Deconstructing the Myth of the Booty

You know how you feel when you find a ten-dollar bill in a winter coat that you forgot about? Well, the eight women of The Saartjie Project (pronounced Sar-key) elicited that same warm smile of remembering in me as they wove a touching, powerful telling of the story of Saartjie (Sara) Baartman, the woman dubbed the “Hottentot Venus.”

Baartman, who left South Africa in 1810 when she was 20-years-old, found herself at the center of a heartbreaking freak show, that would make her all the rage in London and the icon of black female sexuality well into the 20th century.

Through beautiful and sassy monologues, dance and poetry Deconstructing the Myth of the Booty attempts to restore Baartman’s dignity and humanity by insisting that we are her “reincarnated” and as a result can change how people see and treat black women. That by taking up space, telling our truth and disengaging from the machine that only sees us as body parts, we get to redirect the harsh glare and the seldom flattering fascination with the black female form.

The eclectic cast of women, representing various body types and skin tones, moves effortlessly from one vignette to another, with Margaux Deloitte-Bennett’s rich voice providing the sensual soundtrack throughout. From the "Busted Baby Pageant" to the childhood taunts of "if you're black stay back," the audience is taken on a journey that is both provocative and searing in how close it cuts to the bone of truth for the modern day woman, regardless of race.



The brainchild of Jessica T. Solomon, playwright and cultural creative, The Saartjie Project has been on tour for two years. “It was supposed to be a one night performance, but then we started to receive invitations to perform it all over the country,” an amused Jessica shared with the audience during the talk-back portion after the performance.

This was the final performance of Deconstructing the Myth of the Booty and as the cast took their final bow on The Corner Store stage, you wish it weren’t.

The collective’s next project will be based on Nina Simone’s “Four Women.” The new show, schedule to debut fall 2010, will look at the four archetypes of womanhood.

Filmmaker Debra Wilson: Telling Our Stories

I had the good fortune of running into out Black filmmaker Debra Wilson while hanging out in the lobby of the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) and she was gracious enough to give a spontaneous interview.

A California native, currently in the Oakland area, Debra has been very deliberate about how she uses her gift as filmmaker. She feels it is her mission to tell the stories of the various communities she belongs to and communities that are consistently ignored. Debra is quite aware of the power of film and how it often educates audiences who might never come in contact with provocative topics in any other way.

Debra’s own curiosity also helps determine what stories she will develop. After being asked to leave a break out session for “butch-identified lesbians” (because she was not one) while attending the 2001 Zuna Institute National Black Lesbian Conference, she became determined to shine a light into this mysterious world. Over two years, paying for the project out of her pocket, she developed the documentary film Butch Mystique and went on to win the Showtime Black Filmmaker Showcase, where the film first aired.

The documentary follows six butch-identified African-American lesbians in the San Francisco area. Through interviews, issues of power, lifestyle, masculine/feminine energies, outward appearance, and identity are examined.

The Showtime win afforded Debra a $30,000 budget and the opportunity to develop another project that would also air on the premium cable channel. In 2006, Jumpin’ the Broom: The New Covenant made its debut. The documentary focuses on committed same-sex relationships among Black lesbian and gay couples, who build families and lives in the face of opposition to “gay marriage” in the Black community. The term “jumpin’ the broom” is a custom from the days of slavery. During this period, black couples weren’t allowed to legally marry and jumping over a broom was a symbolic gesture to celebrate their love and commitment to each other. Debra’s film suggests that modern day same-sex couples are placed in the same situation of creating their own rituals and ceremonies to legitimize their loving relationships.

At the time the film was released only one state in the U.S., Massachusetts, recognized same-sex marriages. Two years later, the LGBT community in California was in a bitter battle against supporters of Proposition 8, which would overturn the courts decision to mandate marriage for all couples, regardless of sexual orientation. On November 4, 2008, Prop 8 was passed and the right to marry was taken from same-sex couples (who were not married before November 4th). Debra voiced her disappointment that her film was not used to educate the Black community during that campaign. She says she made the film to be accessible to the straight community and hopes to still get it out to its intended audience.

