Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse

The recent Spanish film The Captive (trailer) is difficult to review because it tells a very streamlined story that is very deeply situated in a complex historical context. It also takes a bunch of risks with complicated, emotive topics and hopes the audience is willing to come along for the ride. Critical responses have ranged from “how can you say Cervantes was gay?” to “this film is nowhere near gay enough,” with just a dash of “is this actually Islamophobic?”

I personally think all of these miss the film’s point, which is actually an exploration of Spain’s cultural blindnesses and hypocrisies in the 16th century and maybe a little about how such blindnesses continue today, and also about how some individuals (like Cervantes) could see past them. But that thing about being deeply situated in a cultural complex – that requires some historical background to reach. So I think it might be useful to add a few footnotes and talk a bit about why its context is hard (but worthwhile) to explore.

Content warnings: slavery, torture, violence, Christianity, homophobia. Bias warning: the movie really only shows us one half of a conversation. But that one half plus a few muffled interjections is enough to look past the Spanish view and see some of how it’s constructed. More on that later.

Synopsis (spoilers)
As a matter of historical record, Cervantes (author of Don Quixote, often cited as the greatest work of Spanish literature and/or the first truly “modern” novel) briefly served as a soldier at the Battle of Lepanto. Then he was taken captive by corsairs and held prisoner by the Ottoman Algerian government for 5 years. He was finally ransomed and returned to Spain, where he began his career as a novelist. This movie tells a story (that goes way beyond any historical evidence into pure speculation) about his life during captivity. It’s in the genre of historical fiction of things that could have happened: the historical context is pretty rigorously researched (that’s not the same as true), but the events that make up the plot are invented and interspersed with dramatizations of Cervantes’s own made-up stories, creating a charming but these days pretty familiar artful blurring of lines about evidence, meanings, truth claims and storytelling.

Context
Ok so the first thing you really need to know about this situation is that, in its broad outlines, it really happened. For centuries, the corsairs of north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean captured and enslaved European Christians or imprisoned them for ransom.* Here’s an episode of the Empire podcast about it. It’s hard to estimate total numbers but it happened often enough that European Christian mariners invented mutual insurance societies to pay ransoms for their members. And yes, it’s true that some Christian captives were able to gain their freedom by converting to Islam and then lived free in the Ottoman empire, and others converted but remained enslaved and even so they could rise to important, powerful positions in Islamic society as slaves or eventually buy their freedom, because Islamic slaves could own property and make money. And some people never got any of these options – they were enslaved without questions regarding their religion or options for ways to bargain for their freedom, or they were arbitrarily killed, or otherwise maltreated. History tends to be like that: very varied, with many exceptions even to its seemingly firm rules. The film shows a possible condition, that might have happened to Cervantes.

Also (less discussed in the film) Christians captured and enslaved Muslims and other Christians. The most prolific enslavers of Muslims (or people they could claim were Muslims) per capita were the Knights of Malta. But they didn’t encourage conversion, nor were Muslim slaves able to rise much in Christian society, and it was very rare for them to be freed. There are recorded cases of eg. Greek fishermen being serially enslaved by African corsairs and Maltese privateers, and having to prove their religion or justify their conversion or otherwise plead for their freedom against the word of their gentleman owners on multiple sides.

Now, discussion of this whole European vs. non-European slavery business tends to get cut off by some conversational failure modes before it can be considered deeply, so I’ll just quickly address them:

1. Does this mean that slavery or arbitrary imprisonment isn’t so bad, really?
   No. Slavery is a terrible thing and it’s usually accompanied by institutionalized terror, which the movie does not shy away from. Slaves have limited or no rights and are generally subjected to almost unimaginable cruelties. Don’t do it and don’t condone it.
2. But if Africans enslaved white people, doesn’t that kinda excuse whites enslaving Africans?
   No. See response 1.
3. OK but actually European/American plantation slavery was worse than this sideshow of corsair slavery because there was no way to freedom for blacks on the plantations, their children would also be automatically enslaved, it involved more people, and it was exploited as a colonial system, without which the whole European economy would not have worked.
   That’s all true but I would say that we don’t have to make this a competition, like an Olympics of evils – any time you can be arbitrarily beaten to death, that’s already unconscionably, unquestionably unacceptable. Nothing about any kind of slavery is excusable in any case.
4. Racism is still a strong force in society and by drawing false equivalence between historical enslavement of black and white people, you inevitably cover up the present harm being done by the continuing racist disadvantaging of black people. Talking about the miseries of white slaves is whataboutism, and that’s really why white racists like to talk about this corsair slavery period.
   I dunno. I think racists will latch onto any way to make their racism look OK and we should not abandon our efforts to understand history just because racists look to it for excuses. In fact we have to understand them in order to understand the whole phenomenon of slavery and ongoing cultural battlegrounds. Only by looking squarely at the past can we assess the power it still exerts.

Still with me? Still interested in knowing about this movie?

OK so what happens to Cervantes is he’s put up for sale as a basic worker slave but because of his crippled arm he’s considered worthless, and therefore the slave-seller decides to kill him but he produces a letter that he claims means he’s important, and that means he gets put in the prison for gentlemen prisoners, whose families will pay ransoms in silver for their release. Only he has no rich family, so he’s stuck there.

And here we see how social class changes the captive’s situation, because the prospect of a ransom makes it worthwhile for the corsairs to keep these idle gentlemen alive… but for the gentlemen it totally changes the calculus of captivity. You could convert to Islam to win your freedom, and if you were as poor as a rat (as one convert puts it) it might be attractive – the Ottoman economy presented more opportunities for commoners than the Spanish – but for a noble, your family in Spain will only welcome you back if you don’t convert – if you protect your reputation as a gentleman, if you still have family prospects and employability in the deeply racist, xenophobic, and honour-obsessed Spanish court. You have to still be you – maintain your identity, even act as an exemplar of the indomitable noble Spanish character – to be worth your ransom.
(N.B. the film doesn’t point out the narrowness of the gentlemen’s choice. It says “if you convert you can never leave,” but that’s not true, you can go anywhere in the Ottoman empire, which is essentially a whole other half to Europe, about which the northerners prefer to be ignorant: