INTRODUCTION CONTRIBUTORS ABOUT

Invented Circumstances

Nnamdi Dylan Igbokwe

Content warning: racism and racial slurs

We entered a short, dark hall. I could hear music and voices. Stilted voices. We stepped out into a space lit only by three large screens. I walked through the area first, finding a seemingly separate piece of art in the corner. A photograph of a man and a quote. I’d later find out it was a companion piece to the main one. I didn’t yet recognise the man in the photo as Henry Otley Beyer, the ‘father of anthropology in the Philippines.’ I found a nice central position on the back wall to watch the screens. Two Asian Australian actors were performing a scene. It was funny, but in that awkward kind of way only something that’s already been referred to as art can get away with. Whether the acting was stilted and unnatural by design remained to be seen. I watched the entirety of the piece; all twenty-seven minutes of the three-channel work by artist Andy Butler. ‘Living Truthfully in Invented Circumstances’ was the title. The piece features four Asian Australian actors, including the artist, mostly recreating scenes from pre-Hayes code Hollywood films and genre films set in, or depicting characters from Southeast Asia, that were shown in Manila theatres during the ’30s while the Philippines was still under the colonial rule of the US. It plays on a seemingly never-ending loop, without a cut to black. As far as I could tell, there was no discernible ending. I watched as other viewers came and went. When I finally walked out it wasn’t for long, as after about five to ten minutes in the rest of the space, looking through everything else, I went back to sit for another ten minutes with the piece before leaving ACCA. Despite the amount of time I spent with the piece, I didn’t find it particularly affecting, or consistently perplexing. I didn’t like it necessarily. But I didn’t not like it either. 

As I left ACCA I’d decided only two things about the work. The first was that yes, the stilted and strange, even dreamy, acting was intentional. The second was that it was probably the piece I would end up writing about, despite the fact that at the time, I had next to nothing to say in relation to it. It’s only now, weeks later, after reading about the piece, and the artist, and the Henry Otley Beyer archive that I’ve found my point. Sort of. 

White saviourism has always just been another justification, not dissimilar to manifest destiny. Only one of them is widely seen as being foolish today. White superiority is stronger than God. 

I remember seeing ‘Green Book’ in theatres in either early 2019 or late 2018. I enjoyed it. I remember exiting the theatre with my grandma and stopping at her cousin’s house on the drive back. Sitting on a couch, holding a glass of coke, I listened as they talked. Eventually the movie came up, and my grandma spoke about the various acts of racial violence she was glad didn’t make it into the film. I was glad too. This was a little before the white saviour conversation around the film got started. The spurning of Hollywood’s white saviour narratives became a trend for a short while. There was even a skit on Seth Myer’s late-night show. 

I was heading into my third year at high school and had met many a white saviour among my own peers as well as the staff. While they aspired to far less than genocide or subjugation (while not necessarily disagreeing with it), their feelings of white superiority were still heavily intact. I’d go on to meet many more. 

One was a substitute history teacher. A little later in 2019.

Going to school in the country, there were far from enough non-white kids to make the prospect of saying ‘nigga’ a scary one to white students. Therefore, many white students said ‘nigga.’ Which is why I wasn’t bothered when I walked into history class one day and was asked ‘What up my nigga?’ by a guy across the room. We weren’t friends, but I knew him. Luckily though, the aforementioned substitute teacher was there to rescue me from racism. Appalled, she pounced on him. 

‘What are you? Some kind of white supremacist?’ He gave her some attitude and she sent him out. Pretty standard classroom antics, save for the initial accusation. After he was gone though, she turned to me, clearly noticing my racial pride deficiency. ‘You just let him call you that, do you?’ Wise as she was, she understood I needed to be saved from myself. ‘Have you ever even heard of slavery? Or do you just hate yourself?’ This went on for a few minutes, loudly in front of the class. ‘Is that what you are? You’re just a nigger huh?’ Unfortunately, I did not seize this golden opportunity to cuss out a teacher and perhaps be at least a little in the right. Instead, I just quietly told her she didn’t have the n-word pass. The thing that bothered me most about it though happened an hour afterwards. As we were all waiting for our next class to start, I overheard some of my classmates talking angrily about what had happened. Only not a single person mentioned the teacher having a go at me. Instead, they were all concerned with the pure injustice of the other boy being called a white supremacist. 

Sometimes it takes a more benevolent form. Recently, I was at the NGV with a friend when an older man called me over and said something vaguely racist. Unbothered, I laughed it off and walked away. My friend, however, insisted on telling the security about it despite my protestations. They still decided that, for some reason, they knew better than me in a situation they’d never experienced. Their suddenly apparent feelings of superiority on full display. Understandable. Whiteness and superiority are inextricably linked. The concept of a white race didn’t exist until the seventeenth century, and only came into existence as a means to separate slave owners from their property. Until then, African slaves were deprived of rights since they weren’t Christian. After people began inducting their indentured labourers into the Christian faith, there needed to be another legal excuse to hold them in captivity for their entire lifetime. 