Debra’s most recent project, where she serves as a producer, is Mississippi Damned, a feature film written and directed by Tina Mabry. The true story focuses on a young girl growing up in Mississippi and battling family demons to carve out her own life.

With 15 years of experience in the film industry, Debra looks forward to developing more documentaries as well as webisodes and television projects. She loves what she does and recommends that up-and-coming filmmakers tell stories that they are passionate about and can’t wait to tell. “That passion will buffer you from those who tell you your story is not worth telling,” she counsels. And as far as Debra is concerned, she will never stop telling our stories.



Michelle Sewell is a freelance writer who makes it a habit of hanging out in lobbies.

East Coast Poetry Rocks!

If you have to travel three-thousand-miles for real poetry, then DC is the place to get your fill. The west coast needs to take some notes. Yes, I knows them some fightin' words...lol.

Keeping my good parking karma going in snowy DC, I headed over to Chief Ike's Mambo Room to check out the collaborative project Black on My Back: The Poetic Intersection of the Black Experience. The three poets headlining the show were Gayle Danley, Sonya Renee Taylor, and Twain Dooley.

The show, which the threesome (insert 9th grade giggle here) has been performing for a wide ranging audience in prisons, coffee houses and schools, is a mash up of their original work and the work of celebrated poets such as Quincy Troupe, Amiri Baraka, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes.

The performers did the impressive work of blending the various pieces together seamlessly. The 60 minute show was eclectic, funny and at times sentimental. Sonya Renee, who is an HBO Def Poet and National SLAM Champion, shared that they decided to collaborate on the showcase to educate audiences on how effortlessly page and stage poetry can share the same space and be entertaining. The supportive audience seemed happy to prove their theory correct. Check out the video below for the highlights.



Michelle Sewell is a screenwriter that travels for good poetry and has extra parking Karma for sale.

Are You Ready to Mother Your Mother?

The winter Meg Federico’s 81-year-old mother, Addie, fell and hit her head on the sidewalk, while vacationing in Florida, they suddenly found themselves cast in a geriatric version of the movie Freaky Friday. Seemingly overnight, they swap roles in the parent/child dynamic and every day, for the next three years, is a series of unexpected and unbelievable adventures.

Federico’s bittersweet and humorous memoir, Welcome to the Departure Lounge: Adventures in Mothering Mother, is in many ways an instructive step-by-step narrative on the Herculean task of taking care of an aging parent, while trying to live your own life.

If the natural cycle of life plays itself out as intended we will outlive our parents; and in doing so we might also be placed in the position of caring for them in their final years. Federico bravely writes about her imperfect attempt to do just that and the lessons learned along the way.

The story is told in a series of compelling flashbacks, starting with the author’s father dying on her wedding day. If there was ever an example of foreshadowing you couldn’t get a better one than that. It is also clear early on that Meg and Addie have a strained relationship, a fact that will become critical as Meg becomes one of the central people in charge of her mother’s care.

Once Federico and her siblings make the decision not to place their frail mother in a nursing home (prompted by Addie’s earlier escape, aided and abetted by her Alzheimer's-addled, 83-year-old second husband) they realize how ill-equipped they are to take care of their strong-willed and sometimes alcoholic mother. But determined to give her the best care possible they call in a team of in-home “experts” that range from tremendously caring to outright crooks.

As Addie and her sex-crazed husband, Walter, become more like petulant teenagers, the author the frazzled parent, and the incidents stack up at an outlandish (sometimes outright life threatening) rate the reader can’t help but wonder why they continue at this impossible circus, with all its loony characters. No one would judge them if they called it quits.

In the midst of the chaos of bedpans, missing jewelry, and sex-toys, Federico must also come to terms with the uneven and sometimes-distant relationship she has had with her diva mother. As the youngest of five children, Federico always felt that her mother saw her as an inconvenience that never met her expectations. Faced with these long held resentments, now butted up against her new power and responsibility, she somehow resists the temptation to “pay her mother back.” In fact, as Addie decompensates, and her own family life starts to show the strain of her routine absence, Federico renews her commitment to maintaining her mother’s dignity and making room for her to have a say so in her care, even when it was inconvenient or impractical to do so.

