22 August 2015

What have you done to Celia?


Coming this Fall 2015. To Telemundo. Hold your breath.
Given the clips I've just watched, I already have reservations about "Celia," a multi-episode series of her life. Anyone who knows me well knows I DREAM about Celia Cruz. I have all her recordings. Read about her and read her "autobiography," which must be put in quotations as it has proven to be as reliable as Katharine Hepburn's ME: Stories of My Life - something disseminated from the old PR departments of MGM.

Telemundo's choice of the title role, a Puerto Rican actress of a certain light hue, shows me we've not come far since that Latino comedian made a vile, racist remark about Michelle Obama looking like a monkey. "Latin America," to use that erroneous term for the moment, is more color struck, more obsessed with the brown-bag tests than their counterparts among the Yankees. Ok, they are equally obsessed. They are all cut from the same cultural cloth that is racist Europe.

From the clips, the Cuban revolutionaries look like fanatics; but no hint in the preview that Celia herself was a fellow-traveler of the communists and twice during the 1950's was barred from entering the US with her band for being so [as US State Dept documents released after her death revealed].

I wonder why the long-planned project between Whoopi Goldberg, a feeble mind but decent actress, Cristina Saralegui, and her husband could never be greenlit. Goldberg is not conventionally Latino but she has the coloring and the African body to contrast the actress Telemundo has chosen. Just over 10 years after La Reina's death, it is jarring to see a lighter-skinned, Vogue-bodied woman portray a particular AFRICAN. The light-skinned Puerto Rican plays the younger Celia, while Cuban singer, Aymée Nuviola, another African of Cuban nationality, is reported to play the role of Celia later in life. Nuviola is a force of Nature as a musician in her own right. She would not have had a voice dub her singing parts, and as a sonera - improviser - she is in a league of her own. Yet it will be jarring to see even her play the role of a dark-skinned African in a racist Spanish society.

Haila Mompié, a dark-skinned African singer of Cuban nationality, would have been a wise choice as the young Celia. Haila, as she is known professionally, even produced a tribute CD to Celia in Cuba [that could not attribute itself to Celia]. It is a beautiful rendition of Celia's classics. Like Goldberg, she seems not to have been an obvious choice.

But this is why the term Latin America needs, at minimum, unpacking. In white hands, it pretends to be many things, but never African. It lauds in romantic tones the indigenous communities it continues to exterminate. It holds up Spain or Portugal as Mother Countries, or views a British-German woman as their queen, when its populations are in no way British, German, Spaniard, or Portuguese: its rulers have been.

It is just as if we called Algeria French or Rhodesia British, when 80%-90% of its populations were African in the lands of their ancestors. We really must stop and look at these crimes.

I have been unpacking the Latin American/Caribbean region. Like historian Ali Mazrui, I would consider much of the Caribbean literal extensions of Africa, due solely to Europe intervention in the kidnapping of Africans and the total extermination of the native populations; and the region's whitened minority populations, recent imports to stave off another Haitian revolt and solidify white supremacy, a European counter-measure.

Just as I would look at other parts of the Latin American region as categorical First Nations, indigenous, despite the European governments and landowners in power.

Here I go further: brainwashed and white-washed peoples of the region, including Africans who should know better, might argue they are "all Cuban. Just Cuban," or, "just Mexican," "Brazilian," and so forth and so on, despite what their own racist governments do in practice: and I do include the Cuban revolution here. For a country overwhelmingly African, the absence of African leadership is telling.

Nationality has replaced religion as an opiate of the African masses in the diaspora: false flags and passports, when our condition is predictable and indices common from New York City to the southern tip of Brazil, and then some. Since our services were rendered useless at the end of chattel slavery, our presence has been a constant problem best solved by national campaigns to shoot us, lock us up, malign us at every turn in the popular press. Most attempts to actualize us, show our history, or condition, are silenced. That is why I believe Goldberg's project was vetoed and no one ever seriously considered Haila to play Celia.

Looking at the previews of "Celia," our masters really haven't come far from those times of the 40's, 50's and into the 1960's when African musicians could not be shown on their own record albums nor plays on mainstream - read, white - radio stations. They needed the likes of Pat Boone and Elvis to cover African music, and thus, stars were made and talent erased. "Celia" is on a long continuum of propaganda to erase Africa and its gifts.