Emergency (2022)

directed by Carey Williams

Jaylan Salah Salman

It was really late at night and I was having a chat with my friendly white second-wave feminist friend. I say white because that’s who we are: two ladies—one from Egypt, the other from the US—having fun and enjoying shared experiences.

It’s been all sunshine and butterflies with my friendly American white second-wave feminist friend; she has been very supportive and vocal about loving my poetry. She would describe it as universal and pertinent to women’s experiences around the world. Her words would put me on cloud nine and we even reminisced about creating art together.

That’s until the “moment” that I used to see in movies before but never thought would touch me. A race thing. Or let’s say a culture thing. Race, culture, what is it really? A moment when it is revealed that someone I considered a friend really saw me as a nationality, an ethnicity, a person lesser than the predominantly white race or experience that they belonged to. We had a chat about my poetry and how I was looking for a publisher when she said that my writings were “exotic” and that was what readers in America liked. “It’s exotic writing, honey. What do you think it is?” She then continued that even women who reached out and connected with me saying that they felt this way before or experienced similar things were not actually reacting to how similar our experiences were, despite our differences, but they were attracted to what I write because I am foreign, sexy, exotic, alluring. I felt like I was performing an Oriental belly dance to her eyes, and suddenly my universal poetry was kept in a box, tight, confusing, and lacking fresh air.

That’s what we are: exotic. It’s like One Thousand and One Nights all over; this time, I am Scheherazade and the entire US population is Shahryar. I was performing this oriental burlesque dance with my poetry and instead of a genuine connection and understanding I was getting monocles, oohs and ahhs, white people silently appraising my body—literally—of work through superior, highly-intellectual gazes. It was such a dark moment for me and I logged out of the chat feeling enraged.

That night I decided to watch a somehow forgotten movie that debuted last year at Sundance and was later released on Amazon Prime. I find it deserving bigger and more prominent recognition than it got. Emergency is a comedy-thriller directed by Carey Williams and starring fresh-faced actors whom I mostly haven’t seen before, save for Sabrina Carpenter. The movie follows three non-white students who face a difficult situation, further complicated by their race, that is being non-white in America. Each one of them has a different reaction to the situation at hand than the other. For starters, Kunle is in denial. He sees himself as a straight-A student, a brilliant protégé who cannot be harmed or affected by his race or skin color. Sean is a street-smart kid; he has seen what racial injustice, racism, and police brutality could do to Black men. He has been exposed to the cruelty, unfairness, and brutality of the world, unlike Kunle, whose life is immersed in his studies and sheltered from the ugly face of the world. Raised as an upstanding citizen, a good boy, by his momma, Kunle thinks and acts like guidelines from a book, blindly applying logic without understanding the gravity of real life and how it works or doesn’t always work as it should. Sean is less eloquent, more uninformed when it comes to culture and science, but in real life he reigns, he walks the roads savvy and prepared. He is unapologetic and affirmative of his identity, never escaping from it or running around it in circles.

When faced with a morally taut situation, Kunle and Sean are divided over how they handle the consequences of acting on either impulse or a deep understanding of life. While Sean is the more realistic one, Kunle still holds on to hope that being a good guy will get him off the injustices and brutalities of the world. The night drags on and their limits are tested until a pivotal moment that changes the course of actions, and alters Kunle’s perception of who he is. It is a moment where he is only viewed as his race, a young Black man with a white woman in his car. Kunle is roughed up, brutally treated, and pinned to the ground. Eyes almost gouging out of their sockets, Kunle goes wild, the straight A student becomes a scared, trapped soul, yelling to be released. His entire existence relies on this moment where a policeman pins him to the ground. Being a scholar, never doing drugs, coming from a good family, someone who has always been on the right track means nothing at this moment. He is Black. He is reduced to his race which, in the eyes of police, means that he will always remain a threat to society.

The scenes build up to a crescendo, ending in a climactic confrontation where Kunle came out of this experience a different man. He is aware of the collective Black pain, carries it on his shoulder, and learns how real-life works. He understands that in a world of privilege, it is no longer relevant that Kunle never lived Sean’s life or had a cousin that went to jail; Kunle would be on the same level as Sean if a policeman decided to stop them and drag them out of their cars, get them in a chokehold. It was only in the moment when he prayed he would come out of it alive that Kunle realized nothing was worth being in that position of risking something for the sake of a white person. He had to protect himself, set his boundaries, and build his walls. He had to understand the rules of the game and not let the situation become another guilt narrative for white people to become protagonists in stories about POC.

Throughout the movie, Kunle has been fighting the truth of who he really is. By owning his truth, his Blackness, and how it impacts the world, how he has to stand up in the face of the world, not by appealing to its white majority but by holding his ground, he has found catharsis, protecting his energy and existence in a way.

As for me, well, I wrote a poem. I had to write more and keep that truth inside me alive, not exotic or Western, not appealing to anybody but the truth seekers, those who seek reality in others regardless of fact-checking their backgrounds or heritage. At the end of the day, that’s them and that’s me, and there’s nothing any of us can ever do.

Jaylan Salah Salman is an Egyptian poet, translator, two-time national literary award winner, and visionary artist. She has published film criticism articles, short stories, poems, and translations on many websites and offline publications. You can check out her #TheJayDays reviews and vlogs on her YouTube channel.