Lagerah – The Last Born is a work anchored around theories of abolition, rebellion, ancestral knowledge and love. Shot on location in Scotland, London and Barbados and featuring footage from West Africa as well as from Venice, the film melds a collection of scenes that give focus to the strength of contemporary Black womxn, whose individual acts of resistance are bound together through a form of conceptual storytelling.
Whittle takes as starting point their ongoing interest and research into the Sisterhood of the Good Death. Formed by free Black womxn in Salvador, Brazil in the early 1800’s the Sisterhood radically enacted strategies of resistance against slavery and racism. On arrival in the Americas, the enslaved were left to perish by the shore if they were judged to have no commercial value. Witnessing this brutality was the catalyst for the formation of the Sisterhood. Their main endeavour was to work collectively to give respectful burials to the enslaved and to support other Black people through constituting networks of care. Recognising the devastating impact of simultaneously being actively dehumanised through the constant demand for labour and abasement whilst being commodified, the Sisterhood refused this reading and developed new ways to survive and flourish based on ancestral knowledges. They attended to the trauma caused by loss and grief by celebrating ancestral spirits, marking the lives of those living, and those still to come.
The Sisterhood becomes a symbolic marker of resistance and a reminder of Black womxn standing as a backbone to Black resilience. It is through this lens that Whittle collages together a collection of scenes that centre on the strength of contemporary Black womxn and collectively bind them in their acts of resistance through their gestures, acts and rituals. The film offers up to its audience an insight into different potential layers of resistance that allow for Black love to be situated in proximity with historical sites of trauma that are re-inscribed with rage, hope and exhaustion.
The film also moves on to expand upon ideas of Abolition. Its association with the ending of the Transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery is explored in relation to more contemporary movements; for the abolition of systems of power based on white supremacy, specifically prison and carceral punishment systems. The film is a call for radical change in Western and UK society – where racist, imperialist agenda’s permeate society to this day through a culture of surveillance and incarceration, police brutality and systemic institutional racism. ‘The Last Born’ is a specific reference to Sheku Bayoh, who lost his life in Scotland while in police custody. His name is remembered and celebrated through the griot praise sang that closes the film.
