The Language You Cry In

The opening narration of The Language You Cry In offers a seemingly simple dictum with enormously complex implications: memory is power. But what happens when that power--the connection to personal and cultural history--is broken by total cultural dislocation and enslavement over the course of several centuries? The Language You Cry In offers a remarkable tale of the power of cultural memory in its story of how the lost heritage of one African-American family was preserved and finally revealed in the fragment of a mysterious song. The ethnolinguistic and ethnomusicological tale begins in 1931 with the recording by linguist Professor Lorenzo Turner of a five line song with connections to the Mende dialect of Sierra Leone, sung by Amelia Dawley, a 50-year-old woman living in a remote hamlet in the Gullah region of coastal Georgia. Fifty years later, the interesting link uncovered by Turner initiated a search by American anthropologist Joseph Opala and ethnomusicologist Sarah Schmidt, who traveled to Sierra Leone and discovered a remote village in which a woman, Baindu Jabati, recognized the song as similar to an ancient funeral dirge taught to her by her mother. In the second and perhaps most moving chapter of the search for the song's history, Opala and Schmidt find Amelia Dawley's daughter, Mary Moran, who embarks on an emotional journey with her family to Sierra Leone, where she meets Baindu. If there's a fault in this otherwise excellent film, it's a tendency to rush the editing in some sequences; a more leisurely exposition would have greatly improved the film, at least aesthetically. (We never do get to hear Amelia's wire-recorded song in it's entirety). Nonetheless, along with California Newsreel's similarly-themed earlier film, Family Across the Sea (VL-12/91), this is a valuable addition to any collection interested in materials related to the African diaspora, to ethnolinguistics, or ethnomusicology. (G. Handman)