by Naomi Andre
U-Carmen eKhayelitsha takes the construction of realism/verismo and extends it to a new level with its hyperrealistic setting and the use of a cast that is at home in the township (with the performers either from there or nearby locales). Most Carmen productions present Carmen as an exceptional character who is different from her peers—she is sexier, more exotic, more liberated, more peculiar, more outlandish … more something. U-Carmen embodies any member of the Khayelitsha community whose experiences stand in for a modern South African heroine. In this Carmen we see a different side; she lives by modest means, works in a cigarette factory, and raises her child within the community as a single mother. Malefane reveals her thinking about the role of U-Carmen: “Carmen is just an ordinary person, any normal woman who wants to live life to the fullest.” She continues, “A lot of people see Carmen as strong all the time … sometimes she does those things because she wants to protect herself from the public. She’s a fighter, she’s fragile.” Regarding this last juxtaposition between the strength and potential weakness, Malefane notes, “Carmen is quite fragile inside. On the inside she is quite vulnerable.”57
We see U-Carmen fleshed out with strength and these vulnerabilities. Unlike other Carmens, U-Carmen gets beaten up by the police in the second-act tavern scene (Bizet’s Lillias Pastias; now at Bra Nkomo’s shebeen) and suffers humiliation. She is a struggling Carmen and emerges as an even more sympathetic character when we learn that her Don José (Jongikhaya) has a violent past and is beating her.58 When she tries to move on, she seems more like a woman trying to escape an abusive relationship than the usual, somewhat fickle Carmen figure who tires of Don José and rejects him just because—it seems—she needs a change of pace.
In the final scenes when Jongikaya stalks U-Carmen at the concert arena and kills her outside by the side of the highway, she easily fits the profile of a domestic-abuse victim, killed by her abuser. Presented like a crumpled red blotch along the side of the road next to the refuse and garbage blown against the fence, U-Carmen becomes a stand-in for other women who suffer the consequences of violence that is passed down from the state through the oppression of institutionalized racism that gets recirculated and dispatched onto loved ones and hapless bystanders who get in the way. While U-Carmen is a strong character who shows a degree of agency in her decisions, she is also presented as a victim of a larger societal violence reflective of the white supremacy and patriarchy of her environment. Jongikhaya is also a victim of this same environment. His aggression toward her is borne of systemic and internalized codes of violence, self-hatred, racism, shame, and misogyny.59 Though these larger elements of institutionalized racism and patriarchy are elements in the other black versions of the story (Carmen Jones and Carmen: A Hip Hopera), it is different in the South African context where the immediate history of apartheid lingers so closely in the background and is in the psychological and physical memories of the cast, production crew, and early audiences from 2005. Both U-Carmen and Jongikhaya suffer from the legacy of apartheid, which combines the mix of violence and patriarchal oppression in domestic relationships as well as in the institution of the nation. U-Carmen’s situation moves from representing the very personal to embodying the experiences of any woman in Khayelitsha.
Carmens and Death
All three—Carmen Jones, Carmen Brown, and U-Carmen—wear red when we see them in their first appearance. This is true for almost all Carmens on the opera stage as well as in the vast number of other adaptations. Regularly, the color red continues to be connected with Carmen’s character and it is not unusual to see her associated with this color throughout the production. However, in an unusual move, Carmen Jones and Carmen Brown both wear white when they are killed. Such a color scheme speaks to a deeper trope in each film. As has already been discussed, their Habanera scenes, like all Habanera scenes, are meant to show them off in sexual roles. Yet both African American Carmens undergo a transformation that adds a different layer of interpretation to their murder. In the earlier nineteenth-century French sources, the exoticism of the bohemian Carmen was always kept in the forefront, visible in her contrast to the role of French narrator in the novella and the tour guide stand-in—Don José—in the opera. The nineteenth-century Carmens needed mediation as well as punishment by the end with her death so that an expected social order could be restored; Carmen’s disruption of that social order needed to be stopped.
