Watching Atlantique As I Shelter in Place and Crave Pickles
05/27/20
By Tara Betts
I am awake in the wee hours after midnight and watching the 2019 film Atlantique directed and co-written by Mati Diop. Willie Perdomo suggested it to me months ago, when we broke bread after we talked about his book The Crazy Bunch at Seminary Co-Op Books back in December 2019. This was back when I could go to a restaurant and be drowned out by the cacophony of other diners’ conversations and laughter. Now, I am eating alone, wiping down my groceries after they are delivered, and having a brief exchange with a delivery people (who are always Black or Latino), and we’re all wearing masks. I have the luxury of writing, editing, and doing a little teaching from home online. But it’s Saturday night, so my attempt at normalcy is a glass of red wine and watching this movie. Abruptly out of work, the African brothers in hardhats demand their checks in the opening scene. I wonder how many Americans realize how often this happens around the world, and how this may be their first time some Americans have any idea of how some people have been living around the world. I think about how many Black people are supported by one worker’s check no matter where you go on the planet Earth.
A few scenes later, I am moved by the beauty of Ada and Soulieman, easily late teens or early 20s. They are clearly infatuated with each other and anticipating what might be their first sexual encounter. As someone who is probably their age times two (and maybe plus some), I find myself remembering what that new love felt like, even as I see them smiling at each other, while a train passes between them and their longing. A truer metaphor for an obstacle keeping two people apart couldn’t have been expressed. The train blocks the screen with a blur of a car, then Soulieman’s face, a car, then Ada’s face. In the flickers between fading cars, they smile at each other.
In the next scene, they are whispering love words in Wolof to each other on Dakar’s ocean shore, and they kiss. There are always circumstances that make love yet another job, and it brings me back to being alone during quarantine, like so many other women, and I start thinking about how Essence magazine warned me in the 1990s, when I was much younger, thinner, with less grey hair, and more eager suitors. Black women my age would be alone, or they would have to seek other options.
Later, Ada sneaks out of her parents’ home. Earlier that day, she has seen her mother lay out a beautiful white wedding dress with silver beadwork on the bodice. Her mother chides that she should speak sweetly to her betrothed Omar while she sulks in the nearby room on a bed. She says nothing, but creeps out later by window that night. She meets her friends to go to a club, only to find out that Sulieman and the other young men have gone to sea, that salty sigh and tumult, to earn money. The girls who came hoping that the boys were there are left alone.
Ada has a nightmare that Soulieman will not come back. All I can think is Amaud Aubrey, Trayvon Martin, or one of the many others. The names dig like shards into my skin. Waking up from that ongoing nightmare that Black men might not come home is the one of the most under-articulated nightmares that Black women imagine, besides not making it home themselves. No one knows how many more moments resound like this, especially when the President abdicates responsibility for dismantling the CDC and the EPA, or he suggests (then recants) to people that malaria medicine cures the Coronavirus, or that people inject disinfectants. In a moment, where racial hatred fuels bad decisions, I keep thinking if we go back to school or go outdoors without a mask, who will be policed? Who might get killed for being less than obedient? Whose children will test out the flattened curve before the virus passes?
Since mid-March 2020, I have been craving pickles all the time, especially late at night. When I look up what causes such cravings, it’s not just pregnancy that flares this appetite, and I know that’s not my problem. Apparently, it’s the craving for electrolytes, and sometimes, dehydration. I think it’s the salt. Something in me is craving the ocean, and how the saltwater of the oceans curls my hair, whether it’s short or long, and I recall being in Cuba where I sat with a copper-skinned sculptor reading poems by Nicolás Gullién. There is something that knows that salt is elemental. No arrangement or routine can shift that.
About 30 minutes into the movie, Ada is sitting with Omar in a restaurant. He is wearing crisp white clothes and sipping a cocktail. Omar has given Ada an iPhone as a gift and tells her that it will change her life. Considering that an iPhone is almost the equivalent of one month of American rent for my apartment on Chicago’s South Side, and any iPhone I’ve bought has been on a payment plan, I deduce that Omar is a big money grip, which is why Ada’s family thinks he will be a good husband, but Ada is nonplussed. Omar is no Soulieman. I sip some pickle juice before the next scene cuts to Omar swimming back to the beach as dusk arrives.
Shortly thereafter, African women in the streets clapping in ornate garb, and I think how often are women keepers of culture and tradition? A few men dressed in white stand near the threshold of the building where the building is being held. It is clearly a Muslim ceremony where men and women are separate. Ada is covered by a nuptial veil. Afterward, Ada’s friends are thoroughly impressed by the all-white everything wedding suite. Ada is unimpressed. Ada walks away and drifts off into her own thoughts. Ada’s friends prod her with questions on a rooftop above the festivities, but Ada’s close sister friends in hijabs think she is being foolish. They claim that Soulieman was at the wedding and jetted. After this admission, the bed covered in pristine white, is charred down to the bedsprings in the middle. Ada and Omar’s wedding remains unconsummated. Love is not transactional, but it is about action. What is the praxis behind your love? It can’t just be the theory or the feeling.