After the US colonised the Philippines, Henry Otley Beyer apparently deemed the place interesting and wanted to go, after seeing a human zoo of Filipinos in 1904. As a working anthropologist, Beyer was interested in the country for its people. Anthropology is sometimes referred to as ‘the child of colonialism,’ as it emerged as a result of the colonial expansion of Europe. Considered now to be the ‘science of humanity’ it’s been anything but that until recently. Instead, it’s been the study of the ‘other.’ An ‘exotic’ and ‘primitive’ other, as seen through the lens of a European/American white male. The US saw the colonisation of the Philippines as a benevolent act. A chance to lead and guide the inferior race. A responsibility to elevate them. 

‘Take up the white man’s burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.’
-Rudyard Kipling

When I was in Year 8, we read a book called ‘Nanberry’ and discussed Australia’s colonisation. In an effort to either preserve our innocence or sense of national identity, the violence of the colonisation of Australia was mostly omitted from these discussions. Sitting at a table with several of my classmates and filling in a worksheet on the topic, someone brought this up. Quickly though, the discussion stopped being about violence and instead became about the ethics of colonisation and why it mattered now. ‘Discussion’ is perhaps generous. Most of it was just a collective whine of ‘I don’t wanna learn about the first fleet again,’ and ‘That happened so long ago. I get that it was bad, but it doesn’t matter now.’ One of them, a friend of mine, didn’t quite agree with the second statement. 

‘I don’t really think it was bad. If it wasn’t for Captain Cook landing here, the Aboriginals would still be running around in the bush.’ The whole table was listening to him now. ‘It’s thanks to the British that Australia wasn’t left behind in the Stone Age.’ Now it’s worth mentioning that this boy was partly British. Something he was, for some reason, very proud of. The way he talked about England you’d think it was still a global superpower. He was also constantly wrong about history due to this inexplicable pride. Something most of the class was pretty aware of. ‘The English have never lost a battle you know,’ he said once while we were studying the Battle of Hastings earlier that year. Despite this, most of the table was quick to agree that yes, the British had indeed saved Australia by taking it out of the hands of savages. For the people at the table, this remained their opinion all throughout the unit. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that some or most of them still hold that opinion today. Sometimes I wonder if that would still be the case if we’d read a different book that year. 

It wasn’t just lands that were colonised. It was minds too. 

‘It was worse when the colonial child was exposed to images of his world as mirrored in the written languages of his coloniser. Where his own native languages were associated in his impressionable mind with low status, humiliation, corporal punishment, slow-footed intelligence and ability or downright stupidity, non-intelligibility and barbarism, this was reinforced in by the world he met in the works of such geniuses of racism as a Rider Haggard or a Nicholas Monsarrat.’
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Histories and studies of colonised peoples and cultures, written and curated by the colonisers are consistently preserved and collected by western countries. The National Library of Australia purchased the Henry Otley Beyer collection in 1971. Their website describes the core of the collection as a compilation of typescripts on the ethnography of the Philippines compiled by Beyer. They apparently ‘provide a valuable record of Philippine life in the early twentieth century, before US influences became pervasive’. Most white people can only stand to look at other cultures through their own lens.

Films with a focus on race are often presented from a white viewpoint. This is often defended with claims of historical accuracy. I remember watching ‘The Last Samurai’ in high school during a history class. When the teacher asked why I wasn’t paying attention I told her the movie felt a little too ‘white saviour’ for my liking. She assured me that it was a true story. Ignoring the Americanisation of the narrative (Tom Cruise’s character is based on a member of the French military), or the several other major inaccuracies, which I wasn’t aware of at the time, I found it interesting that this was a story deemed worthy of being told. Why? Because a white guy was central to the events? More perplexing though was why the teacher chose this movie for us to watch. We were learning about feudal Japan and ‘The Last Samurai’ takes place shortly after the end of feudalism in Japan. I suppose it’s probably easier for a classroom full of white students to engage with a film that has a white protagonist. Or maybe she chose it because was the most popular Hollywood movie about pre-modern Japan because white audiences find it easier to engage with a film that has a white protagonist. 

Narratives like that of ‘The Last Samurai’ only perpetuate and reinforce ideas of white superiority. Historical accuracy is a bullshit defence. Countless liberties are taken in order to placate white viewers. The lack of violence in ‘Green Book’ downplays the entire film. All the way down to the title. ‘The Negro Motorist Green Book’, which the movie was named after, was an important tool for African American road trippers, as it told them which towns and roadside establishments were safe to travel through. The exclusion of this kind of widespread violence is a clever omission that allows the film to focus on more palatable and less confronting expressions of racism. These media portrayals are reflective of how our society still relates to race: ignorance and a perpetuation of white supremacist ideas, even in more progressive productions and circles. 

I returned to ACCA on a Saturday afternoon. Seeking resolution of some kind, I’d gone to see Andy Butler’s piece again. Again, I walked through the dimly lit room with its large, suspended works. I could hear the audio of the work I’d come to see echoing into the room. Almost like it was beckoning me in. Still, I tried to spend an appropriate amount of time looking at the other works before moving on. I passed through the dark curtain into the room containing ‘Living Truthfully in Invented Circumstances’ and found an older white couple sitting down. While there was space on the ottoman next to them, I opted to stand at the back of the room. I watched the whole thing again. This time I got it more. I think I did. I felt it more. I was glad to have seen it. I was glad it existed. I hoped more people would engage with it while it was on display. The strange acting, the different scenes, the historical relevance. It was all there. And yet I felt no resolution. I don’t know why I expected to. There was no ending.