With the all-black versions of the story, the difference between Carmen and the other people in the narrative has dissipated and the distance between the insiders and the outsiders to the story is gone. The murders of the black Carmens resonate differently than in the earlier versions. Carmen Jones, Carmen Brown, and U-Carmen are not a contagion to the communities onscreen or in the audience; instead, they have been brought into the mainstream of the world of their respective films and cultural times. Since they are now members of their larger community, there is a new element of sacrifice to their deaths. Carmen Jones and Carmen Brown are still outliers to the norms of their societies; as mentioned above, they do not fit squarely into the conventional models of womanhood for their respective times. But now there is room for them. Neither had been as deeply connected to the original criminal element of the earlier sources. Both women are flirtatious, but we also see different sides of them with the domestication potential of Carmen Jones (when she cooks dinner in the side trip at her grandmother’s house as Joe is taking her to Masonville) and the girlfriend/woman-with-career-dreams/aspiring actress/singer in Carmen Brown. While Carmen Jones is still dealing with the limited gender and segregationist racial politics of her time, Carmen Brown has been liberated and emancipated, to certain degrees, regarding the reality of her aspirations. It is possible to imagine Carmen Brown making it big as a famous superstar; in fact, Beyoncé already has.
Both African American Carmens have assimilated into their cultural surroundings enough so that American white and black audiences of their time could imagine meeting and knowing such characters. Hence, both characters were less foreign to their audiences. But it is the way that each African American Carmen is killed that changes the nature of the larger meaning of her death. Carmen Jones wears white and is strangled by Joe. Right before he kills her he sings: “String me high up on a tree/so that soon I will be/with my darling/my baby, my Carmen.” With the overt reference to hanging in his lyric (“String my high up on a tree”) and his choice of strangling her, rather than the original stabbing in the opera, Carmen Jones becomes a cipher for lynching, a horror very real in 1950s America. Her wearing white speaks to a larger sacrifice of unwarranted and unjust killings of black people at its time. Wearing white exonerates Carmen Jones from the guilt of crime (despite Joe’s comments that he is killing her for revenge and not letting her two-time anyone else again) and places her as a different type of victim.60 Carmen Jones is not the sexually deviant underclass so-called gypsy Carmen from the nineteenth century. I am not arguing that her death is meant to represent a private lynching; a character like Joe would not lynch Carmen. Rather, I assert that the direct references to lynching would resonate with many in the audiences of the time. With Carmen Jones dressed in white her death points more to a symbolic sacrifice rather than punishment. In 1954 she is stopped for trying to have too much, live too grandly, and move beyond (what might have been considered for the politics of the time) her “proper” station.
Carmen Brown also lives life to the fullest, and she wears white when she dies. However, she is killed for other reasons. One of the complicated changes in the hip hopera adaptation is the increased size of the role of Lieutenant Miller, portrayed brilliantly by rapper Mos’ Def. Miller takes the position of Bizet’s Zuniga—the police superior to the Don José character—Derek Hill. In the opera Zuniga’s main function is to provide a rival to Don José at the end of act 2 during the tavern scene at Lillias Pastias. Zuniga shows up right after Carmen and Don José have a fight. As Don José was going back to his dragoon barracks, he sees Zuniga come to court Carme
n. The two men get into a fight and, having disrespected his superior officer, Don José definitively chooses the outlaw life of Carmen and her smuggler band over his life as a dragoon. As a character, Zuniga appears at the beginning of act, 1 and he has a role at the end of act 2 to show Don José caught in a power struggle with his commanding officer and to provide a romantic rival to Carmen.