The officer who investigates the torched wedding bed and Soulieman’s bedroom at his mother’s house enters his room. We immediately hear the waves crashing and sighing outside. He looks around the room and pushes back the corner of the bed to discover a heart drawn on the wall. “A+S” is drawn inside the parameters of the two angled curves we know as an oversimplified organ. Ada lolls in bed as if she has a fever. Later that night, a group of women take to the street like zombies toward Mr. N’Diaye’s house. Mr. N’Diaye never paid the workers like Soulieman, even after he ambles into his plush crib with a date in a fancy dress. The women sit perched in the dark on his living room furniture. These African women with grey-glazed eyes tell him they have come as a warning to pay the wages that he owes. I think about the essential workers, underpaid and possibly risking their lives for minimal returns, in hopes to pay the rent, keep the lights on, feed the kids.
More than halfway through the film, Ada is locked up by the investigating officer. She has no idea where Soulieman is. Her parents have subjected her to a virginity test, and all I think of is T.I. making his daughter go to the gynecologist every year, and Boosie Badazz subjecting his son to some worn out idea of masculinity. After Ada is successfully identified as a virgin, she demands to get her phone back, which was taken from her after her mother was accused of “not raising her right.”
Ada insists that she doesn’t know where Soulieman is. The officer gets a call that fishermen have discovered a boat broken in half with no signs of life on it. As soon as I see Ada shouting in a cell and wisps of her hair rise in the humidity on her head, I think how many women have been blamed for something a man did? How many women are considered the balm to keep men from doing wrong, even if they don’t have a clue? Ada is released when Omar, her husband comes to get her. Ada refuses to get in the car with Omar. He declares her crazy when she says she doesn’t love him, and she stomps away. In the meantime, the women return to Mr. N’Diaye’s house that night. One woman with green braids and completely white eyes sits on N’Diaye’s bed. The woman warns to bring the unpaid wages to the cemetery before the next night ends at 3 a.m.
In that same night, Ada is at home when she hears a faint knock like Soulieman’s. She opens the door to a feverish investigating officer with pale eyes. He calmly insists he is Soulieman before Ada runs away, then the film cuts to a train crossing. Another method of marking boundaries between the rich and the poor, black and white. It isn’t until the young investigator watches footage of the wedding that he sees himself just before the fire. He is wearing another man’s clothes and his eyes are completely white. He realizes that he is Soulieman’s ghost back from the sea. The women are his shipmates who meet N’Diaye at the cemetery. He pays their wages in full. Their last demand is that N’Diaye dig their graves, so he can think of them in his high tower and how they will never be buried.
So, no, this isn’t some tired idea of zombies like Wade Davis’ The Serpent and The Rainbow. This is a story of ghosts inhabiting the living to right the wrongs of the present, and it’s a love story too. I take smaller sips of pickle juice. I have to see how the movie ends. My sleep is erratic at best anyway now, like all of us having vivid, pandemic dreams. Even the birds chirp louder and at all hours outside my living room windows. I’ll be at peace once the ghosts resolve their drama.
As reparations are made, Ada’s friend has braided her hair, and she waits at the empty club for Soulieman to meet her. When the young officer arrives, they slow dance in front of the club’s mirrors. Only then do we see Soulieman’s original likeness holding Ada while the club lights speckle their Black skin like green glitter, or more like a galaxy split, then rendered whole. This pair of the most star-crossed lovers make love for the first time and awaken to the ocean. In the morning, as if uttering an aubade to each other, Ada says, “I’ll always taste the salt of your body in the sweat of mine.” There is about a half-breath of a pause before Soulieman says, “How beautiful you are. I saw you in the enormous wave which consumed us. All I saw was your eyes and your tears. I felt your weeping dragging me to the shore.” As he utters the last few words, the ocean waves that have pervaded the whole film crash and sigh on the beach just beyond the club’s doors. You can almost feel the saltwater clinging to the air.
One thing that keeps coming back to me is how women act as their own reservoirs of calm. They make their own cycles and demands within the very confines that keep them penned. Then again, there are some people who would poison the very water we drink to make a buck, even if their own last drop to drink might become questionable. I keep thinking what’s required to make amends, especially now. What will it take to upright nature and human health again? What will it take to return the tang and pucker of a well-lived life with people to reoccur? A little salt can make the whole dish taste better or break a craving, but too much salt can kill you. I’m just hoping that deadly salt that looks like greed doesn’t keep us from saving ourselves or finding some sort of love again. Maybe salting the earth beyond all fertile possibility can be halted. Maybe we’ll take on just enough to help us hold water and sate our appetites. Either it’s the cusp of high blood pressure from craving saltiness or the urge for something, anything to make my heart race and thump a little harder like it used to so long ago.
Tara Betts is the author of Break the Habit, Arc & Hue and the forthcoming Refuse to Disappear. In addition to her work as a teaching artist and mentor for young poets, she's taught at several universities, including Rutgers University and University of Illinois-Chicago. In 2019, Tara published a poem celebrating Illinois' bicentennial with Candor Arts. Tara is Poetry Editor at Another Chicago Magazine and The Langston Hughes Review and the Lit Editor at Newcity.
Tara Betts worked on this piece with Marc Fischer, the Quarantine Times special editor. Occasionally, Marc selects a Chicagoan to share a commissioned contribution in response to the pandemic.