Neptune Frost Knows We Killed the World

“In order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world, America and all the Western nations will be forced to reexamine themselves and release themselves from many things that are now taken to be sacred, and to discard nearly all the assumptions that have been used to justify their lives and their anguish and their crimes so long.” — James Baldwin

It happened when journalists talked about their surprise at seeing war in a civilized country like Ukraine. It happened when the government doubted that South African scientists were capable of discovering the Omicron variant, and then banned the country from receiving vaccines when the evidence was overwhelming. And it happens every time America offers aid to a country that is behind us in development, paying our own citizens far more money to do a job that local workers are more qualified for. We see that the United States is rich, comfortable, advanced; that developing countries are poor, inhospitable, violent. We lament the strife we see there and want to contribute to justice, to uphold our responsibility to help these communities move forward. But despite our most well-meaning efforts, when we look at the poverty and violence in colonized countries through the lens of Western media, we internalize a lie. None of us can understand what justice means without understanding where violence originates. We don’t understand that our homes in America, especially those in quiet neighborhoods without overt physical conflict, are among the most violent communities on Earth.

Neptune Frost, directed by Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams, is a story of Indigenous resistance to Western occupation. It takes place in Burundi, and addresses the roles of queerness, technology, and traditional wisdom in resisting oppression. The film focuses exclusively on African characters, and yet, without portraying a single character from a Western country (save one onscreen TV journalist), it also offers insight about the role of willful ignorance in comfortable American existence (which comes from proximity to white American existence). That device in your hand or on your lap, the one you’re using to read this essay, and I to write it? It requires coltan. When you mine coltan, you can extract tantalum, which you can use to create a tantalum electrolytic capacitor. This electronic part, and thus coltan, are needed to make phones, computers, and cameras. But coltan is also a conflict mineral, which means the people in the Congo who work as coltan miners experience forced labor, exploitation, and dangerous working conditions. They work, victims of modern day enslavement, so we can consume. None of our comfort, no amount of Western progress would be possible without our theft, from colonized peoples, of their happiness, well-being, and autonomy.

It’s with this theft that Neptune Frost begins. The film is an overwhelming swirl of visual stimuli, but the plot is achingly simple: workers in Burundi are enslaved to mine resources for The Authority. The film doesn’t tell us who The Authority is — a mirror doesn’t need a label. These colonizers murder a man, someone who has friends and family and selfhood. The other workers continue to suffer under the rule of the soldiers who enforce this evil, which is our evil, until one day they refuse.

The first step of resisting is understanding the missing self; the self which has been held captive, but not destroyed. When Neptune (Elvis Ngabo/Cheryl Isheja) becomes the first to escape from the mine, they undergo a change prompted by a long-ago, faraway dream that crash lands like a meteor into the present. They wake up experiencing a change in sex, accompanied by the change in actors. Elements of the film envision futuristic sci-fi; this one, however — the rejection of the gender binary as the means of forming a self capable of resistance — does not. Through our conquests, in our attempts to uphold the superiority of whiteness through the gender binary, we have sought to eliminate over 60 genders (that we know of) from Indigenous societies throughout the world. The Swahili recognize mashoga, men who adopt the gender of women early in life. Burundian tribes recognize ikihindu and ikimaze, intersex priests. When Neptune Frost makes the connection between queerness and resistance, it represents a possible future that comes from a long line of Indigenous tradition. When Williams told the mother of the actor who plays Matalusa (Kaya Free) the high-tech premise of their film, with its digital resistance and intersex protagonist, she responded: “Oh, that old story, that’s a Burundian folk tale. Kaya, don’t you remember, we’ve always told this story.”

Time is connected by more than dreams. Hear the righteous fury of the film’s music, written by Williams — how the primal, polyrhythmic drums and protest chants of opening number “Terambere Ry-igihugu” transform into defiant digital hip-hop anthem “Pensent Comme Leurs Livres Disent.” The soundtrack of the film creates another lineage: music, the language of the oppressed, has changed its instrumentation, but its message, its rhythms, its urgency remain the same, reaching for the same light of liberation. Again, past becomes future, as Neptune picks up the struggle of their ancestors for humanity.

This kind of connection between the past and the future may seem mystic or primitive to us. An organizing principle of Western thought is that time and space are both separate and straight, that “time flows forward, uniformly and independent of observers.” But this “truth,” taken by our scientific institutions as inarguable fact, is just one view of the universe. Ancient Meso-American societies viewed time as cyclical, not as a straight line but a spiral staircase, each cycle building from the last and giving people knowledge of where they come from and where they’re going. For Bantu languages, and many others throughout the world, the word for yesterday and tomorrow is the same.

This difference in worldviews may seem academic, but it has far-reaching consequences. A linear view of time allows us, the beneficiaries of colonization, to believe our wealth and comfort exist because we are ahead of members of colonized nations, when in fact, our “advancements” lie precariously atop their suffering. When Indigenous philosophers argue that the Western concept of time is a “mechanism of unprecedented power for unifying and dividing people,” they reveal the fundamental flaw in the stories we tell about violence. All of us who express a well-meaning desire that colonized countries catch up to us have a limited understanding of how our world is organized; what separates the colonizer from the colonized is not time, but space — the land and resources that we stole.

Think about Uzeyman’s gorgeous visual palettes in the cinematography of the two halves of the film: the harsh, archaic conditions of the mines, and the wild technological hallucinations and vibrant e-cycled costumes of the resistance camp. Do we experience this change as a progression in time, as a movement by Neptune and their tribe towards the future? Why? Both these conditions exist in our world today. We say the colonized must wait for the right time to obtain the technologies they lack. This is a lie. We tell it to the colonized so we can continue to extract the resources we use to create these technologies. We tell it to ourselves so we can live with our actions.

Neptune Frost ends with death, defeat, and the destruction of the resistance Neptune has created at the hands of Western drones. This too is a vision of the future supported by evidence from the past. Haiti, through blood and fire, won a war of independence and threw France off its back; the colonizers returned and held the country ransom for a sum of what is now at least $20 billion. Fred Hampton organized the closest thing to a multi-racial worker revolution the United States has seen; the FBI assassinated him. All to uphold the comfort of the West. Neptune Frost may be folklore, but it is not fantasy.

For the colonized, this ending is a call to continued action. To look at a resistance and see only destruction is the privilege, and the downfall, of the colonizer. The final image of the film sees Neptune arise from the ashes in their straw hat and radio antenna, a fire in their eyes to carry the battle into the future, as others carried it from the past. For them, and colonized people throughout the world, the act of resisting this destruction may create inside them a freedom we, in our ugly indifference to our evils, may never know.

But we, the beneficiaries of colonization, must apply the text differently. For us to attempt to change any of this would first mean understanding comfortable American existence as Neptune Frost does: as a center of violence, built on the labor of people kept out of sight, so as to keep its unethical cost out of mind. In our current economic system, the advancements that enrich our lives are not possible without the existence of the oppression the film unveils, and we cannot help people advance from their impoverished conditions without understanding our relationship to the violence of this world that impoverishes them. For we would do far better to recognize, paraphrasing Malcolm X, that the battle lines of American racism and colonialism are drawn in “[our] own home communities.” Neptune Frost depicts a revolution on the other side of the world, but it should call any of us with a cell phone, anyone who lives and consumes, to re-examine how we see the narrative between ourselves and those whose labor we steal. Blood may be drawn in lands far from our homes, but it stains the ground below our feet.