by Naomi Andre
But I’m not hearing you, you might as well be mumbling
See, I have dreams, and with a man, what will become of them?
There’s not a kid out here who can make me believe
I should postpone my goals, he got tricks up his sleeve?
Whole bar full of cuffs and you ain’t locking me down
Carmen’s words echo a late-twentieth-century strand of feminism especially popular with the millennial generation that took for granted many of the political feminist gains of the 1970s and 1980s “second wave” generation while also wanting to embrace a sexier brand of feminism.45 In a typical lyric that links her voice to the lineage of Motown soul singer Marvin Gaye and also brings together the varied tropes of her curvaceous hips, competitive beauty, and the dangers of stalking, Carmen Brown’s Habanera entrance number continues,
See this is Carmen, voice sweet as Marvin
I turn out lights, with the switch, when I’m walking
Girls steady jealous cause they men always hawkin’
Even got Lou lookin’ at me like he stalkin’.
And I got a mind, too.
Carmen Jones and Carmen Brown personify modes of black womanhood at the middle and end of the twentieth century that are also informed by the actresses who played them. Dorothy Dandridge was undeniably an incredibly talented actress and singer, but her career success was tempered and shaped by the attitudes around race and gender of her time. Though she shared many similarities with Marilyn Monroe, and they reportedly had a strong friendship, their fates overlap and differ in striking ways.46 Both were direct contemporaries (Dandridge 1922–1965; Monroe 1926–1962), happened to share a middle name (Dorothy Jean, “Marilyn” Norma Jeane), were sex symbols of their time, had multiple marriages, and died of accidental pill overdoses whose stories were initially covered up and still have auras of mystery surrounding the details. While Monroe’s unleashed sexuality as the dumb blonde coupled her stage persona and all-American good looks (a busty bombshell), she spent a good deal of time trying to conquer this image and reset the norms by which she had become typecast.47 For Dandridge, the sexual image had different stakes. Though writing about Carmen Jones, Baldwin identifies the more general issue in his comments about the apparent minimizing of the sexual eroticism as a necessity for people to take the film seriously: “Negroes are associated in the public mind with sex … darker races always seem to have for lighter races an aura of sexuality.”48 In the complicated racial times when free black bodies were still defining themselves on stage and screen, Dandridge had a different negotiation than Marilyn Monroe with star image, gender, and sex. Attractiveness with less unbridled sexual energy seems to be the choice made for keeping the attention on the seriousness of the film and all it stood for in black achievement.
By the time we get to Carmen: A Hip Hopera, young women—of all races in the United States—could flaunt their sexiness in ways that “claim” power rather than exploitation.49 In addition to being sexy and powerful, this Carmen “has a mind too” and wants to project a multifaceted image that brings all of these things together. Beyoncé’s super sexualized first appearance during her version of the Habanera is seen in a different context from that of Dandridge. Rather than the artificial and weakened sexuality Baldwin compellingly theorizes in Carmen Jones, Carmen Brown’s entrance (as well as her seduction scene with Hill for their “Seguidilla”) is smoldering hot with lust and desire wrapped together. Yet throughout the film we see other images of Carmen Brown as she hangs out with her friends and in her first encounter with Blaze (the Escamillo figure, now reconfigured as a rapper). Rather than exclusively the flirtatious vixen, Carmen Brown sometimes appears almost shy, certainly less outgoing than her friends Rasheeda and Nikki (Fresquita and Mercedes in the opera) when they first meet Blaze at the club. Though she might not be loud and “in your face,” Carmen Brown exudes a confidence that allows her to think on her feet (when she asks Hill to take her home to change her clothes before going to jail), and to speak self-assuredly and intelligently when she talks about her dreams and desires to be an actress (when she impresses Blaze as she talks about wanting to go to Los Angeles).
