“The Wig Is Off:” A Look Back at Haile Gerima’s “Bush Mama”
“Do you and your spouse reside together? Have you ever received non-cash gifts in the form of free rent, or free housing, free food…. Do you and your spouse reside together? Have you ever received non-cash gifts….” Prying, yet clinical in tone, these questions open the 1975 docudrama Bush Mama. Repeated ad nauseam in voiceover, and increasingly layered with the choppy sounds of a helicopter above, they evoke the surveillance state of a black community under siege by welfare administrators and corrupt police.
Through this lens, we meet Dorothy (the enigmatic Barbara O. Jones), slender and wide eyed, as she strolls down a bustling street, seemingly in a daze — until she is jolted alert by a little boy who tries to snatch her purse. A struggle ensues, but the boy is victorious, absconding with Dorothy’s purse and what seems to be the last of her hope.
At times more symbol than distinct personality, Dorothy embodies the constant anxiety and paranoia of living hand to mouth at the mercy of the California welfare system. She spends her time alternating between trips to the welfare office, caring for her young daughter Luann (Susan Williams), or staring wistfully out of the window of the apartment she once shared with her partner TC (Johnny Weathers). A Vietnam vet who suffered from night terrors and alcoholism and struggled to find employment after the war, TC has been arrested and imprisoned on false charges. In some ways, Dorothy’s story may sound unoriginal — a textbook iteration of the so-called “welfare queens” that emerged from the conservative, largely anti-black policies of the Nixon and Reagan administrations — ‚and that’s part of the tragedy that defines her and her loved ones.
Dorothy’s only comforts are her two friends, Simmi and Molly, and yet her friendship with each puts her at odds with the other. Simmi’s embrace of Pan-Africanism and various strains of Black Power clashes with Molly’s hatred of both — she refers to them as “militant trash” — not to mention Molly’s alcoholism and racialized self-loathing. Caught in the middle of these diametric ideologies, Dorothy struggles to find solace in either, turning instead to TC’s letters and memories of happier times before incarceration separated them — as it has so many others in their community.
Yet even as TC remains out of sight, he’s never far from Dorothy’s mind. He writes to her constantly, sending her letters that oscillate between declarations of love and condemnation of a capitalist structure he blames for the downfall of society as a whole, and black communities in particular. He maintains that a system predicated on reaping the benefits of inherent injustice and enslavement leaves no real way for black people to survive, much less succeed, in America.
Directed by Haile Gerima (Sankofa, Harvest: 3,000 Years) and set in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Bush Mama explores the cyclical violence of living at the margins of a highly segregated metropolis. The opening scenes are interspersed with footage of the very real harassment that Gerima and his crew endured at the hands of the LAPD while filming, lending the film an air of cinema vérité.
Shortly after emigrating from Ethiopia in 1967, Gerima began his graduate film studies at UCLA, during a time of intense upheaval. The Watts riots were only a few years prior, and racial tensions hung heavy in the air. A leading figure of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers (sometimes called the LA Rebellion school), Gerima found inspiration in the ideology of Third Cinema, the Latin American film movement birthed in the late 1960s, which embraced Marxism and Social Realism, and rebuked the glossy aesthetics and fluffy storylines of Hollywood. Along with contemporaries such as Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Billy Woodberry, and Jamaa Fanaka, Gerima and his classmates began making films that simultaneously subverted Hollywood tropes and centered on the stories of ordinary black people, the kinds who didn’t play sports or sing disco tunes, and therefore not the type that Hollywood and the larger entertainment industry valued — or even cared to mention. For these reasons, the cohort is often credited with “creating a new black cinema,” as film scholars Allyson Nadia Field, Jan Christopher Horak, and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart discuss in their text L.A. Rebellion.
Gerima was inspired to write the film that would become his master’s thesis after witnessing the eviction of a black mother in Chicago in the dead of winter. Alarmed by the cruelty of this encounter, Gerima wrote, directed and produced Bush Mama, with cinematography assistance from fellow students Ben Caldwell and Burnett. Their work on the film exemplified the collaborative spirit that underpinned the Los Angeles School and enabled them to produce groundbreaking work on shoestring budgets.
