Yours in love and struggle: “Compensation”(1999)

Because I had loved so deeply,
Because I had loved so long,
God in His great compassion
Gave me the gift of song.

Because I have loved so vainly,
And sung with such faltering breath,
The Master in infinite mercy
Offers the boon of Death.

“Compensation” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Zeinabu irene Davis’ “Compensation” (1999) is all about love through struggle: it takes strength to remain gentle and kind. Despite the sorrow, there remains surging notions of love that seep through every frame and moment of this story. Davis creates a film that shows the possibility of tenderness in spite of prejudice, as its characters consistently choose to endure the effort of love. Marc Arthur Chéry, the screenwriter for “Compensation,” reanimated Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem of the same name for this film. Both works detail the delicate and ephemeral act of balancing love and loss through compensation. 

The film follows two Black love stories that take place in Chicago at opposite ends of the 20th century. The first takes place in the early 1900s and follows young couple Malindy and Arthur; the second is set in the 1990s and follows Malaika and Nico. Leading actors Michelle A. Banks and John Earl Jelks bring these characters to life in beautiful dual performances. Malindy is a Deaf seamstress who falls in love with Arthur, an illiterate hearing man from Mississippi. In the 1990s, Malaika, a Deaf graphic artist, falls in love with Nico, a hearing librarian. Both romances are beset by pandemics relevant to the time period, as Arthur fatally contracts tuberculosis and Malaika is revealed to be HIV-positive. Davis skillfully creates a mosaic that intertwines Black life and romance with both hope and melancholy, all while diving into the intricate universe of d/Deaf folk.

Davis’ film is, firstly, a shining star of inclusion. “Compensation” explores such wildly diverse and important perspectives of Black women that are not typically represented within film, especially during the time of its release. Davis tackles the intersection of hearing and non-hearing folk, the meshing of different class and education levels, racial marginalization in relation to terminal illness, and the intersection of Blackness and disability, while also coupling it with love and a patient resilience. Davis also embeds accessibility directly into the film. The sound design was uniquely mixed in order to be felt physically by hard-of-hearing folks, bringing vibrations to the forefront of the soundscape whenever possible. Intertitles, open captioning, and audio descriptions are also embedded into the film.

“Compensation” is clearly a love letter to Chicago and its rich history of African American culture. The film’s very beginning launches us into the bustling city streets of Chicago in the early 1900s with the use of archival photography. It’s easy to immediately notice the intricate, layered sound design that Davis beautifully employs throughout the entire film. Ragtime music is overlaid with voices, footsteps, and the rumbling sounds of engines amidst an industrializing city during the Great Migration. The sounds of real people and real experiences are combined with historic images of Black life. We see many eyes – some wide, bright and hopeful of a baby’s, others worn, old and tired from the everyday motion of life for African Americans at the time. 

With the innovative use of silent-film style intertitles, Davis creates a timeline that highlights the importance of early Chicago to the evolution of African American history. She walks us through the simultaneous growth of the city and the emergence of a Black literary culture pioneered by The Chicago Defender, as well as the works of figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Scott Joplin. There’s also an ode to Chicago’s Pekin Theatre, which was the first Black-owned theatre renowned for its all-Black stock company. Davis herself even recreates Black Chicagoan director William Foster’s 1912 film “The Railroad Porter,” which no longer exists in any form. It was likely the first African American directed film featuring an all-Black cast. With love, Davis simultaneously recollects and recreates a detailed memory of Chicago’s importance in uplifting and documenting early Black life and the history of Black film and literacy.

So much of the film is about an appreciation for education and expression, and how they serve as an anchor for enlightenment and loving. While Malindy teaches Arthur how to read and sign, she learns how to love. In the modern day, Nico takes ASL classes while Malaika learns to have trust in vulnerability and falls in love with him. We’re introduced to Malaika’s best friend, Bill, a talented Deaf dancer who helps to further immerse Nico in Malaika’s world when the couple attends a Black Deaf Advocates meeting together and watches him perform. In a particularly moving scene, they watch Bill dance to a melodic interpretation of Dunbar’s “Compensation.” Through dance, Bill makes use of his full body as an extension of sign language and highlights the important link between Deaf culture and dance. In parallel, Arthur immerses himself in Malindy’s world as she teaches him two languages. As an illiterate migrant from Mississippi, Arthur experiences a complete rebirth into the world of language and loving.

Malindy and Malaika are women who carry so much spirit and dimension within them; they beautifully represent the shimmering feeling of being a young and ambitious, yet sensitive, woman. Malaika carries the heavy burden of her affliction with AIDS, but she doesn’t let her pain consume her life. Importantly, she represents the disproportionate impact that AIDS had on Black women in Chicago at the time, and how these women still continued to carry themselves fiercely in this world. Both women eventually find themselves in tough conversations with friends and family in speculation of the futures of their respective romances. Both Malindy and Malaika cannot help but choose love, even if it seems like all forces of nature are closing in on them. 

“Compensation” is a story that paints love without border or time. The film itself is grounded in a poem and its story beautifully pulses outwards from Dunbar’s original words. We weave seamlessly in and out of the two timelines, and towards the final moments of the film, we see shared sorrow that bleeds across the century and stings tender to the touch. “Compensation” is about finding beauty and solace within the silence. The soul of the film lies within a train ride home, the infinite lapping of the waves of Chicago’s seashore, and the wild geese that decorate the sky as we journey along the gentle paths of the two love stories. 

In the end, Malindy gains the strength to surrender and let Arthur go; Nico gathers the courage to make sacrifices for Malaika and stay with her. Every exchange is a form of compensation in the name of love, and everything is an attempt to love and be loved more. Profoundly, Davis’ choice for the same actors to play both couples represents a reincarnation of their love a century later, when things do happen to work out this time around.