Southern Storytelling
by Andy Sarjahani for South Summit 2024: Southern Futurism
—
INTRO
For all its wild and wonderful messiness, the American South is home and always will be.Regardless of where I receive my mail. The forest baths in the old growth hardwoods of mybeloved Ozarks bring me a restoration that I’ve yet to find elsewhere. And yet there’s theincreasingly pervasive dogmatic ideology that fuels legislation that slash rights across theSouthern states.
Growing up Iranian-American in a small town in Arkansas, I began to learn around age 5 that if I did a good enough job hiding my Middle Eastern half, I too could be one of the guys. There was a part of me that I always felt I had to check at the door. To be clear, it’s the Iranian part of me that needed to shrink.
Now, as an independent filmmaker, it seems as if I was supposed to have checked the Arkansas at the door. Many of my colleagues are confined to the bubbles of New York and LA, and the well meaning cliched quip “I’m sorry you had to grow up there” confuses me. What exactly are they sorry for? These same people would never apologize to me for being Iranian so why is this acceptable amongst presumably liberal peers?
SOUTHERN STORYTELLERS
I had the privilege of working as a cinematographer on the 2023 PBS docu-series Southern Storytellers directed by my friend and mentor, Craig Renaud. The New York Times picked a Southerner to review the series and this is what she had to say:
“Despite our bloody history, and contemporary politicians intent on suppressing that truth, many people here defy what non-Southerners think they know about this place. The new PBS documentary series “Southern Storytellers,” directed and produced by the Arkansas filmmaker Craig Renaud, makes this point as directly and as forcefully as I have ever seen it made on television, a medium that is in large part responsible for the stereotype itself.”
STORIES HOLD POWER
Stories hold power and we live in a time where book bans are as ubiquitous as the Dollar General’s scattered about the South like horsenettle in pasture. Arkansas native Maya Angelou said, “The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.” Her 1969 classic novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is one of the most banned books in US history and is currently banned in varying capacities throughout Alabama, Florida, Tennessee, Washington, and Texas. My mom was a children’s reading teacher at a public school in Arkansas for over 30 years. She fostered a curious spirit and love for story and I have to believe that’s the early scaffolding of my evolution into a filmmaker. Books, moreover stories, were integral to our upbringing. To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the multiple classics that she gifted my brother and I growing up, is now banned inside and outside of the South.
Like the translucent waters of the Buffalo River that methodically carved the limestone bluffs of the Ozarks over millions of years, stories and their ideas hold power.
NORTHERN/COASTAL GAZE
Most stories told through film about the South have historically been told by people without connection to the place or a real. genuine. investment that typically doesn’t extend beyond the trauma porn they’re here to save us from.
The Northern or Coastal Gaze is antiquated and views the American South with an extractive lens. Whether it be poverty porn or a fixation with the caricatured toothless backwoods bigots whose self-hate and insecurity manifests in mindless ferocity towards anything that feels unknown. These projects will be rewarded by critics and gatekeepers as “revelatory.” Indeed,
for them it is revelatory because the critics have as little connection to our place as those who made the work. Who are these projects for and why are these the people defining us? And why do we need to be rescued by them?We’ve always been here though. Our stories available to the masses might be few and far between, but we’ve always been here.
I saw a film recently at a film festival whose maker was a young, upper-middle class Israeli man hailing from the private schools and suburbs of New York City whose only connection or time spent in the American South was the handful of days it took him to make the film. He profiled one of the most radical leaders in the Southern Baptist community and it will be distributed on a major platform. Mockery and caricature of the South sells like Chick-Fil A at a church softball tournament. How is this any different than Tucker Carlson fixating on the most rabid, American flag burning mullah in Iran and waving it in front of the entire Fox News audience as a monolithic Iran?
WORK AS RESISTANCE
Our work is an act of resistance, refuting the dominant narratives that perpetuate harmful stereotypes and fan the flames of polarization. Nuance dies in these flames. Rather, our work brings Light to perspectives we’ve always known existed.
WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A SOUTHERNER
We are making from a perspective that has been absent, erased, and in other cases violently silenced. We are speaking against the silence of the past and in doing so defining our future. Not a single one of us has a lock on what it means to be a Southerner.
For me, it’s gutting a catfish on the banks of the Arkansas River with my pops. Our fingers smelling like our Tyson chicken liver bait. Dry counties run by the Baptists who get drunk behind closed doors. Summer creek swims with my soul dog June. Legislation, signed by a childhood classmate, that attempted to ban Iranians in Arkansas from owning a home. Bull elk bugling in rut in the Boxley Valley as the first fall chill rolls in. Digging for ginseng, forest baths, and deep tissue massages for the mind. Obliteration of women’s reproductive rights. Old growth hardwood deciduous forest. Burning nostrils and watery eyes from Dow Chemical plants, Tyson Chicken rendering plants, and paper mills. Political will devoted to monuments for the unborn rather than the failing public schools. Church potlucks and poison ivy. Cottonmouths and deer ticks. Sandstone cliffs and digging for diamonds.
My perspective is a tiny drop in our big bucket. The ensemble of our collective perspectives will illuminate the wildly diverse tapestry we all know exists.
We will look to our ancestors who tell us what the South has been and how we arrived here.
We will consult our lived experience for answers on what the South is and what it’s becoming.
We will make stories to make sense of it.
And the stories will come because we will continue to try to understand our home as we redefine it. We will interrogate and illuminate every corner of this place, watching the problematic ideology wither in the Light just as the good ideology thrives. In the process, we have grace for each other and move fiercely towards the Light.
MAKING THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT
At the future South, we don’t check part of ourselves at the door. I look forward to a day when our stories don’t fixate or fetishize Otherness. Jon-Sesrie Goff’s After Sherman, Elaine Sheldon’s King Coal, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. These are the models I look to as I develop my own work.
From Wendell Berry on community:
“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”
Thank you for your time today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andy Sarjahani is an Iranian-American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer raised in a working class community outside the Arkansas Ozarks. He is interested in people, our relationship to place and how that shapes our worldview. His current work focuses on human ecology, climate change adaptation, threats to democracy, masculinity, and nuance within the American South. He holds an MS in Sustainable Agriculture/Food Systems and left academia in 2012 to tell stories with a camera. He has worked as a documentary cinematographer for VICE, Al Jazeera, Story Syndicate, PBS, and on numerous
documentaries. His personal work has been supported by The Pulitzer Center, ITVS, The New Yorker, Center for Asian American Media (CAAM), DOC NYC, New Orleans Film Society, Southern Documentary Fund, Reel South, Arkansas PBS, Arkansas Humanities Council, Asian Doc Network, Video Consortium, and Antenna. His debut feature documentary, IRANIAN HILLBILLY is currently in production and was a 2022 Southern Documentary Fund production grant recipient and the winner of 2022 New Orleans Film Festival’s South Pitch. He is a 2023 CAAM Fellow and 2023 PBS Wyncote Fellow. He enjoys roaming his native Ozarks with his devil hound, June.
This piece was commissioned by the New Orleans Film Society for South Summit 2024. South Summit received critical support from JustFilms Ford Foundation, which is part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arts Council New Orleans.
