(Sex) Striking Out: Spike Lee’s Chi-raq

Spike Lee’s Chi-raq is not just a movie, but a movement. “The mission of this film was to save lives,” Lee has said, and there is a strong sense of urgency both in the movie itself, and in the publicity and activism around it. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY appears on the screen in red flashing capital letters at the start of the movie, setting a tone of insistence and crisis about gun violence and gang warfare on the South Side of Chicago. The successes and failures of Chi-raq lie in its compelling interactions between fiction and real life.

The movie is a loose adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. This is flagged early on by the character Dolmedes, played by Samuel L. Jackson as a charismatic one-man Greek chorus:

In the year 411 BC — that’s before baby Jesus y’all — the great Aristophanes penned a play
satirizing his day
and in the style of his time
‘stophanes made that shit rhyme.
That’s why today we retain his verse
To show our love for the universe.
But warning — you gonna see some PAIN.

The pain in Aristophanes’ play was caused by the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens and its empire fought against Sparta and its allies. When Aristophanes staged Lysistrata, the Greeks had been at war for twenty years. In the play, the women of the Greek cities, led by the Athenian Lysistrata, come together to try to end the crisis. Their strategy is a sex strike: they refuse to have sex until the men see sense, which, after many a scene involving striptease gyrations and frustrated erections, they do. They celebrate by watching the personification of Reconciliation take off her clothes.

The pain in the movie is caused by gang warfare between the Spartans and the Trojans. Rapper Demetrius Dupree, aka Spartan leader ‘Chi-raq’ (Nick Cannon, whose song Pray 4 My City opens the movie), is in conflict with Cyclops (Wesley Snipes). When a young girl, Patti, becomes a casualty of their violence, Chiraq’s girlfriend Lysistrata (Teyonnah Parris) rallies the women of Chicago to take action. The sex strike is on:

I will deny all rights of access and entrance
from every husband, lover or male acquaintance who comes to my direction in erection…
If he should force me to lay on that conjugal coach
I will refuse his stroke and not give up that nappy pouch. No peace, no pussy!

The plot of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata has been used to comment on modern gang violence before — namely, in the 2003 movie A Miami Tail, which is set in Liberty City, Florida, and which stars hip-hop artist Trina and rapper Mr Cheeks. Both movies contain the same rallying cry: “No Peace, No Piece!” However, A Miami Tail is a straightforward comedy, whereas Chi-raq shifts quickly and crazily between genres and tones. One moment we watch the women squirm with reluctance as they take Lysistrata’s oath, the next we are with Dolmedes, whose flashy suits and dapper cane are more at home in a musical than on the mean streets, the next we see Irene (Jennifer Hudson) wash her dead daughter’s blood off the sidewalk.

References to current and historical events and names fly thick and fast: Selma, the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Trayvon Martin, Malcolm X, Sandra Bland, “Dr. Ben Carson’s lies.” Scenes are tinged with the symbolism of the gang colors, purple and orange, and overlaid with graphic lettering. The rhyming speech takes on different qualities, doggerel and Shakespeare, rap and Dr. Seuss. All of this creates a chaotic energy that can be overwhelming but ensures sustained passion, vitality, and tension. It produces a joyousness, a thrill of taking up the political challenge, of the possibilities of change. It is a shocking, stylized morality tale.

In Aristophanes’ play, Lysistrata is the moral center of the drama. Unlike her comrades, she is neither hypersexualized nor defined by her relationship with a man. In the adaptation Lysistrata has a strongly sexual relationship with her gangster boyfriend; the moral center is shifted to the characters Miss Helen (Angela Bassett), whose advice inspires the sex strike, and Father Mike Corridon (John Cusack), whose sermon at Patti’s funeral slams gun violence and makes it clear that the issues are far larger than the “self-inflicted genocide” of black-on-black violence.

