The Brooklyn Rail

As poet and theorist Fred Moten reminds us, “The history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” I revisit this phrase like a mantra the week of this writing—the same week that ushers in Donald Trump’s baffling second inauguration as President of the United States. While the future of the country lies uncertain save for its running institutional commitments to structural racism, queerphobia, and misogyny, plus the Damoclean threat of economic decline—Meanwhile, the latest release by Emmy-nominated documentary studio Aubin Pictures, has proven itself a necessary salve. I’ll admit: watching this film during a whirlwind week of social and political chaos had the same effect as staunching a long-running bleed. At least for now.

Directed by Catherine Gund and described as a “docu-poem in six verses,” Meanwhile is a gorgeous, quietly energetic, and moving meditation on Black resilience and world-making in the face of interminable violence. The film follows several artists, community members, activists, and allies as they contemplate how to build lives and heal in a society that seems to demand Black and Brown pain in exchange for citizenship. In Meanwhile, art-making allows opportunities to not only act in service of change, but to rest, take heed, and change course; to remember that love can give and take energy in equal doses (or, as filmmaker Arthur Jafa’s own documentary-style homage to the absurd, terrifying, and joyful bricolage of experience that makes up a Black life lived might offer: “love is the message”). As poet and writer of the film Jacqueline Woodson stresses in the narration, “There are so many ways to breathe.”

The film opens on credits over black. We hear a somewhat exasperated exchange of dialogue, an errant musical note, the static noise of shuffling equipment: the crew is busy, preparing for a shot. This film, we recognize at once, is deeply invested in the processual. “Two cameras are about to clap,” someone says, and the film cuts to archival footage of Puerto Rican poet and writer Miguel Algarín. His words form the organizing premise of the documentary: “When I see what you see / the space between us disappears, / but I still despair, / because I do not know if you’ve done what I did / in order to see what you see.”

A ticking clock pre-laps into the main title, Meanwhile, against short spells of measured exhales. We will return to this breathing motif several times, reminding us of the urgency of space-making, of staying grounded when things inevitably fall apart. Then, two definitions of the word “meanwhile” appear: in the intervening period of time (sequential); and at the same time (simultaneous). The film deftly sets up its terms in the first few minutes: those who perform creative, activist labor must not only do it alongside chaos, in community, but also do it between caught breaths. Woodson’s narration elaborates this further: “Even in the fire, we can’t extricate ourselves: we’re all connected.”

The film then moves in short (perhaps too short at times) vignettes between archival footage and audio of artists and thinkers like James Baldwin, Nina Simone, and Muhammad Ali; to abstract scenes of artwork and bodywork (a recurring piece depicting a woman’s head trapped in a plastic bag of water before she bursts free and gasps is particularly haunting); to documentary-style interviews with creative workers like photographer Amber Ford or multimedia artist Nate Lewis; and to news accounts detailing police brutality and increased incidences of violence after Trump’s 2016 election win, all scored with meditative soundscapes composed by Grammy-winning musician Meshell Ndegeocello.

These juxtapositions of scenes and audio can be both jarring and gentle—the film revels in transitions. There are many scenes of people moving, traveling through subways, trains, cars, always with deep intention. Meanwhile’s commitment to an ethos of transience, of languishing in waystations, means that we revisit the same artists in various stages of the creative process—like musicians Josh Quat and Daniel Alexander Jones, who adapt words from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon into song and lyrics (“May as well be a rainbow,” as in the variance of Black skin colors).

In the third and most pivotal section, “Unrequited Love,” we’re introduced to a standout vignette: a kinetic portrait of dancers Tushrik Fredericks and Shamel Pitts, who move together intimately and in sync against a lavender backdrop. Their choreography, revisited throughout the latter half of the film, evokes a novel and visionary kind of masculinity—one premised on kindness, care, and reciprocity. The dance lends a utopic, almost fantastical radiance to the entire work, helping to render the film as, in director Gund’s words, a document of a “process of liberation.”

The stakes that Meanwhile elaborates are, quite simply, life and death. I’m reminded of theorist Saidiya Hartman’s theme of “redressing the pained body” in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Black pain lives on as the “history that hurts.” These losses must be recognized and articulated before they can be redressed. Attendance to the body’s memory of violence is, in fact, what re-members it, makes it again whole and capable of pleasure. Meanwhile’s avant-garde expressionism and cinéma verité approaches remind us of the very real, bodily urgencies that animate creative labor. This “countermemory” refutes a rigid, linear narrative of racial progress that erases hard-won histories of Black activism and struggle. Revisiting this history constructs what Hartman calls “a bridge between the living and the dead”—a bridge that allows artists and activists in the film like Ivy Young to share memories and photographs of gone-but-not-forgotten family members, friends, and colleagues who have passed in struggle, while still working toward a reparative future.

As long as there has been Black containment, there will be Black resistance. The breath, like the pen and the sword, is a tool: in times of crisis, we “breathe through the panic and get to the next step,” as Young instructs. Like Buddhist tonglen practice, Meanwhile breathes in suffering to breathe out the promise of peace. This is the cyclical poetics of redress: revisit the pain—say its name—to begin anew.