Dunkirk
Source: theguardian
Tuesday 1
August 2017 08.00 BST Last modified on Tuesday 1 August 2017 12.19 BST
The blockbuster purports to be a
historical portrayal, but in fact it’s a whitewash. And these decisions help
corrode societal attitudes
• Sunny Singh is a British-based
writer. Her latest novel is Hotel Arcadia
‘The
French army deployed at Dunkirk included soldiers from Morocco, Algeria,
Tunisia and other colonies, and in substantial numbers. But we don’t see them.’
Photograph: Bros/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
What a
surprise that Nigel Farage has endorsed the new
fantasy-disguised-as-historical war film, Dunkirk. Christopher Nolan’s movie is an inadvertently
timely, thinly veiled Brexiteer fantasy in which plucky Britons heroically
retreat from the dangerous shores of Europe. Most importantly, it pushes the
narrative that it was Britain as it exists today – and not the one with a
global empire – that stood alone against the “European peril”.
To do so,
it erases the Royal Indian Army Services Corp companies, which
were not only on the beach, but tasked with transporting supplies over terrain
that was inaccessible for the British Expeditionary Force’s motorised transport
companies. It also ignores the fact that by 1938, lascars – mostly from South
Asia and East Africa – counted for one of four crewmen on British merchant vessels,
and thus participated in large numbers in the evacuation.
But
Nolan’s erasures are not limited to the British. The French army deployed at
Dunkirk included soldiers from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and other colonies, and
in substantial numbers. Some non-white faces are visible in one crowd scene,
but that’s it. The film forgets the racialised pecking order that determined life and
death for both British and French colonial troops at Dunkirk and after it.
This is
important, firstly, because it is a matter of factual accuracy in what purports
to be an historical portrayal – and also because it was the colonial troops who
were crucial in averting absolute catastrophe for the allies. It is also
important because, more than history books and school lessons, popular culture
shapes and informs our imagination not only of the past, but of our present and
future.
The
stories that we share among ourselves give us the vision of our individual and
collective identities. When those stories consistently – and in a big budget,
well-researched production like Dunkirk,
one must assume, purposefully – erase the presence of those who are still
considered “other” and less-than-equal, these narratives also decide who is
seen as “us” as opposed to “them”. Does this removal of those deemed “foreign”
and “other” from narratives of the past express a discomfort with the same
people in the present? More chillingly, does it also contain a wish to excise
the same people from a utopian, national future?
British
soldiers fight a rearguard action during the evacuation at Dunkirk. Photograph:
Grierson/Getty Images
A vast,
all-white production such as Nolan’s Dunkirk is not an accident. Such a big
budget film is a product of many hundreds of small and large decisions in
casting, production, directing and editing. Perhaps Nolan chose to follow the
example of the original allies in the second world war who staged a white-only liberation of Paris even though 65% of
the Free French Army troops were from West Africa. Perhaps such a
circumscribed, fact-free imagination is a product of rewriting British history
over the past decades, not in the least by deliberate policies including Operation Legacy? Knowingly or not, Nolan walks
in the footsteps of both film directors and politicians who have chosen to
whitewash the past.
But why
is it so important for Nolan, and for many others, that the film expunge all
non-white presence on the beach and the ships? Why is it psychologically
necessary that the heroic British troops be rescued only by white sailors? What
would change if brave men fighting at Dunkirk wore turbans instead of helmets?
What would alter if some of the soldiers offered namaaz on the sands before
rising to face the advancing enemy for that one last time?
Why is it
so important that the covering fire be provided by white French troops rather
than North African and Middle Eastern ones? Those non-white faces I mentioned
earlier – they were French troops scrabbling to board British boats to escape.
The echoes of modern politics are easy to see in the British-first policy of
the initial retreat that left French troops at the mercy of the Nazis. In
reality, non-white troops were at the back of the queue for evacuation, and far
more likely to be caught and murdered by Nazi soldiers than their white
colleagues who were able to blend into the crowd.
Could we
still see our neighbours as less than human if we also saw them fight
shoulder-to-shoulder with “our boys” in the “good” war? Would we call those
fleeing war “cockroaches” and demand gunboats to stop them
from reaching our white cliffs if we knew they had died for the freedoms we
hold so dear? More importantly, would anti-immigration sentiment be so easy to
weaponise, even by the left – in the past and the present – if the decent, hardworking Britons knew
and recognised how much of their lives, safety and prosperity are results of
non-British sacrifices? In a deeply divided, fearful Britain, Nolan’s
directorial choices succeed as a Brexiteer costume fantasy, but they fail to
tell the story of Operation Dynamo, the war, and Britain. More importantly,
they fail us all, as people and a nation.
All
storytellers – and novelists, poets, journalists, and filmmakers are,
ultimately, just that – know the power we hold. Stories can dehumanise,
demonise and erase. Such stories are essential to pave the way for physical and
material violence against those we learn to hate. But stories are also the only
means of humanising those deemed inhuman; to create pity, compassion, sympathy,
even love for those who are strange and strangers. Stories decide the
difference between life and death. And that is why Dunkirk – and indeed any
story – is never just a story.