In the hip hopera, Lieutenant Miller’s is a major role that serves more as an example of a dirty, bad-cop foil to the clean, good-cop image of Derek Hill (as Don José). After Da Brat’s opening prologue, the scene moves between two cop cars (one with Miller and his partner, the other with Hill and his partner). We first see Miller collecting hush money from a local drug dealer that immediately shows he is on the take and working with the gangster crowd. As both Miller and Hill respond to a stolen-car call from headquarters, we see Miller plant drugs on one of the perpetrators, deny it, and then threaten Hill when he tries to speak up. Miller emerges as the bad cop yet the smooth and confident rapper; his character becomes much more interesting than the hardly noticeable Zuniga from the opera and almost steals the show.
The “good cop” family-values man Hill represents (with his engagement to Caela) versus the “bad cop” with close gangster dealings that Miller embodies reflects a larger trope of black urban life. The double lens in which society views black people during the time of the hip hopera tends to shift between praising those working within the system of middle-class values and, conversely, being hyper-suspicious that all black people have a tendency toward thug-like behavior, cavorting with drug dealers and corrupting the halls of law enforcement. Miller and Hill bring both sides of this conflict to life; Carmen Brown becomes a player against this background.
By the end of the hip hopera, Carmen Brown has moved closer to her goal of fame and is with Blaze in Los Angeles. Derek Hill who initially went to L.A. to follow Carmen Brown is hiding out from the law and has gone to warn Carmen that the corrupt Miller is in town. Backstage during one of Blaze’s concerts Hill tries to warn Carmen of the danger, but Miller (hiding in the rafters) sees them both, and he shoots and kills Carmen. As Hill pursues Miller, he shoots Miller in self-defense and kills him. The last scene before Da Brat’s epilogue/outro is a montage that intersperses the flashbacks Hill has of meeting Carmen, the rise and fall of their relationship with the future news and media coverage of the reported violence at Blaze’s concert where Hill is blamed for killing Carmen Brown and Miller in a fit of jealousy and rage.
An element that makes the hip hopera feel relevant and truer to life is the ending where the news media gets things completely wrong in their coverage of this “black on black” crime. Audiences (up through today) watch the film and understand that so often the officially reported story does not have the full truth when it comes to crime among black people (as well as many other communities of color). With the complementing story of crime in black neighborhoods and police corruption, Carmen Brown becomes a pawn in a larger narrative. While she is still a character who stands for young black millennial female-gendered power, she also becomes a symbol of the innocent caught in the crossfire. Hill presents no motive for killing Carmen; his stated reason for being there is to protect and save her from whatever Miller has planned. Hill believes that Miller would hurt Carmen in order to get to Hill, and the audience has no reason to doubt him. Miller has proved to be an immoral character who would have no problem killing to cover up his own corruption. Hence, when Hill’s prediction comes true, Carmen Brown’s death has little to do with her own behavior and more to do with how she is caught in the crosshairs of patriarchy gone wrong. Wearing white highlights the virtue in Beyoncé’s brand (just beginning as she was becoming a solo artist). She is a Carmen whose sexiness has lost its threat and has become desirable by men, women, and transgendered people as a feature to possess or to emulate. So many of us now want to be this millennial Carmen.
U-Carmen in South Africa’s township of eKhayelitsha dies wearing Red. But even though she was created after the other Carmens, and in post-apartheid South Africa, there is something less sacrificially heroic in her death than the other black American Carmens (Carmen Jones and Carmen Brown), whose deaths seemed to be connected to shining a light on larger causes, legible just below the surface, of injustice. U-Carmen’s death feels brutally realistic and violent outside against a chain-link fence, next to a major highway. After her death, the camera pulls back and for a few long minutes the music has stopped, the diegetic noise of the cars on the freeway takes over the sonic soundscape, and the red crumpled heap of her body against the side of the road seems more like a red blotch of refuse than a once-living person. This is an everywoman Carmen who has no magical exotic powers and no belief that her dreams, optimism, and aspirations can save her. Now she has become easily disposable.