Corridon is based on Pastor Michael Pfelger of Saint Sabina Church, whose foster son was killed in a gang shooting and who has campaigned tirelessly against gun violence. Reverend Pfleger provides a voice-over at the beginning of the movie. When her character Irene mourns the loss of her child, we are reminded of Jennifer Hudson’s own losses: her mother, brother, and nephew were shot dead in Chicago in 2008. Much of the movie’s emotional charge comes from the repeated resonances within its fantasy scenario to real life tragedies.

Less successful is the proposal of a sex strike as a response to gang warfare, a proposal that in the movie is given roots in an actual sex strike that took place in Liberia, and that outside the movie is touted as a real solution. Nick Cannon on The View (12/14/15), when pressed about whether a strike would really work today, insisted that it would because of “the power of a woman when she withholds.” Spike Lee has suggested that sex strikes are not only a solution to gang warfare but also to sexual violence on university campuses.

This is seriously misconceived and lies in a fundamental misunderstanding about the Liberian sex strike. In the movie, Lysistrata, encouraged by Miss Helen, looks up ‘sex strike’ on the internet and finds Leymah Gbowee, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her activism for peace in Liberia. The scene cuts to a short clip of Abigail Disney’s documentary about the Liberian women’s resistance called Pray the Devil Back to Hell (the devil here is the warlord Charles Taylor, responsible for much of the violence in the second Liberian civil war). In the clip the Liberian women are speaking about their sex strike. This inspires Lee’s Lysistrata to follow their lead.

The Liberian women’s activism has itself been viewed as a version of Lysistrata. (So we have an ancient play supposedly influencing modern real life events that influence a movie that is an adaptation of the ancient play and that hopes itself to influence real life events — complicated dynamics!) The Western media has frequently discussed the events in Liberia as having reflected, or even having been inspired by, Aristophanes’ comedy, and has cast Leymah Gbowee as a “Liberian Lysistrata.”

This is a fiction of Western journalism. A few days before it was announced that Ms. Gbowee had been awarded the Nobel, I interviewed her before she gave a public talk at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where I work. I asked her whether she had read Lysistrata, and she said she had, recently, because a friend had given her a copy as a gift. I asked her what she thought of news reports that spoke about her as a Liberian Lysistrata. She refused to dignify the question but gave me a look of pitying contempt (see here for more). In her memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers, Gbowee devotes less than a page to the strike and its role in the fight for peace:

‘Sex Strike’ is a headline that sells, so when reporters interview me they tend to ask about the sex strike first. Did the women of Liberia really bring an end to the heinous civil war by withholding sex? Well, it certainly gave the men a fresh motive to press for peace.

But the truth is that the greatest weapons of the Liberian women’s movement were moral clarity, persistence, and patience. Nothing happened overnight. In fact it took three years of community awareness, sit-ins, and nonviolent demonstrations staged by ordinary ‘market women’ — years of gathering in the roads in eye-catching white T-shirts, demanding the attention of convoys of officials and media folks who would glimpse the signs and the dancing, would hear the chanting and the singing.

Then we launched the sex strike. In 2002, Liberia’s Christian and Muslim women banded together to refuse sex with their husbands until the violence and the civil strife ended.

She concludes, “It had little or no practical effect, but it was extremely valuable in getting us media attention” (my emphasis). Spike Lee has either misunderstood, or chosen to ignore, that the Liberian sex strike was not a political solution. Its main purpose was to attract publicity.

Common sense suggests that if men are desperate for sex and their wives and girlfriends are unwilling, there are three obvious possibilities. The first, acknowledged in Chi-raq, is for them to go to prostitutes instead. In a scene in a depressed strip club a couple of men are reduced to groping themselves because the strippers have joined forces with Lysistrata: “these hos have literally shut down the penis power grid.” The second is to turn to each other for relief, and there are a couple of moments where the movie acknowledges its heteronormativity, the funniest of which is when a woman reports the sex strike to the men and quips, “good thing I’m a dyke.” The third, unacknowledged possibility is rape. The movie revels in the idea that penises are weapons without suggesting what that might mean for women who anger and challenge men. When I asked Leymah Gbowee about this aspect of the Liberian sex-strike, she told me the strike was most effective in rural communities where the women’s actions were seen in a religious light, but in urban communities women would come to meetings with bruises on their faces. They were certainly being assaulted, and likely also raped.

