Themes of Autonomy and Coercion in Get Out and The Girl with All the Gifts

The Girl with All the Gifts opens on a scene of a dark and gritty prison. We hear a girl’s childish voice counting. The girl, Melanie, dresses in prison orange and climbs into a wheelchair immediately as we hear a jarring klaxon and the harsh sounds of male voices: “Wakey, wakey! We’re on the move!” “Rise and shine, you friggin abortions!” Men with guns enter Melanie’s cell and strap her into her wheelchair as she wishes them good morning. They secure her hands, feet, head. “Cuffs and straps to be verified manually,” she reminds them before they wheel her out to a long line of children also strapped to wheelchairs. We learn that these children are hybrid zombies (called hungries) and that a woman working at this prison for children, Dr. Caldwell, is using the children to search for a cure / vaccine for zombiism. Dr. Caldwell believes the children are not really human but are only mimicking humans. Her experiments require the deaths of the children.

In contrast, in Get Out, Chris comes to the Armitage home willingly and stays for over half the film as his discomfort grows. When he does try to leave, the family prevents him from leaving, keeping him as a captive for their own and their neighbors’ use, as they have kept other black visitors. They secure him to a chair and play a video that tells him what they’ve done before (kidnap black visitors, including one whose body is currently being possessed / used by their grandfather to prolong his life and health) and what they plan to do now (give Chris’ eyes to a neighbor who wants his artistic talent).  

It is imperative that both Chris and Melanie are black (in the book The Girl with All the Gifts, she was not black). Chris and Melanie are two in a long line of white exploitation of black bodies. In “Why Get Out Is the Best Movie Ever Made About American Slavery,” Steven Thrasher says: “In Peele’s hands, I found my eyes looking at Chris’s floating body and thinking about stolen Africans who were experimented upon (or thrown overboard), Henrietta Lacks’ stolen HeLa cells, Emmett Till’s little 14-year-old lynched body, music and sports stars being extracted from Black neighborhoods for white profit, the government not treating syphilis in hundreds of Black men in Tuskegee to study them—and, back to Chris, about to be lobotomized” (Thrasher).

These movies aren’t just reminders that white people have devalued and used black bodies. They’re a reminder that that exploitation is ongoing. The original ending of Get Out shows Chris in prison, punished for the necessary actions he took to escape the Armitage family. This mirrors the beginning of The Girl with All the Gifts where Melanie is imprisoned, punished for nothing more than the circumstances of her birth. These scenes are a grim reminder of the prison industrial complex, where, according to the NAACP, “African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites” (NAACP). The 13th amendment that is often cited as the ending of slavery, states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (Constitution Project, emphasis mine). Slavery has not ended, and African Americans are still enslaved by the American prison system.

Get Out was written before the election of Donald Trump but released after he took office. Similarly, The Girl With All the Gifts (a British film) was written before Brexit but released after the referendum. Both speak to xenophobia and racial fears of changing populations. Get Out was a reminder during the Obama administration that racism had not been cured. A large portion of the population had reacted very badly to seeing a black man in a position of power and even white liberals still clung tightly to their privilege. The Girl with All the Gifts spoke to a nation nervous about refugees they dehumanized and saw as invaders. As a soldier lies dying and fearful for the new zombie-fied world, Melanie reassures him: “I’m sorry, sergeant. I’m so sorry. It’s going to be all right. It’s not over, it’s just not yours anymore” (The Girl with All the Gifts).

Just before this scene, Dr. Caldwell tries to convince Melanie to sacrifice her life in order to create a vaccine and save humanity (a humanity that obviously excludes her). Melanie asks her if she thinks the hybrid “hungry” children are alive and human. When Dr. Caldwell answers “yes, you’re alive,” Melanie responds, “Then why should it be us who die for you?”

The trope of black sacrifice leads us to expect Melanie to give up her life. She is humanity’s only hope. And when we watch the growling and mindless “hungries” lurching in search of blood from an animal or even another human, we know something must be done. Experimenting on children is wrong. Using them to create a vaccine is wrong. But if the child gives up her life willingly? It is further complicated because Melanie is black. So we’re expecting this trope. We’ve seen it before

But Melanie says, “Then why should it be us who die for you?”

Why?

 

Works Cited

Constitute, www.constituteproject.org/constitution/United_States_of_America_1992.

“Criminal Justice Fact Sheet.” NAACP, www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/.

McCarthy, Colm, director. The Girl with All the Gifts. Lionsgate. https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B06VXZJ4CJ/ref=atv_dp_pb_core?autoplay=1&t=141

Peele, Jordan, director. Get Out. Amazon / Get Out, Universal PIctures Home Entertainment, 2017, www.amazon.com/Get-Out-Daniel-Kaluuya/dp/B06Y1H48K7/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=get out&qid=1547931633&s=Prime Video&sr=1-2.

