For Europeans traveling, Newark is an inconvenient alternative to JFK, a hard-to-reach New York airport. We pass through it without worrying about knowing that the airport is also a city, the largest in New Jersey, which has become, according to the American crises, a kind of wild laboratory where the United States has experienced demographic upheavals. , urban and economic – exodus of white populations, addiction epidemics, deindustrialization – which have shaped their cities.
For Europeans who read, Newark is also the city of Philip Roth (1933-2018). The one that saw the novelist and his characters grow up, Seymour “The Swede” Levov (American Pastoral, 1997) or the Roth family of the Plot Against America (2004). As for Europeans interested in American politics, they know of Newark that it was one of the first cities convulsed by the uprisings of the 1960s, and that one of the leading figures in the bloody repression of the 1967 riots ( you can currently see on the New Yorker website an impressive portfolio of images taken for Life magazine by photographer Bud Lee) was the African-American poet Amiri Baraka, born Everett LeRoi Jones (1934-2014).
From this literary coincidence – the coexistence in the same space of the novelist, chronicler of the life of the Jewish community, and the militant poet, who organized theatrical workshops in the city and was arrested and beaten up during the riots –, the documentary filmmaker Steve Faigenbaum forms the backbone of this short film with a long title. This confrontation between two artists that everything separates turns out to be both impossible and fertile.
Lots of exciting ideas
Impossible because Roth quickly left Newark, which only existed in his memory as a reservoir of fiction, while Baraka made it the field of a political practice of his art. So much so that the first can only exist in voice-over or through the memory of a contemporary, while the second is present on the screen, a major figure in African-American activism, bogeyman for the conservative media (we see also his son, Ras Baraka, now mayor of Newark).
However, from this dialogue of the deaf a host of fascinating ideas, sometimes just touched on, are born. A witness evokes the mutation of Weequahic, the Jewish district where the author of Portnoy and his complex (1969) grew up, which saw its occupants flee to the suburbs as soon as the first African-Americans settled there. The ghetto besieged by anti-Semites that Roth nightmares in The Plot Against America has become another kind of ghetto, the exits of which are also strictly controlled. Not that the texts have so decided, but town planning, the film demonstrates, is an instrument as implacable as the Jim Crow laws of the southern United States in the past.
The duration of Exclusion, rebellion, affirmation – Newark USA prevents its author from doing more than sketching the process by which the advances made in the wake of the 1967 clashes were gradually confiscated. At least we will have learned that Newark was the scene of an ambitious attempt at African-American urbanism, which the opposition of mostly white neighborhood committees derailed. But this brevity also gives a frenetic pace to this succession of missed appointments, resignations from institutions, which is not the prerogative of the United States alone.