The evolution of the Carmen persona shows a broad progression from her original position as a vividly portrayed but mainly silent literary character in Mérimée’s novella to Bizet’s very vocal and central character in his opera. Seeing and hearing such a bold female character needed a lot of intervention through the depiction of a foreign picturesque setting (complete with exotic bohemian color, bull fights, and seductive so-called Spanish dances), and a helpful “tour guide” type of figure to keep the audience grounded in the norms for nineteenth-century Western (European) behavior. When the story of Carmen on the margins migrates to African American culture in the United States, there is the added dynamic of having Carmen become the representative of black people on the periphery of mainstream white culture. Yet the original relationship between Carmen as an outsider to the others in her novella/operatic world is altered, as there are now all-black settings in Carmen Jones and Carmen: A Hip Hopera.
These works present an important opportunity to explore what a Carmen figure could do in her own community. Carmen Jones and Carmen Brown are very much articulations of their time with the opportunities and limitations of 1950s and the early millennium in the United States. Carmen Jones presents a spectrum of black people at midcentury, the working class of the parachute factory laborers, black soldiers in the newly integrated military, the glitzy world of show business with Husky Miller and his entourage, the mix of classes at Billy Pastor’s, and the poor in Carmen’s hometown. While the depictions of these socioeconomic levels show a cross-section of black society, they are not fully explored and are presented in rather sanitized ways (on a colorful movie set). Yet even though there is a diversity of class representation, there is little room for Carmen Jones to fit outside the gendered expectations for womanhood of that time. For black women there is the working world and the domestic sphere. In the world of Carmen Jones, the high price is death for wanting to look for something different and experience sexual freedom to move from one partner to another.
Unlike Carmen Jones, Carmen Brown is allowed to be motivated by her dream for stardom and fame. This is a world that feels contemporary to its audiences: the urban blight of Philadelphia, the depiction of policemen and “regular” folks at Lou’s Pub and at the bar in Philly (after Blaze’s first concert when he first meets Carmen Brown and her friends), the figure of famous glitzy rapper Blaze and his crew. From what we see, Carmen Brown is well on her way to realizing her dreams by the end of the film when she is settled in L.A. with Blaze and her friends. Being quite adept at manipulating the gender codes of her time, she uses her good looks and personal drive to move ahead. In the telling of this Carmen story, the price she pays for her ambition is brought on by corruption in the black community, notably through the “bad cop” of Lieutenant Miller and his manipulation of “good cop” Derek Hill. What we have not yet seen in these African American Carmens is a figure who works within her community and has desires that can be achieved.
Additionally, these U.S. Carmens weave in a feature of the Great Migration exodus from her home community (Florida, Philadelphia) to the north (Chicago) or west (Los Angeles) for better opportunities. In the next section I outline a context for opera in post-apartheid South Africa that shows how U-Carmen eKhayelitsha adds this new dynamic of a Carmen who is rooted within her own community, albeit equally unlucky in her destiny.
South African Carmen: U-Carman eKhayelitsha
Bringing the Carmens Together: Narrators and Audiences
As in the African American Carmens, South African U-Carmen eKhayelitsha is adapted to an all-black setting; in this case, the main action takes place in the Cape Town township of Khayelitsha with a few flashbacks that take the story to the rural areas (formerly the Bantustan Homelands, during the apartheid government). All of the characters are black—as in Carmen Jones and Carmen: A
Hip-Hopera and, unlike Mérimée’s or Bizet’s Carmen, there is no presence of a tour-guide narrator to help the audience understand Carmen’s so-called mysterious and exotic ways. This is because there has been a radical shift in the vantage points—who is in the story, who is telling the story, and who is in the audience interpreting the narratives.
