Los Angeles/206 director Zia Mohajerjasbi’s debut feature Know Your Place (released in 2022) is a film that everyone in Seattle (and all other major cities) must watch. It is dense, so unpacking it all is nothing but impossible within the obvious attentional limits imposed on a review. But, I will begin by saying this: The star of this film is, above all, Seattle. And not just Seattle, but the 206 in the months between summer and winter. This star has, during all months of the year, two important and different parts. One: The city that is becoming, class-wise, homogenous. This kind of city has less and less space for those whose lifestyle is maintained by the exchange of labor for wages. Two: The city that’s losing its color. Black Americans were the first to go, and all that’s left of what was once the Blackest neighborhood in the Pacific Northwest is the melancholy Remembrance Plaza, a public art project on 23rd and Yesler that the Catholic Community Services commissioned to ostensibly remember Black Americans who once called this area home.
For the past five or so years, however, it’s been the displacement of Black Africans, with the recent closure of Queen Sheba Ethiopian Restaurant on Capitol Hill as its most striking (if not most depressing) example. There are now no East African restaurants or residents in what was once the most progressive area of Seattle. Next, it seems, are working-class Asian Americans in the International District. Know Your Place takes place during the present displacement.
The story of Know Your Place is profoundly Black African. It’s the odyssey of 15-year-old Robel Haile (played by Joseph Smith), who is tasked with hauling by hand, from one end of the city to the other, a huge and heavy suitcase intended for a family friend who is returning to East Africa. I, as a Zimbabwean-born American, can attest to the authenticity of this plot. When an African returns home from the States, they not only take their own things, but those of relatives and friends, too. I once recall taking a long bus ride to Shoreline to give a Zimbabwean friend (Saki) a bag filled with vitamins for a sick family member in Harare. In the case of Robel, the suitcase he pulls around Seattle (on the sidewalk, onto this and that bus, into a Link train, or the trunk of a cab) contains, among other things, medicine.
But impressed on this Black African American plot, which also involves Robel’s best friend, Fahmi Tadesse, is the narrative sensibility of 1990s Iranian cinema—more specifically, the cinema of the late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. And more specifically yet, Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House?, which is the first part of a trilogy that ends with one of the greatest films of the 1990s, Through the Olive Trees. Where Mohajerjasbi, an Iranian American, parts with Kiarostami and the Iranian New Wave of the 1990s is Kiarostami’s commitment to beauty (or aesthetic realism).
Indeed, a part of the sadness that courses through Know Your Place has as its source an unsaid consequence of the raw displacement of POCs by primarily wealthy white Americans: Not only can POCs not afford to live in the city, and, in many cases, the entire region, but, more importantly (and spiritually), they can’t afford to live in a beautiful city. In the pre-gentrification days, one did not need a tech job or large inheritance to access the darkling light of Seattle, its large population of big and leafy-thick trees, its glorious sunsets, its glorious color-turning fall, its marvelous bodies of water, its nearby islands, and even the calming music of its urbanized rain. In this film, Mohajerjasbi presents something that is entirely new (if not revolutionary): A political economy of urban beauty.
Know Your Place is screening at Northwest Film Forum Nov 14-21.
“There are now no East African restaurants or residents in what was once the most progressive area of Seattle.”
Doing a Google “East African restaurant near me” shows several results in Seattle, four on Capitol Hill including Adey Abeba Ethiopian Restaurant on East Union St.
Charles, I recall reading part of this review in either 2023 or 2022, and screenshotting the paragraph about Kiarostami. Your review had me excited to see Know Your Place back then, so it’s great to have a chance to see it in 2024.
However — and I’m not sure if this was in the original review — Seattle isn’t exactly “losing its color”. The Central District’s Black community has been displaced, of course, but as of the 2020 census, Seattle is getting less white and more Asian and Latino. And to your last paragraph about POCs being priced out — many are recipients of the tech jobs you mention and contribute to gentrification, yet you seem to lump the entire, heterogenous category of “POCs” together.
Watch out for @1 Phoebe and her Googlefingers, just waiting to check what you know in your soul to be true with a mind numbing capitalist transaction.
@3: There’s a Ghanaian restaurant literally across the street from the Stranger’s old office on Capitol Hill. It may not be East African, but that seems like a weird distinction to draw in an article whose subject is Black displacement. Harare-born Mudede himself is not from East Africa, unless you torture the definition.
@1: Might want to double-check your Google-fu. That restaurant is on 22nd and Union, which is not even close to Capitol Hill.
The African population has remained steady in Seattle for the past 20 years.
The Asian population has increased.
The central district has made huge investments in low and medium income housing that is almost exclusively, probably illegally, directed towards Africans. Ever heard of Africatown? While I think they are despicable racists they have managed to get the city to give them over five properties in the central district and counting.
The woe is me attitude is tiresome and dishonest. Maybe the black community should have to see films about how their violence negatively impacts the Asian community.
@2 “The Central District’s Black community has been displaced”
It’s a dishonest use of the word displaced. Black homeowners voluntarily sold their homes making a huge profit. It was the Japanese people being displaced that allow them to buy the homes at a very modest price by the government to begin with. For some reason there seems to be less outrage over this than black people voluntarily selling their homes and making an enormous profit. It’s a voluntary displacement. There are plenty of programs in place to help low-income and elderly homeowners with property taxes. There are tons of neighborhoods that cycle through different ethnic groups during a span of 100 years. That idea that when a neighborhood is a predominantly black neighborhood and then is in transitioning from that it is somehow more of a tragedy than any other ethnic transitions is dishonest. There are plenty of other groups who are also priced out of neighborhoods. And there are plenty of times where black folks choose to leave out of their own volition just like everybody else. It’s odd that when white ethnic groups do not want to see cultural changes to their neighborhood we do not say they are fighting gentrification or displacement. We say they are racist. And gentrification and displacement, real things, have been dishonestly used simply because of the desire to keep a culturally black neighborhood culturally black, even when those changes don’t come about by tragedy. The central district became less Native American and less Japanese out of tragedy and injustice. Neither tragedy nor injustice is what is causing the central district to become less black. Yeah mourn The changes but then don’t turn around and call other demographics racist when they hate to see the changes new ethnic groups bring to their neighborhoods.
Teresa Mosqueda, Tammy Morales, and Kshama Sawant succeeded in ‘upzoning’ the Central District to make housing “more affordable” and “equitable”
Real estate developers swooped in and offered black families money for their homes.
Those families moved to cheaper areas like Kent.
In their place, $800K and $900K ugly townhouses were built and the Central District started to change
“Progressive” policies failed the people they’re supposedly trying to help, yet again.
Vote Better.