Just as the author deftly uses humor as a way to soften some of the more difficult issues caretakers face (i.e. changing diapers, dementia, and slowly losing the person who once took care of you), she is also straightforward in the reality that ultimately, unlike parents taking care of children, there is no future or bettering the situation and what frees you from this obligation is death.

Their last days together are both tender and a celebration of her mother’s long and determined life. And although Federico knows that death is how this obligation will end, it doesn’t make it any easier when her mother takes her final breath while sleeping in her arms.

Welcome to the Departure Lounge is a poignant testament to how human we all are, including our parents.

Michelle Sewell, founder of GirlChild Press, has recently been hired to write a memoir involving death, teen pregnancy, and raising kids in the Valley. She currently lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Avatar: Is it Racist?

My writer friend, Kellie, and I are riding down Sunset Blvd when she asks me if I think the movie Avatar is racist. I have to tell her I’m one of the few people who hasn’t seen it. Well she is dying to talk to someone about “all the racist images” and demands that I put it at the top of my viewing list.

Later that weekend, I made my way over to the multiplex, snuck in some goodies from 7-Eleven (hey, I’m a struggling artist), and settled down to see the much-hyped, 3D spectacle.

If you have somehow found a way not to be sucked in by the blockbuster Avatar hype, here is the basic plot: A paraplegic marine dispatched to the moon Pandora on a unique mission becomes torn between following his orders and protecting the world he feels is his home.

I got to give it to writer/director James Cameron, he put everything he had in this movie (not necessarily good storytelling, but you can’t hit every ball out of the park). Avatar is a perfect example of a filmmaker not letting go of an idea and finding the right time to execute it.

Before I answer Kellie’s provocative question, here are the things I can easily answer about Avatar.

1. Avatar is the perfect 3D movie to see if you have never seen one before. This was my first.
2. Avatar is boring --according to the two guys who started to snore twenty minutes in. One of them eventually left.
3. Avatar takes movie making to the next level. Once again, Cameron has set the bar for big and huge and spectacular.
4. Avatar is visually beautiful. Cameron gives us all the bells and whistles.
5. Avatar has ridiculously shitty dialogue. Cameron, I know you are heralded as the tricked out technology director, but would it kill you to take a script writing workshop?

Now back to Kellie’s question: Is the movie Avatar racist?

I suspect if you feel your racism alarms going off it’s because Cameron intends to ring it. In many ways Avatar is a textbook example of how indigenous people and their communities are taken over and destroyed. The colonist find something valuable that the locals are sitting on and they try every trick in the book to get them to give it up. If not by offering cheap trinkets, then by good old- fashion force (and smallpox- infested blankets).

In his heavy handed way the director means to be clear that this is a story of “us” and “them” In the “us” column is Giovanni Ribisi’s character, Parker Selfridge, whose disdain and impatience for the “monkeys” of Pandora grows by leaps and bounds as the story progresses. He makes Bill O’Reilly look like a super liberal in comparison. And a story of colonist gone wild would not be complete without a benevolent soul, Sigourney Weaver’s Dr. Grace Augustine, who only wants to learn from the Nav’is (and if time allows collect some samples).

The “them” come in the form of the fourteen-feet tall, bright blue Nav’is. They are a not so subtle mash up of all the people who have ever had their land and culture stolen and left out on the margins. With their spears, flying Pterodactyl and spiritual connection to their ancestors, they are a hint of Aborigines, Native Americans, Zulu Nation, and magical.

Thrown in the middle of this cultural stand off is our reluctant hero, Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, who eventually finds himself “going native.” During the montage where Zoe Saldana’s Neytiri teaches JakeSully the way of the Nav’is, I found myself thinking of the 1995 Walt Disney animated film Pocahontas. So, my mother is right again; there is nothing new under sun.

For all the bells and whistles, Avatar, at least in part, is a story that has been told before, in fact, many times. Here the story is being played out on the gaseous planet Pandora (and please, don’t wreck your brain on why he calls the planet that). It is a retelling of how people, who believe they have more right to something, will go about getting it, regardless of the cost – often to the indigenous people.

So, is Avatar racist? No. Just a flimsy, but visually spectacular allegory older than time.


Screenwriter Michelle Sewell wonders if it would be wrong to sneak a turkey leg into the movies next time?