A process that had its roots in the nineteenth century, present in Carmen Jones and continued through Carmen Brown (in Carmen: A Hip-Hopera), is now complete in our title character, U-Carmen. These black Carmens have shown the evolution of the Carmen figure. In 1875 we started with the exotic outsider who titillated and shocked the hegemonic French bourgeoisie audience with her outlandish ways. In the mid-twentieth century, audiences in the United States were also enticed by the sexual allure of Carmen Jones. The lower economic status and sexual nature of this 1950s postwar factory worker continued her enticing presence with the fantasy of racial subservience and the safety of containment within a pre–civil rights segregated environment. Mainstream America had access to a dazzling array of black talent without the threat of having to be too close. On the screen or performing onstage, an unspoken (but strictly enforced through practices such as redlining and Jim Crow laws) respectable distance remained between blacks and whites that prevented the two populations from moving in next door, sitting side by side in school, or—in many states—sharing the same water fountain. By the end of the twentieth century, America once again revisited the black Carmen figure. At this point, the United States was past the civil rights movement of the 1960s and had a strong, albeit bloated, sense of national pride in its socially progressive advances since the 1950s, including a perception of its black-white race relations.
When Carmen: A Hip-Hopera was released in May 2001, no one knew that we were on the cusp of a new era of global terrorism after the events a few months later on September 11. No one knew that we would elect our first black president in 2008 and enter such a racially turbulent time that much of the progress of the civil rights gains would be called into question and urgently need readdressing within that decade. Instead, the millennial hip hop Carmen aspiring to the bling lifestyle felt like a clever twist of the “American dream” where anyone with energy and talent could make it big. Carmen Brown, embodied by the young Beyoncé, brought together the smokin’ hot body type, a smooth R&B-infused rapping lyrical style, and just enough youthful innocence that, despite the mixed reviews (the movie did not significantly catapult anyone into the spotlight, but neither did it hurt any of the performers’ careers), it had rather strong support from black audiences.50 Even as the century drew to a close, the story was still presented in a segregated setting—an all-black cast where the action was focused in the urban centers of Philadelphia and Los Angeles. With the light honey-brown color of most of the principal characters, the hip hopera reinforced much of the racial narrative seen in Carmen Jones. The title character is a party girl who wants to break out of the expectations before her. Carmen Jones resisted the domestic and well-behaved demure girlfriend-fiancé-housewife path represented in Cindy Lou. Carmen Brown resisted the girlfriend-fiancé-housewife path represented in Caela. While Carmen Jones does not present an alternative path, besides working in the factory and possibly marrying into wealth through the boxer Husky Miller, Carmen Brown has aspirations and goals to “make it big” and become a singer and actress. Despite the vast gains black people in America had made, Carmen Jones and Carmen Brown love and pursue segregated dreams, fifty years apart in the United States at midcentury and the dawn of the new millennium.
U-Carmen comes out of these sources but resonates as a different figure. It is as though Carmen has gone home to a space where she is surrounded by her community. We, in the audience, have followed her there and watch her, peering in from the outside we now inhabit.51 U-Carmen from Khayelitsha not only represents who is in the story, but she is now telling the story; she is the narrator. Those of us in the audience who are not from Khayelitsha are not given an easily accessible, built-in narrator/tour-guide proxy to show us how (or if) we fit in.
As Davis and Dovey have perceptively argued in their discussion of how the opera and the township are brought together through Fernando Ortiz’s ethnographic paradigm of transculturation, “Bizet has become a character in Khayelitsha, and Khayelitsha has become inhabited by Bizet.”52 Viljoen and Wenzel have also discussed the way U-Carmen fits into her community in Khayelitsha and articulates different narratives that extend beyond the femme fatale; she becomes a more complex and independent South African woman.53
In the opening of the film we are introduced to the elements of the township and the setting of the opera through the use of the diegetic sounds of the township, the female factory workers singing other non-operatic songs over Bizet’s music, and the fast panning action of the camera (forward and backward) over the landscape of Khayelitsha.54 In these opening minutes of the film, we are given direction about how to watch and listen to this telling of Carmen. As the camera introduces us to the township visually, we are also alerted early on to the contrapuntal sonic soundscape that will bring together Bizet’s music, the diegetic sounds of Khayelitsha’s honking car horns and crowing roosters, and the multiple instances throughout the film when diegetic singing of non-operatic Xhosa songs and ululation are layered on top. The use of the French narrator in Mérimée’s novella and the “he is one of us” aspect to Bizet’s Don José in the opera are now presented through the filmic devices of the genre where the sound and visual techniques replace the use of a specific character in the story who guides the audience through the narrative. As Khayelitsha is written into operatic history, multiple opera audiences are brought into these new narratives. Those not familiar with opera but part of Khayelitsha see themselves in Bizet’s tale. Those familiar with opera but outside of Khayelitsha see Bizet in the township. And those familiar with neither Khayelitsha nor Bizet experience a story that opens up the possibilities of how opera can have meaning in new spaces for unexpected populations.
