Early in Spike Lee’s latest film, Chi-Raq, the virtuous Ms. Helen (Angela Bassett) reveals to sex-strike leader Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) that she lived in the Cabrini-Green housing projects before the city tore down the neighborhood and she moved to Englewood. Ms. Helen also tells Lysistrata she lost her ten-year-old daughter Pam to senseless gun violence. Growing up in those same housing projects in the late 1980s through the late 90s, I lost my childhood friend, Dantrell Davis, whom we called “Danny,” in a similar way. When he was nine, a stray bullet caught Danny in the head as he held his mother’s hand walking to school. The tragic event is one of my earliest memories from childhood.
Danny’s death, and the other violence that marked my early childhood, produced in me a kind of survivor’s guilt. I have often wondered how my family dealt with the everyday suffering inflicted on us by the police, city public housing policy, and gangs. Over the years people have asked me, “How did you make it out of the projects?” The answer is, I got lucky. Gun violence in Chicago has killed an entire generation of people I knew. This connection was largely why I wanted to see Chi-Raq. The story Spike Lee seeks to tell is one that’s deeply personal to me.
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Chi-Raq follows a sex strike started by Lysistrata, who faces off against her eponymously named boyfriend Chi-Raq (Nick Cannon) in an effort to curb the violence after Irene’s (Jennifer Hudson) young child is killed by a stray bullet. The two-hour film rightly begins by framing the debate around the renaming of the South Side neighborhood of Englewood—and by proximity the entirety of Chicago. The renaming works to achieve a form of visibility for black suffering in the city, detailing the peculiarities of black Chicagoans’ lived experience and memorializing the dead. For me, it’s a personal link to my friend Danny’s death in 1992 to the killing of my mother’s cousin Shawn Knowles in 1993 to the untimely death of Shawn’s young brother Maurice Knowles in 2015. The name Chi-Raq represents a longer, more systemic heritage of violence in the city that has long watched black boys, men, and now women and girls killed in segregated black communities. The name Chi-raq is a reminder of that sad reality.
In the film’s opening, the words “this is an emergency” flash across the screen in large, bold lettering, followed by statistics comparing the present-day total amount of American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan—6,773—with the 7,356 gun-related deaths that have occurred in Chicago during the same period. The numbers presented are a sobering reminder of the killing of nine-year-old Tyshawn Lee, who was murdered in Englewood last month in gang-related attack, and 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by Chicago police, a case that is now being reviewed by the Justice Department.
The communal violence in the Windy City has been long described fallaciously as “black-on-black crime,” and Lee seeks to connect the epidemic to the national level. At one point, the film’s narrator Dolmedes (played gleefully by Samuel L. Jackson) describes Lysistrata by saying, “Baby so fine she made George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson want kiss her.” The line is an example of the film’s general theme of conflating communal violence in Chicago with police and general racially motivated brutality.
The film makes good use of the disturbing statistics; however, it leaves unexamined the ways that violence has altered the fundamental workings the city itself—how storefront windows have swapped out signs for “no smoking” with ones for “no guns” and how the city has been forced to set up “safe passage” routes so students can simply go to school alive. Instead of zeroing in on the reality of young people disproportionately affected by violence—44 percent of all homicide victims in the city are between the ages of 15 and 24, and over half of the offenders are of similar age—Lee focuses heavily on the adults.
At times the film recalls Lee’s early comedic brilliance and ability to deconstruct complicated social issues with films like
Do the Right Thing, and She’s Gotta Have It. “No peace no pussy,” the battle cry of Lysistrata’s army of girlfriends, wives, sisters, and mothers, is a perfect example of the film’s desire to use satire as a vehicle to explore the complexities of the decades-long communal violence. “Satire uses humor to elevate the issue you’re describing,” Lee told the Los Angles Times. But against the back drop of ongoing violence in Chicago, the exaggeration, humor, and irony deployed by Lee rings hollow. It doesn’t signify a larger insight about violence in Chicago, and the movie ends neatly, peace achieved, in typical Hollywood fashion, as black Chicagoans’ lives offscreen are engulfed in terror.
Lysistrata’s sex strike also serves to highlight the city’s institutional failures. One study found that in Chicago, only 6 percent of black male public school freshmen finish college; 92 percent of black male teens were unemployed in 2012. Without quality education and employment opportunities, it will be difficult to curb the violence. Activist groups like Black Lives Matter and Chicago’s BYP100 have successfully campaigned to have Chicago police detective Dante Servin fired for his off-duty killing of 22-year-old Rekia Boyd, but they could do more to spotlight the issue of communal violence. Chi-Raq‘s use of a sex strike is timely in its play on current and historic black-led campaigns calling for realistic solutions.
The idea for the strike itself is drawn from Aristophanes’s 411 BC Greek play Lysistrata, in which the title character convinces the women of Greece to withhold sex to force a negotiated peace to end the Peloponnesian War. In Chi-Raq, Lysistrata googles Nobel Price Prize winner and Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee, apparently drawing inspiration from Gbowee’s Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace movement, which employed sex strikes to help end the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. However, as the writer Ta-Neishi Coates recently pointed out in the Atlantic, Gbowee herself wrote that the sex strikes “had little or no practical effect.”
Gbowee does allow that the strikes were “extremely valuable in getting us media attention,” a point that’s certainly not lost on Lee. However, the director’s heavy focus on them instead of her other tactics—such as prayer, sit-ins, and protests—distracts from the film’s admirable effort to draw national attention to the structural inequalities that perpetuate violence in Chicago. In this way, the reductive use of the Greek comedy and Gbowee’s activism in the film does not provide the historical heft that Lee was hoping to achieve. Instead, it plays down the comprehensive approach employed by Gbowee to quell the violence in her country against her gender. A better example in adapting a classic play to address contemporary issues would be Lynn Nottage’s play Ruined, which masterfully pulls from Brecht’s Mother Courage to locate specific violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In one scene, as the gangs and sex strikers stand symbolically, dressed in white and waiting to sign the “peace accord,” I was reminded of the three-year long gang truce signed in Cabrini-Green after Danny was killed. For a time things were peaceful, but his mother was never the same. After Danny’s death, local gang members wore baggy long white tee shirts, spray-painted with Danny face and name on them. It was a curious thing to see—they were honoring someone they had helped kill. I have long pondered how to memorialize Danny. But how do you honor a life that hardly got around to living?
At the film’s conclusion, Ms. Helen holds a large black-and-white image of her slain daughter Pam in front of Chi-Raq that tells her daughter’s story: “This is my Pam. She is ten years old, one summer day, back when we lived in the Cabrini-Green projects, Pam was outside, jumping double Dutch, when they started shooting. She was shot through her left eye, by a stray bullet. This was over 20 years ago, when children dying from stray bullets weren’t a common occurrence.”
In 1992, the year Danny was killed in Cabrini-Green, there were 61 murders of youth in Chicago. Today that number, as the film points out, hovers at 400 murders—more than one a day. I had hoped that Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq would have told that story. The story of how Pam and Danny’s story have sadly become a common occurrence in Chicago today. It will take more than a movie—it will take a movement—a movement to change it.
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Chi-Raq is screening in theaters nationwide.