The Tribune

By NOELLE NICOLLS

Tribune Features Editor

nnicolls@tribunemedia.net

One of the classic features of post modernism is the deconstructive approach to analysis that tends to take an unceremonious look at dominant ideologies, frames of references and entrenched narratives. In layman’s terms, post modernism is about cutting through the propaganda and reconstructing multidimensional truth. It is about taking an anti-mainstream look at mainstream ideas.

If the new documentary “The Black Moses” by film maker Travolta Cooper is true to its word, then audiences will experience a true post-modern look at the Bahamas’ first black Prime Minister Sir Lynden Oscar Pindling; he will be simultaneously disrobed by the many men and women who knew him and crowned as a mythological black Moses. Travolta interviewed Bahamians historians and political leaders, as well as international giants, who knew Sir Lynden, including Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki and P J Patterson.

The many dimensions of Sir Lynden’s life and legacy are expected to be laid bare for audiences to rediscover the man fondly known as the “Father of the Nation”. The film premieres on Sunday night at the closing of the Bahamas International Film Festival (BIFF), at the Atlantis Resort.

Bahamians know all too well, Sir Lynden is a man who unites and polarises the nation. Growing up, Travolta had no escape from this reality. Revered as a God on his mother’s Bimini side of the family, Travolta also came to know of Sir Lynden as “a devil” from his father’s Cooper’s Town, Abaco family.

“My family could not be more politically polarised. I left the country when I was 16. I was too young to be really that involved. I saw Sir Lynden through the eyes of a child. I remember he was campaigning in Bimini. I just remember people worshiping him and all the preparation that were involved. He was always this grand myth to me. And the night he was voted out I remember my grandmother crying and she said, ‘Our time is over son; this y’all time now’. There was a great uncertainty about what it meant that he was no longer the leader. I remember the night was so dramatic,” said Travolta.

“As a child, you think like a child, so you just absorb your environment without having any concrete opinions. You have abstract opinions. Only now, having done this research, having spent time with his family, being entrenched in all things Pindling for the last three years, I only now feel like I know him,” he said.

Typical of many who hold entrenched views about Sir Lynden is the influence of divisive party politics, and clan wars between cult-like worshipers of Sir Lynden, the Progressive Liberal Party’s darling, and former Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham, the backbone of the Free National Movement.

Perhaps possible because of his youth, which is often prone to subverting mainstream conventions, Travolta sought to transcend the tribalism that often shapes one’s judgment of Sir Lynden.

His film, which took three years to finish, places Sir Lynden in the broader context of the African Diaspora, and examines his legacy in relation to other Black Moses figures in the global black liberation movement: Errol Barrow of Barbados, Marcus Garvey of Jamaica, Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Gairy of Grenada and Forbes Burnham of Guyana, said Travolta.

American Actor Dennis Haysbert, famously known as the “velvety-voice” of Allstate Insurance ads and for his leading roles in film and on television , lends his weight to the documentary, starring as the mythical Black Moses. Part documentary and part narrative, Travolta said the film blurs the lines between the two cinematic forms. In both story lines, the biblical story of Moses paralleled.

“The toughest job I had was to tell everybody’s Pindling, to give everyone their Pindling. Bahamians are great folklorists and I think the portrait we painted of Sir Lynden was to represent the men sitting at the corner playing dominoes – their folk tale – and also talking to Sir Arthur Foulkes at Government House – that folktale,” said Travolta.

For more information on Black Moses and other films screening at BIFF, visit www.bintlfilmfestcom. Tickets for the film are available at the BIFF box office for $25 in advance. At the door on Sunday, the tickets will be sold for $40.