, engrossing you with the underlying sounds of both spent and bated breath as she consumes the fruit. This is the only moment in the film when the sound is identifiably diegetic, connected to what’s being visually portrayed; for the viewer it is profoundly grounding. Together, the combined use of archival sound and images assembled become evidence of life, of the ongoing. The film’s poem is strategically timed throughout the archival footage, slipping in, out, and through the trappings of traditional film methods as a medium for history and entertainment, often designed with anti-Black logics. The entire film embodies a lullaby-like groove, affecting in the way Dionne Brand describes Black music: “leav[ing] you open, and up in the air … an opening to another life tangled up in this one but opening.”²

Consider the film that opens with the sensation of multiple moments in time, as unending as soil gripped and poured between your hands.

While Hope shows us that history is alive and embodied through rituals of deep love and care passed down by ancestral creole women, she does not deny the desire for tangible contact with them, for a shared space in the literal sense with these ancestors. The title, If I could name you myself, is very intentional: the deep care the Black woman shows towards her own body is an act meant to translate back to these ancestral women who, without question, endured pain and suffering as colonized bodies. I feel connected to the following last stanzas of the poem, thinking of my mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, whose Black bodies have been tormented in some way or another by Western colonial and economic imperialism:

If I could name you myself and truly
If I could raise you myself and truly
If I could hold you myself and truly.³

This slip into the place of time and memory is a beautiful and emotionally exerting psychic commute. As her film concludes with archival footage of an ancestral Black woman weaving and looking shyly towards the gaze of the camera, you are left with the gripping impression that you are both holding and being held. Perhaps not in the way we truly desire…but holding and held even so.

Feature Image: Hope Strickland, If I could name you myself (I would hold you forever) , 2021, video still, courtesy of the artist.

Image Description: still image of a cotton plant superimposed over an industrial weaving machine processing cotton.

Mirella-Kami Ntahonsigaye is a Ph.D. student in Communication and Media Studies at Carleton University, residing in the unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Peoples. Her research looks into black audio-visual media, media history, and black futurity, focusing on the Black Horror genre, with a growing interest in critical ecologies.

1. Strickland, Hope. If I Could Name You Myself (I Would Hold You Forever), 2021
2. Brand, Dionne. “Jazz”, in Bread Out of Stone (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1994), 161.
3. Strickland, Hope. If I Could Name You Myself (I Would Hold You Forever), 2021