This is a Carmen whose story has ended even before the cameras stop shooting. It is as though everyone else has gone away; there are no mourners, the police have left, and the medical examiner will pick up the body of U-Carmen—labeled and ready to go—when it fits into an already-busy schedule. In the bureaucracy of post-apartheid life, she will wait her turn in death for entrance into the morgue. This Carmen is unlike other versions of the Carmen story where the curtain comes down and the film ends with her friends crying around her and Don José dejectedly taking responsibility. Those Carmens have a heroism ascribed to their death. Those Carmens died center stage and we are still mourning their deaths as the films end. In Khayelitsha, it is as though her specific death has already become old news before we can leave. The cameras continue to roll, capturing a vast emptiness of violence past and the aftermath of death is still felt: the death of U-Carmen, those who came before, and those who will come after. This is a telling of Carmen in the midst of the apocalypse. The specter of apartheid hovers in this film as a ghostly character. We witness something that has unfolded and is still unfolding before us. This is a story that begins as it ends, or whose ending signals a beginning.
In the black settings of the Carmen story, the Carmen figure becomes an increasingly more integrated member of both her onscreen community and the audiences sitting in the theater. Within the South African Carmen the juxtaposition between the familiar and the foreign seems to be practically erased so that the film has a fairly homogenous group of characters, a story set with members from the township of Khayelitsha. The cultural world presented is recognizable and understandable to its home audience. South Africans can see their own land and people so that the separation between the Self and the Other so prominent in Mérimée and Bizet virtually collapses.
Yet the element of exotic fascination continues, even if it is configured differently in the nineteenth-century French versions, wherein the French were presenting Spain to the French—the implied audiences for Mérimée and Bizet (even though in reality this was not a homogenous public, they catered to expected conventions).61 In the new millennium, audiences are anticipated to be more diverse, especially with the distribution of film being a global phenomenon.
U-Carmen eKhayelitsha has gone beyond the local opera audiences and has become a global text. The multiple publics who are exposed to the film far exceed its original audience or modern opera-going audiences in any one location. As mentioned above, this South African version presents a glimpse into an experience that is not seen in traditional Western opera productions. In standard productions of Carmen, opera audiences today are used to having the character of Don José act as our heroic figure; the Spanish soldier who is engaged to the girl next door (Micaela). When he falls in love with the racial and ethnic Outsider (Carmen), we are a little nervous but expect him to civilize her to our patriarchal code and make the best of the situation. The tragedy is his when he is unable to tame her and is driven to kill her when her wild ways cause him to snap in an obsessive pathological break. Yet in the last moments of the opera he redeems himself when he does not flee the scene but instead “returns to his senses” and turns himself in. Though we know he wil
l be punished, he ends the opera as a good citizen to the moral code as he admits his wrongdoing and accepts his punishment.62
What we are not used to is a production where Carmen is part of an African community around her. The African American context of Carmen Jones and Carmen: A Hip Hopera is accessible to most audiences through iconic visions of black America in the rural South (as in the first part of Carmen Jones) or in the African American urban experience in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Traditional opera audiences are not used to having this exotic tale told from a different angle.
The invention of U-Carmen in South Africa gives birth to a new viewer who destabilizes the function of the earlier nineteenth-century transgressive presence of Carmen. Non-African viewers familiar with the French Carmen stories understandably feel disoriented when first seeing this South African Carmen; the Western normative vantage point has been shifted and the heroine formulates new terms of womanhood. Inversely, it is now the specifically non-African publics that have been decentered. Those of us in the audience who are not South African are now exoticized, as we are outsiders to the localized knowledge of South African culture. In a new gesture for a telling of Carmen, the experiences of South African audiences are mirrored back in the films. In terms of who is representing whom, the stakes have also changed and it is no longer the exotic Other who is being defined by a Western narrator. Instead, we have a new articulation of sub-Saharan Africa that takes into account the experiences of postcolonial, post-apartheid cultures and repositions who is on the outside looking in.