I'll Remember You As You Were, not as What You'll Become

Sky Hopinka changed my life when I saw this at MoMA the summer after I graduated high school. It was 2022, in the pandemic’s aftermath, and I was about to start my first semester of college in a few weeks and in the midst of roaming around New York before heading back to Houston, trying to get my money's worth from a student ticket I'd paid for at MoMA.

In this section of the museum, the walls were painted a migraine-inducing white, but the screening room for this short video was painted pitch black. The girl at the end of the dark hallway led me to a seating area and had piercings on every piercable part of her face. I arrived midway through the video and took a seat on a black wooden bench a few feet from the screen.

A flashing cross with red chemtrails disappeared and reappeared over spoken word poetry about growing up in rural Oklahoma. The reciter retraced moments of being uninvited to sleepovers because of her hair's frizz, moments of riding in the passenger seat of a random stranger's pickup truck with a few beers in hand. The mundane, muted, nozzled descriptions of unbelonging were something I'd known too well, having a funny Muslim name and a body beginning to sprout in the rubble of a genocide (*1), as other museum-goers came and went into this room, talking of Michelangelo.

It felt like just a few minutes of video revealed a generational wound I had but didn't know existed, a wound that contained forgotten history, erased traditions, peoples routinely characterized as barbaric through scientifically justified nose and head measurements -- wounds that live in hotwired amygdalas and reddened teeth, that are attempted to be stitched by zippers on overstuffed suitcases that carried all belongings, but a wound that reappeared when Bangladeshis are referred to as "rats" and the word Muslim became synonymous with everything that was wrong with the world. I didn't know it, but that wound had alcohol poured on it a few times, and it was this video that, I think, helped me realize that.

Granted, there are obvious differences between this film and my life. Sky Hopinka is trying to communicate something about Native American, not Bangladeshi, identity and culture, and the Bangladeshi diaspora is not currently living under a settler colonial regime (*2). But there was a common denominator I recognized -- it was something about just how hard it felt to belong, to feel torn between two different worlds, to hover through life with some sort of Du Boisian or Fanonian double consciousness, and to yearn for some magical Tracy Chapman moment, where finally, I Had A Feeling That I Belonged.

But simultaneously, Sky Hopinka does something magical in the first half. I won't say what it is because any description of it doesn't feel like it will do it justice, but it turns everything I said above on its head, sort of, and reveals to me a dialectical beauty that percolates through colonial resistance.

I really don't know what else to write. This made me realize that film, video, and art have the capacity to communicate things that language simply can't convey, things that can only be felt, and when you try to put something together, it only comes across through chopped and fragmented speech. This is beautiful, and for anyone who has felt the sting of colonialism and its shadows, the way it twists and rinks out your gut flora, it might give you some affect that language does not have the capacity to describe and could only be spoken of in caesuraed and stumbling sentences.
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(*1) This Wikipedia page on the Bangladeshi Genocide is stellar. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_genocide
(*2) Although Bangladeshis were living under a settler colonial regime prior to the regime's dissolution. Nonetheless, there is significant debate about whether it was actually "settler colonialism" in the way historians have defined the term.