The Liberian women emphasized modesty and purity in their actions; Chi-raq’s women are as insatiable as the men. This may be true in Aristophanes, but it is also true according to a pernicious stereotype of black people. One of the earliest movie adaptations of Lysistrata, a silent short made in Florida in 1914 called Coon Town Suffragettes, introduced the stereotype of the ‘mammy’, a fat, nagging older black woman. The movie was made with white actors in blackface and the women rallied not to stop male violence but to keep their lazy, cheating, husbands at home. We’ve progressed from there in terms of racial and sexual politics, but not as far as we should have.

Theater scholar Kevin J. Wetmore has analyzed the adaptations of Lysistrata in African-American theater and film in ‘She (Don’t) Gotta Have It: African-American Reception of Lysistrata’, a chapter that does not mention Spike Lee despite its prophetic title. Wetmore argues that early African-American adaptations of the play are “double-coded”, with different humor aimed at black people in the audience than at whites.

So who is the intended audience of Chi-raq? Not the largely white and Chicano population of Santa Barbara, clearly — the movie is not showing there, despite the fact that the city has six movie theaters, regular film festivals, and close ties with the movie industry. I had to drive to Oxnard to see it, where my partner and I made up half of the audience of four white people. The previews were all for comedies with black casts, suggesting that the movie’s marketing team presumes it is a ‘black interest’ movie. The question of audience is significant — my impression is that the fiercest criticisms of the movie have come from African-Americans, while white critics have been more laudatory.

The key problem is the movie’s failure to provide a feasible solution to the violence. It is a mistake that Aristophanes did not make. In the famous ‘wool working’ speech Lysistrata outlines her policy using domestic metaphors:

Imagine the polis [city] as a fleece just shorn. First, put it in a bath and wash out all the sheep dung; spread it on a bed and beat out all the riff raff with a stick, and pluck out the thorns; as for those who clump and knot themselves together to snag government positions, card them out and pluck off their heads. Next, card the wool into a sewing basket of unity and goodwill, mixing in everyone. The resident aliens and any other foreigner who’s your friend, and anyone who owes money to the people’s treasury, mix them in there too. And, oh yes, the cities that are colonies of this land: imagine them as flocks of your fleece each one lying apart from the others. So take these flocks and bring them together here, joining them all and making one big bobbin, And from this weave a fine new cloak for the people.
(Lysistrata 574–86, trans. Henderson)

Obviously, these policy suggestions are not transferable to our time, place, and political system. However, despite its idealism and superficiality, it is a more cogent solution than any offered in Chi-raq. The movie suggests other possibilities in one-liners, in Father Corridon’s sermon and elsewhere. Affordable housing, prison reform, and education reform are all mentioned, but nothing beyond the idea of a sex strike is developed into a coherent proposal.

The movie’s imagery, with its repeated and powerful tableaux of crowds — the crowd at the rap concert waving light sticks, the crowd at the funeral singing as the choir, and the crowd towards the end of the movie, dressed all in white echoing the white T-shirts of the Liberian women — suggest that the way forward is with assemblies like the Black Lives Matter movement and Everytown for Gun Safety (both founded by women — an alternative mode of female empowerment to striptease).

The sexual scenes ultimately get in the way of what should be the real message of Chi-raq. In the words of Leymah Gbowee about her very different, and not at all Aristophanic, sex strike: “The message was that while the fighting continued, and no one was innocent — not doing anything to stop it made you guilty.”

Helen Morales is Argyropoulos Professor of Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara and editor of Ramus: Critical Studies in Greek and Roman Literature. She works largely on ancient fiction and gender, but her most recent book is about being a fan of Dolly Parton: Pilgrimage to Dollywood (Chicago UP, 2014).