Thrasher, Steven. “Why ‘Get Out’ Is the Best Movie Ever Made About American Slavery.” Esquire, Esquire, 23 Jan. 2018, www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a53515/get-out-jordan-peele-slavery/.

Daughters of the Dust is not exactly straightforward. While it takes place over the course of one day, time shifts in memories and flashbacks, family history interconnected and woven together like the braid Nana’s mother gave her before they were separated. This uncertainty can leave the viewer feeling off-balance but it also draws the viewer in, forcing them to pay close attention, to become more than a viewer.  In Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash creates liminal spaces and liminal symbols that seem to teeter on the edge of pulling the family closer together or pushing them apart.

When I use the word liminal, I do not mean only that which is just perceptible or in-between;  I also mean that which is at a median, that which is in the middle, and that which is interconnected. Dash’s film interrogates all of these liminalities and often plays them off each other. She shifts these liminalities against each other like the pieces of glass in the kaleidoscope are shifted against each other in an early scene, creating a beautiful picture, rich with meaning.

Time itself feels liminal. It is kaleidoscopic and shifting. This is not just because of the flashbacks and time shifts. It is because the setting occupies a transitional space. It looks both to the past and to the future. This is also the tension of the film. Unable to exist peaceably on this threshold, the family is filled with contention. Nana is worried about their journey to the mainland. Eli is angry and off balance because Eula has been raped, and he is afraid that the child she’s pregnant with is not his. Nearly the entire family is angry that Yellow Mary has come home although she’s “ruint.” Viola is concerned that the family is not Christian. Hagar is angry that Nana seems to be holding the family back and insisting on old traditions. Nana sees this struggle in the family and calls for Eula’s unborn child to come down and heal them.

The child is itself the most obvious liminal marker. She is unborn, marking the space between conception and birth and also marking the spiritual belief in the continuity of birth, life, and death. As Nana tells Eli: “The ancestor and the womb, they one, they with us” (Dash). Nana’s indigo-dyed hands, bottle tree, and tin bucket full of “scraps of memories” are also markers of this in-between space, a place of memory and spirituality and a tie to family and Africa (Dash).

Ironically, though Viola is rigidly religious and opposed to Nana’s spirituality, when Hagar speaks against Nana and Nana’s spiritual practices, it is Viola who stands up for her, putting Hagar in her place—another in-between place, half in and half out of the family: “you married into this family,” Viola reminds her (Dash). The film emphasizes familial relationships and alliances. While most of the family ostracizes Yellow Mary and some even imply that seeing her will kill Nana, Nana reacts with overwhelming love when she sees her. Yellow Mary and Eula spend much of the day together, Yellow Mary telling Eula of her own experiences as a survivor of rape. It is a sort of lesson in resilience and survival. And Eula, when the other woman continue to shun Yellow Mary, finally has had enough, crying, “If you love yo’selves then love Yellow Mary cuz she a part of you just like we a part of our mothers.” She reminds them that if they hate Yellow Mary for being “ruint,” then they must hate her, they must hate themselves, their mothers, and their history for rape and slavery have “ruint” them all (Dash). Anglette K. M. Gourdine states “Each frame shared by these women forces the viewer to distinguish the scandalous from the scandalized. . . . Dash teeters these two women on the boundaries of invisibility and exposure, between dignified and scandalized, to meet shamelessly in the territory of political uncertainty” (Gourdine, 509).

An uncertain peace is reached. Nana gives her blessing to the family’s travels. Eula, Eli, and Yellow Mary stay behind. The unborn child narrator tells us that she is born before Nana dies. As we watch the boat carrying the Peazant family away from Ibo Landing, there is no certainty. They have entered another shifting space.

Work Cited

Angeletta K. M. Gourdine. “Fashioning the Body [as] Politic in Julie Dash’s ‘Daughters of the Dust.’” African American Review, vol. 38, no. 3, 2004, pp. 499–511. JSTOR, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1512450.

Dash, Julie, and Julie Dash. Daughters of the Dust. Kino International, 1992.

I initially approached Octavia Butler’s “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” with a bit of trepidation. Reading disability stories makes me nervous, especially when I’m reading them from authors I like. I’m always afraid I won’t like the author anymore by the end of the story. I’m afraid of the cliches that will show how much the author doesn’t like me. Will the disabled character be reduced to a platitude of darling and threadbare innocence, a backdrop against which the real characters are allowed to be genuine and heroic? Will the disabled character be a horror? The one-dimensional villain made bitter by the betrayal of his body? Will the disabled character reassure you? Serve to make you so grateful that this is not your life, this is not your body, this is not your mind, you are not diseased, you are pure? Will the disabled body be nothing more than a metaphor, a blackboard upon which the author and intended audience may scribble interpretations of their own existence? Will the story serve to remind me that I am not the intended audience?