Yet it would be amiss to ignore the ways in which Gerima and his Chicano, Asian, and African American classmates critiqued the racially denigrating messages of Hollywood while occasionally — and poignantly — employing its methods. In particular, Gerima uses tropes familiar from the contemporaneous genre of Blaxploitation, a boom of black-cast action films, spurred by Hollywood’s recognition of black buying power at the box office amid its own impending financial crisis. In Bush Mama, Gerima introduces Dorothy in a manner similar to the way MGM introduced its iconic hero John Shaft. As Horak describes, the first sight of Dorothy as she walks along a busy, urban street mirrors the emergence of Shaft, strutting from one crowded New York City corner to another. Dorothy’s dazed state, however, contrasts with Shaft’s brazen machismo, signaling the uneasy dynamic between her position as the troubled everywoman forced to bear the burdens spurred by men in her life, and his as the heroic private eye, marketed as “Hotter than Bond, cooler than Bullet.” The comparison also exposes the competing ideologies of a movement that prized storytelling and political awakening on the one hand, over the glamour, exploitation, gratuitous violence, and blatant misogyny that defined Blaxploitation on the other, as a genre predicated on selling cheaply made films to a black audience hungry to see themselves reflected onscreen, albeit in ways that were oversimplified and gratuitously violent. As the trailer advised to potential audiences under the age of 13, “If you wanna see Shaft, ask your mama.” Furthermore, while unmistakably striking, Dorothy’s character is also uniquely un-sexual; she’s defined by her role as a mother and, in some ways, her depression, whereas even groundbreaking Blaxploitation heroines like Coffy and Foxy Brown (both played by the “queen” of the genre, Pam Grier) were still largely defined by their looks and subject to misogynist storylines.
Eschewing linear narrative, Gerima’s film weaves together the nightmarish scenes that fill Dorothy’s subconscious, with the daily horrors and humiliations that define her life. Hours spent waiting in the chaotic welfare office alternate with the degrading scorn of the social worker who visits and lectures Dorothy constantly, shaming her for being foolish enough to continue her pregnancy “without a man in the house.” TC’s name is never mentioned in this context, but it becomes clear from the first encounter with the social worker that acknowledging his existence — and their love for each other — would be far from a saving grace. “This is not for me, it’s for you. It’s for your good, not mine,” the social worker scolds as she instructs Dorothy to get an abortion, as if the decision should be as simple as deciding to do her laundry.
Violent sequences of abortion nightmares plague Dorothy, and at times it’s difficult to separate her dreams from reality, so dense is Gerima’s layered imagery. This oscillation is a common thread that runs through many of Gerima’s later films, such as Ashes and Embers (1982) and Teza (2008)
Yet in the context of this community, one so plagued by lethal forces both within and without, to abort a black baby would be akin to “racial suicide,” as Simmi puts it. TC, too, condemns the bureaucrat for her coercive meddling, and is furious over what he sees as an out-of-bounds incursion. Similarly moved by the “militant trash” that Molly condemns so wholeheartedly, TC urges Dorothy to wake up and recognize the precariousness of her own existence as a black woman in America. He can’t believe she would even consider giving up their child, and rails at the social worker’s overt attempts to control not only Dorothy’s finances, but her mind and body as well.
But Dorothy’s political awakening slowly comes within reach, as images of black radicalism begin to populate her home through the precocious efforts of Angi, a friend of her daughter’s whose mother refuses to allow posters of African liberationists and Black Panthers in their home. One poster in particular — a young African mother holding a machine gun in one hand and her child in the other — serves as a visual incarnation of the film’s title — and foreshadows Dorothy’s turbulent political awakening.
A shockingly brutal encounter in Dorothy’s apartment finally crystallizes the messages that TC, Simmi, and Angi have espoused throughout the film, as she attacks a predatory police officer who dares harm the only thing Dorothy has left: her daughter. Savage beatings play out of order and in quick succession, implying the dismal reality that Dorothy has at last come to recognize and actively reckon with. She takes off her wig, revealing for the first time her natural hair, and her newfound awareness of self. “The wig is off my head TC,” she says, “the wig is off my head.”
Bush Mama will screen at The Museum of Modern Art, on Friday, April 21 (introduced by Brandon Harris, Professor, Film and Cinema Studies, Purchase College), and Wednesday, April 26, as part of Making Faces on Film: A Collaboration with BFI Black Star, a film series that explores the ways in which images of blackness have been historically constructed and challenged both within and outside the mainstream film industry.
