We are the raccoons in charge around here

@sissa-arrows source (french)

Over 200 Algerians were killed that night over 500 if you count the one killed in the following nights but thousands more were arrested (over 10000) every single ministry was an accomplice they used to public buses to transport them kept them in a stadium because the precincts were not big enough… While the people killed were men and women, the people arrested were a huge majority of men. So the following days the women and children started calling for a peaceful march to ask for their husbands and fathers to be released. This time they knew that the public opinion wouldn’t look kindly to it if they killed them. So the police instead arrested the women and sent them to a psychiatric hospitals saying they were unstable and needed to be locked inside. Luckily the director was a good man so he refused to lock the women inside the hospital saying they were perfectly sane but he also refused to let the police take them. So he waited until the police left to help the women leave back to their places.

There’s a documentary about it (I don’t remember if the psychiatric hospital was in this documentary or in an other) made by an Algerian woman in the diaspora in France. It’s filled with testimonies and a woman explains that when her husband left for the protest he told her to take care of the children and that if something happened to him she needed to make sure their children would go to school school and be good students. He survived to October 17 but was found and killed by the police on the 19th.

It’s played on a banjo, an instrument with origins in West Africa formally invented in the US by enslaved people (and then popularized in Irish music through Irish American immigrants, largely in the South and Appalachia). Even the instrument telegraphs an attempt at cultural exchange morphing into theft and exploitation, especially because the history of the banjo has been purposefully obscured by white people

It’s got a strong down beat, making it the musical opposite of the swung blues sound (emphasis on 1/3 as opposed to 2/4). The scene is clearly meant to evoke klan imagery, and giving it this marching feel ABSOLUTELY contributes

It’s in 9/8 meter (with some mixed—it’s a uniquely weird song), making it, traditionally, a slip jig. Historically, this is a light shoe dance for women only (he’s dancing hard shoe in the movie) meaning that Remmick’s attempt to reclaim his own culture has been botched, obscured, and lost as he’s been alienated from it and co-opted into the symbolic hive of American whiteness/cultural orphanage/cultural patricide.

The song itself is about a guy cutting a shillelagh (a walking stick/club with a folkloric purpose of warding off evil spirits) to protect himself on his journey to Dublin, but winding up using it against a few Englishmen mocking him for his Irish accent. It’s a parallel to exactly what Remmick was not able to do—protect himself from monsters, and protect himself from colonization. It also highlights that this number is being used to threaten violence against the leads

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)