The Problematics of Iman in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Midway through that end-of-the-Cold-War allegory, 1991's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy are sent to a gulag after being framed for the assassination of the Klingon High Chancellor.  While the crew of the Enterprise is busy planning their jailbreak, solving the who-dunnit, and preventing full-on war, Kirk and McCoy are befriended by a fellow inmate named Martia, who informs them there is already a hit out on them.  She offers them her expertise to help all three of them escape.  Martia later turns out to be an alien shape-shifter, who can transform into whatever shape she needs to survive, dependent on the situation.

This shape-shifting aspect of Martia becomes all the more problematic once one becomes aware that the actress playing her is Somali supermodel Iman, a person who in real life is already quite skilled at shape-shifting to navigate the fraught racial dynamics of contemporary America.

As a fashion-conscious friend recently explained to me, Iman is the daughter of a Somali diplomat who traveled the Middle-East; she was discovered at Nairobi University in Kenya by fashion photographer Peter Beard.  At the time of her first visit to New York in the '70s, she was fluent in 5 languages and was already highly educated and deeply cosmopolitan.  However, when she arrived in New York, she learned that Peter had presented her as this "goat-herder's daughter," as an illiterate, rustic rube of some sort, such that when the Press learned she could speak English fluently, all were caught off guard.

That moment appears to be pretty representative of her entire career, for she was being forced right from her debut to conform, change, shape-shift to the expectations others had for her--and it hasn't always a smooth ride.  Though she achieved instant stardom, she was constantly "too ethnic" for some white audiences, while "not black enough" for some African-American ones.  She was under constant pressure to appear both more and less "authentically African," and was often taken to task for failing the impossible expectation to be both.

As if to underscore her constant navigation between multiple worlds, in 1992 she married British rocker David Bowie, who himself has a reputation as a shape-shifter, constantly reinventing himself every few years.  Perhaps she got along so well with her shape-shifter, sometimes alien-looking Ziggy Stardust of a husband, because she was of necessity an alien shape-shifter herself long before she played one in Star Trek VI.

For example, at one point in the film, in order to escape her leg-brace in the mining level, Martia shape-shifts into a small blonde white-girl, which, given the way that whiteness continues to define American beauty standards (standards that Iman had to both conform to and resist throughout her modeling career), is almost a meta-commentary on the fashion industry itself in that moment.

When she, Kirk, and McCoy escape to the surface, she transforms into this large, Yeti-like monster to withstand the cold, then back to the sexy Martia we first met when they break for camp.  McCoy asks if "there is any way of knowing if this is the real you?" which had to have been a question that Iman was both asked--and asked herself--too often throughout her career.  She responds by paraphrasing Polonius to Ophelia: "I thought I would assume a pleasing shape," which is a strategy that, again, Iman doubtless had to often adopt just to survive the racial minefield that is Western modeling and unequal American power relations.

But Kirk isn't the only one for whom she's assuming a pleasing form; as Kirk soon realizes, she merely staged their escape for the benefit of the Klingons in exchange for a "full pardon", as part of a conspiracy to make it look like they were killed in flight from prison.  She even parodies her "pleasing shapes," wielding her shape-shifting as a weapon (as, again, Iman doubtless had to often) as she transforms into Kirk, then attacks him.

But alas, her strategy of conformity fails, as the Klingons vaporize her anyways when they find them, so as to ensure there are no witnesses to their conspiracy.  Kirk and McCoy are of course beamed out by the Enterprise in the nick of time, but not without leaving the viewer with a sour taste in the mouth for Martia, and the no-win situation that she (and so many women of color like her) has been placed in, as all the pressures to conform to "pleasing shapes" in a thousand contradictory ways still end in her being betrayed and disappeared.  Like Ophelia of yore, her attempts to please everyone please no one, ultimately causing her to disintegrate, tearing her apart, killing her quite literally.  Iman, fortunately, has had a happier time of it in real life than Ophelia, though many women, particularly women of color, have been far less fortunate.

The film itself is already problematic in other places, though at least more self-consciously: remember how the Klingon ambassador's daughter calls out the racism implicit in Chekhov's phraseology "inalienable human rights," or the moment when Spock in effect mind-rapes the double-agent Valeris in a non-consensual mind-meld to find out from her who the other co-conspirators are.  I have to wonder how consciously intentional the casting of Iman as a shape-shifter was in a film that already calls explicit attention to white and male privilege, ethnocentrism, paternalism, and unconscious racism.