More Notes on Race and Time Travel (Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures)

The Whoniverse’s spinoffs, with their lack of TARDISes, travel in time far less than the parent show does, but there’s still the odd time-travel episode here and there.  This offers a few more opportunities to explore race when 21^st-century characters of color visiting the past.

On Torchwood, “Captain Jack Harkness” finds Jack and Tosh transported to 1941.  Tosh, who’s of Japanese descent, is lucky to be in Wales in January rather than the U.S. in December, but it’s still a thoroughly-unnerving experience.  As soon as she realizes when they are, she gets anxious, and rightfully so.  “Jap” trips easily off of people’s tongues, and Tosh’s natural out-of-placeness from being displaced in time is interpreted by those around her as traitorous behavior.  She’s quickly suspected of being a spy, and without Jack asserting her loyalty to Britain, things might have turned very ugly for her.  For me, one of the hardest-hitting moments of the episode is when she worriedly asks Jack what will happen to her if they can’t get back, and Jack replies, “I’ll take care of you.”  Yes, it’s one friend looking out for another, but it’s also one friend acknowledging that the other will experience additional danger solely because of her race and that he, due to his privilege as a white person, will need to protect her.  Very sad, but very honest.

With The Sarah Jane Adventures, we have two PoC of different races with separate time-travel experiences, which are interesting to compare.  Rani visits the past twice and gets “exotic foreigner” reactions both times.  When she crashes a mid-century village in “The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith,” she causes quite a stir (to be fair, that’s partly because she’s wearing pants.  After she leaves, a villager exclaims, “Can that really be the fashion in the Punjab?”)  Rani has a bemused/weary acceptance of shocking the locals, replying, “Yes, hello.  Ethnic person in the ‘50s.”  Her other jaunt into the past is in “Lost Time,” where she, Clyde, and Sarah Jane are sent to different points in history.  Rani meeta Jane Grey, under the guise of being her new lady-in-waiting, and while one of Jane’s servants doubts the “foreigner” can be trusted, Rani uses the “mysteries of the East” thing to her advantage.  She plays off any out-of-time faux pas as Indian customs, and Jane, fascinated by but ignorant of Asia, easily buys her excuses.

It disappointed me that Clyde was the only one not to visit the ‘50s in “The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith,” and I was glad he finally got to time travel in “Lost in Time.”  Clyde is sent to the WWII era, where he and an evacuated boy thwart a group of Nazis planning an attack – he’s tossed right into the deep end, isn’t he?  I’ve already mentioned the main race-related scene here, when the Nazi commander calls him a Negro, and Clyde in turn amazingly calls the Nazis “a gang of bullies picking on others for what they look like” who will lose the war due to their “blind, stupid prejudice.”  (I love it so much.)  But what really strikes me is what I think may be the reasonClyde only time travels once, and then only to WWII.  I wonder if the writers were aware that, as a Black boy, Clyde would experience harsher, blunter racism than Rani would as a South Asian and wanted to be sure that racism came from obvious bad guys (Nazis, people.)  When 1950s villagers gawk at Rani, their exoticizing is more about ignorance than malice, but if Clyde had walked into the same crowd, he would’ve likely had a far colder welcome.  It’s ugly enough for a Nazi call him a Negro.  If he’d had that contempt from one those pleasant villagers?  From one of Sarah Jane’s parents, maybe?  Way worse, and harder for Clyde to push back against.  If the show really had that kind of understanding and planned Clyde’s one time-travel adventure accordingly, it shows a pretty unflinching awareness of history and race relations.

Original: The Silence (2012)

I forgot to post my usual end-of-month poem on Thursday, so I'm giving to you now.  Short and sweet today.

*          *          *

The Silence

I’m the silence, not the song –

Am I more the lull in the conversation

Or the still air muzzled by the morning chill?

Am I the moment of held breath between the song and the applause,

Afraid to break the spell?

Wouldn’t you like to know?

Too bad – the silence doesn’t tell.

Trevor Noah: The Daywalker (2009)

Since both Last Week Tonight and The Daily Show were dark this week, I thought I’d review another Trevor Noah standup special in lieu of the usual News Satire Roundup.  IMDb tells me this was Noah’s first televised comedy special, filmed in Johannesburg and broadcast in South Africa.  In other words?  Thank you, YouTube!  Both of the other specials I’ve seen from Noah (as well as all his work on The Daily Show, obviously) were made in the U.S., and while he spends plenty of time talking about Africa in all of his comedy, these other pieces I’ve seen are definitely framed for U.S. audiences.  Other than a handful of shorter clips, this is the first piece I’ve seen made specificially for South Africans, and it’s interesting to see what Noah’s work is like in that setting.

I’ve read that Noah tailors his routines a lot based on where he’s performing, and from what I’ve seen, that seems to bear out.  As a result, much of the comedy here is about people or cultural norms that I know very little about.  The hour-and-20-minute show covers all of South Africa’s presidents (crazy to think that basically every person in that audience was alive for the country’s first democratic election,) including a lamentation that Jacob Zuma, the current (then and now) president, is a disappointment, comedy-wise, and a fantastic bit about Nelson Mandela’s 91^stbirthday party.  There’s also a ton of material on similiarities and differences between various groups in South Africa – white, Black, colored (meaning mixed race,) and Indian – with a number of specific geographic references, snatches of assorted languages, and a wide array of accents.  However, even though certain references alluded me and I’m sure it’d be a lot funnier to someone who’s familiar with those cultures and knows those politicians, I still got plenty out of it.  Funny is funny, and Noah’s comedy doesn’t have to be packaged specifically for me to work for me.  (Note:  his various African accents are a lot thicker here than the one he typically uses in the U.S. now, and there are some jokes that my American ears simply couldn’t decipher.)

Something that I found really interesting is his stories about being colored/mixed.  Now, this is a common theme in Noah’s comedy, and I’d already heard some of these jokes in routines he’s done elsewhere, but while I knew that his experiences as a biracial person born during apartheid was unique, I didn’t realize that they were unique even among mixed South Africans.  As part of his introduction to the topic, he notes a light-skinned woman in the audience, asks if she’s colored, and then verifies that her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all colored as well.  Because “colored” was a separate racial group under apartheid and racial groups weren’t supposed to mix, many (most?) biracial people there came from families where everyone is biracial.  Therefore, having one Black parent and one white parent wasn’t the norm even for a mixed person.  Having heard it and knowing what I know about apartheid, it makes sense, but it had never occurred to me before.  This routine offered some interesting tidbits I hadn’t known; I knew that Noah’s father was kept a secret until after apartheid ended, but I didn’t know that secret even extended to his mother’s side of the family, and while I knew that some people mistakenly thought Noah had albinism (rather than being mixed,) I’d never heard him talk about it, and his story of rolling with his “albino crew” was pretty fun.

Warnings

Thematic elements, sexual references, a little swearing, and alcohol references.