A Shadow of Myself. Mike Phillips
to another, more expansive age. Some of them, recounting incidents from their past, made the preview audiences rock with sympathetic laughter. After the first showing a critic from one of the broadsheets had patted him on the back and told him that it would be a hit in the documentary section on the festival circuit.
The woman at the World Service had used almost precisely the same phrase before the interview, and when the recording started Joseph talked freely and with confidence, eager to please. The film, he told her, had always been somewhere in the back of his mind, because his father had been one of those Africans who had come to Britain shortly after the end of the war as a student. After Ghana achieved independence he had become part of its diplomatic corps and studied in Moscow before eventually returning to Britain. Part of his intention, Joseph said, had been to record and to understand the experiences of men like his father and the environment in which they had lived.
His interviewer listened with a flattering attention, smiling and nodding from time to time. Afterwards she complimented him again. ‘Great, great. That was really fascinating.’
At the time he had been too dazzled to remember what he had said. Now he sat running the interview through in his mind, struggling to isolate the information that a listener might have gleaned from it about his background, and about his father’s life. What he remembered best was how much he hadn’t been able to say. This wasn’t because the interview hadn’t been long enough. On the contrary, she kept encouraging him to tell stories about the men and their experiences. At the same time she made it clear that her audience would be bored and alienated if he started to talk about the process by which the film had emerged, or about the pain and rage which it concealed. When people complimented him on the work his head spun with pleasure, but underneath his excitement he sometimes experienced a spurt of churning unease about the meaning of their words.
The truth was that the first audience who saw a rough cut of the film had received it very differently. These were the men he had interviewed and whose stories he had culled and assembled. He showed it to them in a preview cinema in Soho, and, sitting in the dark it seemed to go down well. They laughed in the right places, and sometimes they shouted with approval when someone made a telling point or told a funny story. Afterwards, as they filed out, most of them shook hands and congratulated him. The only discordant note came when one old man, Mr Mensah, a Ghanaian and a particular friend of his father, held his hand for a moment and gave him a knowing smile. ‘Very clever,’ he said. ‘The whites will love it. You’ll do well.’
Later on, alone with his father, this was the first question he asked.
‘What did Mr Mensah mean by that?’
Kofi shrugged his shoulders, cutting his eyes sideways at Joseph and away again.
‘Mensah is a radical. He’s got his own opinions.’
In that instant Joseph knew how much his father despised what he had done. His first reaction was anger, then he wondered how to get Kofi to say what was wrong. The problem wasn’t simply that his father would try to spare his feelings. He knew that Kofi and his friends were privately contemptuous of people who were governed by fear of damage to their self-conceit. ‘Most of the people in the world,’ he told Joseph once, ‘have to live with the terror of sudden death for themselves and their children, or famine or torture. Out of my mother’s eleven children I am one of three survivors and I don’t know what happened to the other two. In this country they spend years weeping over a nasty remark, or because they didn’t get enough love.’
On the occasions when he said such things it was clear that he was also talking about the differences between himself and Joseph’s mother. There was no arguing with Kofi about this. In this respect he was like most of the black people Joseph encountered, regarding the whites and the fuss they made about their emotions as ludicrously soft, self-indulgent; and Joseph already knew that if he confessed to being hurt by the old man’s reaction it would prompt a sarcastic smile.
‘I really want to know how they felt about it,’ he told Kofi.
The handshakes had been sincere enough, but he knew that their praise was not for what they had seen. Instead, it was a compliment on his achievement in wrestling so much from the hands of the whites. Coming from Kofi’s son, a man who was almost one of themselves, it was a matter for congratulations.
‘What would they feel about it?’ Kofi said with an undertone of irritability in his voice. ‘It was a nice film.’
It was the response Joseph had feared. He could question his father all day without getting a direct answer. In comparison his mother had taught him that a direct question was to be answered directly. If someone asked about her actions or her feelings she would tell them, except on the occasions when she said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Sometimes she said, ‘None of your business.’ ‘I can’t be bothered to beat around the bush,’ she would tell Joseph.
Kofi and his friends found such behaviour irritatingly confrontational and sometimes downright rude. In their world politeness and respect demanded circumspection. To make matters worse, they had all spent most of their lives in countries like Britain, where concealing their deepest feelings and beliefs from the whites had become second nature, an instrument of their survival.
‘You didn’t like it,’ Joseph said. ‘I could tell you didn’t.’
‘It was okay,’ Kofi replied. Then he relented a little. ‘Maybe it was light. You left some things out.’
It was Joseph’s turn now to be irritable, but he held his tongue; he knew precisely what his father meant. The lightness and charm of the film was the result of careful selection. Most of it was actually made up of spontaneous fragments, some of them off the cuff remarks or stories incidental to the main drift of the interview. Joseph hadn’t planned it that way. The film had been commissioned as part of a television series about ‘outsiders’ in Britain, but Joseph had been trying to make a version of it for more than a couple of years. In a sense it was the project at which he had been working for nearly two decades, and which had started with a long interview he had conducted with his father as part of a film school exercise. From that point he had believed that the reminiscences of men like Kofi were a sort of hidden history which had to be told. Making it happen was another matter, and it took more than a dozen years, during which he worked as a TV researcher, then a film editor, attending courses in his spare time, and assiduously writing proposals and scripts which were inevitably rejected. It wasn’t until his mother died that her legacy gave him the resources to set up his own company. The company consisted of himself, a computer and a rented office near King’s Cross, but he was able to begin touting for work as an independent producer. The jobs were few and far between, consisting mainly of short segments of film or video for other producers’ programmes, and it had taken a couple of years, but his big break came when he was asked to submit a proposal for one film in the series on outsiders. The offer wouldn’t have been made, he knew, at the time when he started his first job. In those days the largest companies still patted themselves on the back when they hired a black researcher, but attitudes in the industry had changed gradually, and it was now conventional practice, in most of the less prestigious TV series, to make room for at least one black independent.
On the other hand, he was competing with another dozen hungry black producers with more or less the same experience, but the passion and detail of Joseph’s proposal, in preparation for most of his career, won him the commission. In the moment that he heard the news, it was as if, having been born dumb, he had suddenly been granted the gift of speech. And when he started work he had a clear outline of what he wanted in his mind, and for a time the project seemed to be going smoothly. All of the men he contacted had a lot to say, most of it the product of long years of disappointment and frustration. In comparison, Joseph’s life had been comfortable and secure, but their words stirred echoes inside him, and, sometimes, listening to some story of insult or violence he felt an outrage stronger than any of the feelings prompted by his own experiences. The first edit was an angry polemic in which the men described a hostile, oppressive society and the way they had survived it. Joseph had no doubt that it was powerful and moving, but when he showed it to the producer of the series it was obvious that she didn’t share his satisfaction.