The abled and ableist temptation with stories about disability is to interpret them as metaphors—the story isn’t, cannot be, about disability; it must be about some other social ill for which disability stands in as a metaphor.  It is my intention then to interpret the text straightforwardly first, in the context of crip theory, the intersection of anti-blackness and ableism, and the historical violence against disabled bodies and people of color via eugenics and institutionalization.

It is necessary to acknowledge that Octavia Butler herself was disabled. She was dyslexic and wrote and read very slowly (most articles that refer to her dyslexia, including the one linked, are themselves ableist and condescending). While it is unclear whether she was familiar with crip theory, “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” addresses concerns fundamental to crip theory and disability activism, such as eugenics and institutionalization. She even addresses frustrating and condescending ableist attitudes and internalized ableism, as demonstrated in this conversation between two characters:

“‘No ordinary person can concentrate on work the way our people can’

[…]

“‘What are you saying? That the bigots are right? That we have some special gift?’

“‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly a bad characteristic, is it?’

‘It’s what people say whenever one of us does well at something. It’s their way of denying us credit for our work.’”

(Butler, 55)

 

In Sami Schalk’s “Interpreting Disability Metaphor in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night,’” she, while giving credit to others who have analyzed the text as a metaphor only for race, points out that the intersection of race and disability plays an important role in the text. Though the text rarely refers to race, the character Alan describes his last name as Nigerian (Butler, 40). Schalk points out the many ways in which race, disability, and class intersect in the real world, resulting in similar oppressions to those DGD’s face in Butler’s story (144). DGDs are stereotyped as violent and unpredictable, facing discrimination and isolation, eventually only able to find companionship with each other. Likewise, both the disabled community and the black community face discrimination that often results in their deaths at the hands of the police. The intersection of blackness and disability is especially lethal.

The institutionalization of DGD’s—something which is viewed as inevitable—can be compared to the school to prison pipeline. No matter how well the DGD’s manage their illness, they will end up in an institution, and only the luckiest will go somewhere like Dilg, a cutting-edge institution described as a “retreat.” Most will end up at a place like the one where Naomi, Alan’s mother, was housed: “Places like that . . . well, sometimes if patients were really troublesome—especially the ones who kept breaking free—they’d put them in a bare room and let them finish themselves. The only things those places took good care of were the maggots, the cockroaches, and the rats” (Butler, 55). There is not much hope for DGDs, not many reasons to stay alive. Most are expected to be sterilized (another reference to eugenics, both of people of color and disabled people), and they voluntarily sterilize themselves. Beatrice, the woman at Dilg, refers to DGDs who reproduce as “irresponsible,” and says “Most DGDs have the sense not to marry each other and produce children. I hope you two aren’t planning to have any—in spite of our need” (Butler, 61). Alan states that “they should pass a law to sterilize the lot of us” (41). Internalized oppression is powerful.

“The Evening and the Morning and the Night” often feels hopeless and discouraging, and even the thread of hope Butler weaves into the story near the end seems tiny, making the reader question whether it will be enough, whether the characters will survive. She does not reassure us. But the hope is there, and it is in community. To survive, the DGDs must depend on one another. The paradigm shifts. As Schalk states: “The story’s move to offer the possibility of a different, but still meaningful life is critical to its intervention in terms of both disability and blackness, as disabled people and black people have both been assumed to have less to contribute to society and  to experience inherently more difficult lives. For people with disabilities, this sentiment is so severe that there is a pernicious cultural belief that people with certain kinds of disabilities are better off dead” (Schalk, 147).

 

Works Cited:

Butler, O. E. (2005). Bloodchild and other stories. New York: Seven Stories Press.

Lopez, German. “There Are Huge Racial Disparities in How US Police Use Force.” Vox.com, Vox Media, 14 Nov. 2018, http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938186/police-shootings-killings-racism-racial-disparities.

Mizner, Susan. “Police ‘Command and Control’ Culture Is Often Lethal – Especially for People With Disabilities.” American Civil Liberties Union, Aclu, 11 May 2018, http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/police-command-and-control-culture-often-lethal.

Perry, David. “Police Killings: the Price of Being Disabled and Black in America.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 22 June 2017, http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/22/police-killings-disabled-black-people-mental-illness.

“Phenomenal Writer Octavia E. Butler: From Dyslexic to Mastermind.” IAmPMAG, phenomenalmag.com/phenoms/phenomenal-artists/phenomenal-writer-octavia-e-butler-from-dyslexic-to-mastermind.

Schalk, Sami. “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night.’” African American Review, vol. 50, no. 2, 2017, pp. 139–151., doi:10.1353/afa.2017.0018.