U-Carmen
The entrance into the exoticism of the Carmen story is reconfigured in U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. The film presents a new incarnation of the narrator figure. Unlike the framing device of the same narrative voice in the Mérimée novella (of the French bourgeoisie academic) or Da Brat outlining the story from the gendered and racialized position of our protagonist (in her prologue and epilogue), here we have two disembodied “voices” surrounding the film. These bookends open with the voice of Mérimée, spoken in the opening minutes of the film while the camera pulls out from a close-up of U-Carmen’s face. The final bookend is the vacant voice of the landscape that the camera center stages once U-Carmen has been silenced.
In the opening we have Mérimée’s words from his novella, translated into Xhosa (appearing as English subtitles across the bottom of the screen) spoken by a baritone voice, describing the figure of Carmen.
In Spain for a woman to be thought beautiful she should have thirty positive qualities. Or to put it another way, it must be possible to apply to her three adjectives, each of which describes ten parts of her person.55
This quotation of Mérimée’s authorial voice is paired with the visual “voice” the camera provides that immediately links Mérimée as narrator with what we see. During Mérimée’s words (presented both in Xhosa and English) we see the image of Pauline Malefane’s face come into focus as the embodiment of our Carmen. After the close-up, the camera pulls back and reveals the location, a small photo shop in Khayelitsha. The camera dynamically pans around the township, and the narrative voice reciting Mérimée’s words gives way to the soundtrack of daily life starting morning routines. A Western orchestra begins tuning up, then moves into the downbeat of Bizet’s sparkling rousing overture. The establishing shot in this opening sequence does several things simultaneously when it brings together Mérimée’s words introducing the image of Pauline Malefane as our U-Carmen and the importance of “looking” through the close-up camera angle in the photo shop
. As if the conceit of translation were not salient enough, we have the aural marker of the Xhosa language (an Nguni click language that immediately sounds the foreignness with the pops of the clicks on x, q, and c) and English interpretation in subtitles.
In Mérimée’s novella and in the role of Da Brat in the hip hopera the narrating figure frames the story as the first and final scenes. Unlike the energetic and hectic opening scenes of U-Carmen eKhayelitsha, the end of the film, with its final sonic and visual landscapes, is contained in one long, slow shot of the camera pulling back from the stabbed, dead Carmen. Unlike the animated beginning with the bright orchestral timbres and the colorful visual texture of Khayelitsha, the conclusion of the film is nearly silent and the visual rhythm has slowed down to an extreme long shot pulling away from the scene. In the last moments of the film, we hear the dull roar of the wind and see the passing cars in a maze of highways that give the scene an impersonalized ghostly feel.
The stark, postapocalyptic nature of the end of the film seems vaguely appropriate. For even though this film represented an early example of South Africa’s new and exciting entrance into an international arena for film and opera, it also carried some of the weight of its brutal history with apartheid. One of the things that makes U-Carmen so effective is that the story is completely in the present moment with the recent history of apartheid woven in through its indomitable legacy and a few strategic flashbacks in the characters’ memories. The past is embedded as it haunts the present but does not take over the future. There are a few overt references to the apartheid past, but the focus of the film is on the sumptuous sound of the voices and the still-new situation of hearing opera sung in Xhosa and seeing it set in a township. The stark reality of the poverty in Khayelitsha is noticeable and unlike traditional opera performances in Western opera houses; but once the audience settles into the film, these initial matters tend to revert to the world of the film and point to the verismo, gritty realistic element of the original late-nineteenth-century context of Bizet’s opera.56