Triggers
Triggers (2017)
Created, written, directed, produced and filmed by: K. Marshall Green
Triggers is a visual poem, a letter to Black girls and women surviving domestic and state violence, told through cinematic collage, jazz, performance, and the lyricism of scholar and filmmaker Marshall Green.
The film must be seen to be understood. It has so many layers it defies simple description. Bookended by someone writing a letter to their younger self, Triggers takes viewers on a 10-minute journey through the story of Marissa Alexander, a Black woman from Jacksonville sentenced to 20 years for firing a warning shot in an altercation with her husband (in the end, she served three years).
Green starts the piece by dramatizing this moment, imagining the layers of psychological, physical, and technological conflict and harm that could have produced these multiple layers of violence.
“We don’t want to call the cops. We know what cops do!”
Overlaying this poetic drama are three Black queer and trans performance artists - scholars Julian Kevon Glover and Mlondi Zondi with Anna Martine Whitehead – who seem to represent some of the characters in the story, except without conforming to gendered expectations.
Our expectations that we are seeing an artistic dramatization of one event is challenged, however, when Green’s lyrics suggest this scene recalls his own childhood:
I was triggered
I prayed for that woman
I prayed for that man
I prayed for that baby
I cried for that baby
I was that baby
Protesting the abuse of a father on a mother
…
I went back
Watched
Witnessed
War
In Home
Home
In War
Protest
Still
I feel weak
Small
Shifting the focus to his own subjectivity allows Green to ask more difficult questions about how Black people have few good options for justice amid the violence of the state and gender binary.
“I still feel guilty that the prayer I prayed for my father was prison…I believe the relationship we have with the state is an abusive one.”
The complex, unresolved, constantly shifting feelings of pain, love, and a desire for justice are beautifully embodied by the unpredictable, discordant, variously smooth and rigid performances by Glover, Zondi and Whitehead, shifting between elegant vogue femme performance and post/modern dance. Their movements are accented by the jazz score, which vacillates between discordance and harmoniousness.
While we don’t get resolution, Green softens this disharmony toward the end by asking “what justice look like?” To conclude the piece, he sings (after narrating most of the film in spoken word):
A little black girl dreams in poems to poems to her mother
A little black dreams in prayers to her father, and he answers back
A little black girl dreams in songs to her self, sweetest thing I’ve never known
Here we are confronted with the suggestion that Green, our narrator with a smooth upper baritone, was the little Black girl caught in the drama amidst violent gendered relations structured by various ideological apparatuses.
In writing a letter to the little Black girl he was as the transmasculine person he now is, Green shows, through creative practice, his theory of trans*. Writing about an earlier film, and ethnography of trans and gender nonconforming masculine of center people, Green writes that “Trans* is a multidirectional, unpredetermined set of embodied motions that are affect and are affected by structures of governmentality” (Black Camera 192).
One way to decenter linear narratives is through collaboration, which Triggers embodies through dialogic production with onscreen performers and offscreen musician. It is perhaps as much their narrative as Green’s. There is an improvisational feeling to how they move and how the music sounds, which shows it represents clearly what Green has theorized about Trans* as “unpredetermined movement:”
“There is a master narrative of transition that begins with the transgender subject’s articulation of being trapped in the wrong body. This entrapment can only be conquered through a move to the opposite gender. This master narrative of transition has made it more difficult to know transition as a state to be in, as a state to be studied, rather than a marker for what is between two distinct gender embodiments. The transition is an operation to be completed so that eventually the subject will no longer be in a state of becoming but rather, they will have arrived at home in the right body. Instead of reproducing this narrative, I ask about the multifaceted ways that people assume the category Trans*” (Black Camera 191).
Elsewhere, Green has explicitly drawn connections between this understanding of transness and Black feminism, which explains why he begins his story with Marissa Alexander. Understanding the project of Black feminism as unthinking the gender binary, by showing how racialized people disrupt or are excluded from its privilege and norms, opens up space to think about Black feminism as a fundamentally queer and trans project, something others like Lamonda Stalling, C. Riley Snorton, Che Gossett and others have also theorized:
“Are we able to hold the stories of both CeCe McDonald, Marissa Alexander, and Kye Peterson under this inclusive Black Queer Feminist framing? I seek a Black feminist praxis that can hold all of these people, but in order for that to be the case we may have to disentangle ourselves from a reliance on ‘woman’ and instead think through the ways in which femininity and masculinity are moving in and across all kinds of bodies” (Souls 442)
Bibliography:
“The Essential I/Eye in We: A Black TransFeminist Approach to Ethnographic Film.” Black Camera 6, no. 2 (2015): 187–200. https://doi.org/10.2979/blackcamera.6.2.187.
“Where Black Feminist Thought and Trans* Feminism Meet: A Conversation.” Souls 19, no. 4 (2017): 438–54.