Scenarios of the Oppressed, Fantasies of the Master

In 1966, Muhammad Ali Clay refused to serve in the military because he did not want to fight against Vietnam, whereupon his license, passport and ID were confiscated. Although he suffered many challenges because of his reaction against the law, many people consider this reaction to be a symbol of resistance against the racist system.

In 1976, a movie called Rocky was made. In the movie, a white boxer named Rocky, who makes his living doing street work, fights a black boxer named Apollo Creed. In this title fight, Rocky defeats his “black” opponent Apollo.

In 1977, the movie Rocky won three Oscars. The film’s actor and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone comes on stage to express his gratitude for the award. As he begins to speak, Muhammad Ali enters the stage without Stallone seeing him. When Stallone sees Muhammad Ali, he is astonished. Muhammad Ali stands in front of Stallone, looks at him and then points his finger at him and angrily confronts him: “I am the real Apollo Creed. You stole my script!” He then challenged Stallone to a fight, saying twice: “Show me what you can do?” Stallone raised his fists. They both laughed together. During their fight, Muhammad Ali punched him with his fists and asked him: “Show me what you can do?”

After a few seconds, Stallone escapes Muhammad Ali and the fight ends in the first round. He is ridiculed on stage. Then Stallone ends his speech as follows: “I just want to say something. It’s a great honor for me to stand next to a true legend. It will be a real treasure to me for the rest of my life.

We don’t know how Sylvester Stallone would have spoken as Rocky if Muhammad Ali had not appeared on stage that night and sued him for his stolen script. But in the shadow of the violence, the truth came out. Muhammad Ali broke the legend of Rocky and the Hollywood film industry with his fists, just as he destroyed the reputation of the state a few years ago.

In the history of the Academy Awards, this two-minute production was not widely publicized. There may be two reasons for this. Muhammad Ali did not just indict Stallone, he also exposed the state film industry and its pricing policy. He showed us how the state, the market and art work together to colonize people’s imagination and how they steal the scenarios of oppressed people and replace them with false representations.

The colonial system does not allow for a success story that the oppressed people can be proud of. So they not only resorted to songs and epics, but also made biographies and real-life stories their own. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the importance of “daily life”, “the power of fantasy, image and imagination” was discovered. After land and fields, gold and silver, it was time for minds and imaginations. The state and capitalist forces wanted to shape the fields of culture and art, including literature, television, cinema and theater, in an industrial style. The aim is not only to invade homes, but also minds and brains.

Colonialism distorts the truth with theft scenarios, artificial and false heroes and misrepresentations, filling them instead with its fantasies. The oppressed people whose scripts have been stolen lose their reality after a while, they see their images in the scripts of the rulers, whatever role is assigned to them, they play this role. The rulers’ fantasies become their scenarios.

Culture and art play an important role in the development of colonialism. Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe and Shakespeare’s play The Tempest are two important examples of colonial fiction. For years, anti-colonial writers wrote other works against the portrayal of “Friday” and “Caliban” in these works, revealing the fantasies of the rulers from the perspective of the oppressed. In the field of cinema, these “script wars” are still going on.

In every field, the battle for representation continues throughout the world. Only those who care about their scripts can appear in the world with their names, speak to the world about their names and share their experiences with the world so that justice prevails in both reality and representation and the scenarios of the oppressed are not victimized by their fantasies.

#YouAreAllWeHave – Support Kurdish Media!