Tag: Documentary

Women in Sports Week: The Toughest Trio: A Review of ‘The Boxing Girls of Kabul’ (2011)

Saber Sharifi trains women boxers in The Boxing Girls of Kabul

This is a guest post by Rachael Johnson. 

The Boxing Girls of Kabul is a Canadian documentary about the boxing careers of three young Afghan women, sisters Sadaf and Shabnam Rahimi and Shahla Sikandary. It was written and directed by the Afghan-Canadian filmmaker Ariel J. Nasr. Based in Afghanistan, Nasr produced the recently Oscar-nominated live action short, Buzkashi Boys (2012).

The Boxing Girls of Kabul opens with harrowing archival footage of an execution of a woman at the Olympic Stadium in Kabul on November 16th, 1999. Many will recall this secretly-recorded film from news reports, but it will always disturb and haunt: the kneeling woman, clad in a pale blue burqa, attempts to turn her head to her executioner as she is about to be shot. Mercifully, the camera cuts to a blue sky and carries us directly to contemporary Afghanistan. We see, in close up, the determined brown eyes of a young female boxer training at the very same stadium where women were executed during the dark days of Taliban rule.

We are first introduced to Sadaf who tells us that she and her fellow fighters spar in the same gym where girls were imprisoned. She is somewhat frightened by the place itself but explains, “When we play sports, we forget our problems. When I box, I feel happy. I box because I want to advance myself, and advance Afghanistan.” Sincere and ambitious, the girls want to determine their own destinies. Shahla says, “In the future, I want to be the most progressive and bright of all Afghan girls…a champion.” All are hungry for medals. 
Image from The Boxing Girls of Kabul
Boxing has always, of course, been the most traditionally masculine, most brutal and most controversial of sports. Female boxing remains a divisive issue around the world and only became an Olympic event at the London 2012 Games. It is all the more remarkable that girls from a land scarred by gender discrimination have taken up the sport. The girls’ coach, Sabir Sharifi, explains, “The Taliban were absolutely opposed to sports. They had an especially strong opposition to boxing.” A girl boxer in a hijab is an incongruous image for many–or most–Westerners. For the Taliban, female boxing is simply sinful. Boxing has also, however, been the sport of the marginalized and oppressed so it is perhaps unsurprising that these young Afghan women have chosen boxing. The sport for the trio is identified with self-empowerment and female self-worth.

It is interesting to see the boxing girls of Kabul negotiate the streets and shops of the capital with their trainers–as well as journey abroad for competitions–but the interviews with them and their families at home and in the gym provide a more intimate and perhaps more illuminating portrait of the nature of their lives. In the locker room, we see the trio and their peers talk about exam results, tease each other about their hair and spray bottled water over each other. These glimpses serve to remind the viewer that their interests and aspirations are fundamentally the same as most young women around the world. They also give a strong idea of both their incomparable pressures and camaraderie.

Nasr also provides helpful insights into the attitudes of the men in the boxers’ lives. Their coach is a very likeable, middle-aged man. Sharifi formed the girls’ boxing team in 2007 with “a few brothers.” He himself was a victim of Afghan’s tragic, war-torn history. The 1980s Soviet occupation, he explains, put an end to his Olympic ambitions. Sharifi and his colleagues consistently demonstrate support and affection for their charges. He says he wants champions. There persists in the West an Islamophobic, racist belief–even among self-proclaimed progressive people–that all Muslim men in all Muslim lands dominate, control and persecute their daughters. The forward-thinking likes of men such as Sharifi constitute a formidable response to such bigotry. He is not alone. Shahla explains that it is her father who supports her the most in her family. “He thinks that a girl can be someone in the future,” she says. Sadaf and Shabnam Rahimi’s father is also encouraging while their progressive mother wants them to continue both their education and sporting career.
Image from The Boxing Girls of Kabul
Female boxing, of course, enrages the Taliban and Afghan conservatives in general. The girls are given the opportunity to compete in Vietnam and Kazakhstan. Unhappily, increased recognition brings increased intimidation for both trainer and coach. Sharifi is threatened on the street while Shahla experiences pressure to stop boxing from her brother. He is shown to be infinitely more conservative than her father. In English, he expresses concern that his sister’s boxing career will endanger the family in the event of a full-blown Taliban resurgence. He worries that the family will be accused of being “kuffar” (non-Muslim). “Nothing except this,” he insists. But is he merely motivated by concern for his family’s safety? He scorns his sister’s independence, accuses her of not praying with satisfactory piety and delivers this extraordinarily unsettling threat: “If I was in my father’s place, I would set so many restrictions she wouldn’t even be able to eat without being afraid.” But the girls bravely pursue their sport despite these difficult and dangerous circumstances.

There are other obstacles. Funds and facilities are inadequate. They do not even have a ring. In Vietnam and Kazakhstan, we see them outclassed and overwhelmed by their hosts. It is painful to watch, but I was reminded by a quote by the novelist and boxing writer Joyce Carol Oates: “Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.” The girls, understandably, complain of inadequate training and resources, but they are also, of course, cutting their teeth. Shahla is fortunate to secure a bronze medal in Vietnam–there were only four in her weight class–gaining the attention of the Afghan media. Her father is proud of her achievement.

We learn, at the end of the documentary, however, that Shahla no longer competes. Pregnant with her first child, she visits the gym “when she can” and works part-time. You wonder if she will return. It is heartening though to hear that Sadaf continues to compete and that Shabnam aims to be a doctor. Perhaps they have been empowered by their mother’s words: “In Afghanistan, we have to fight against men to show we have pride.” 
Image from The Boxing Girls of Kabul
Documentaries like The Boxing Girls of Kabul are invaluable in that they give voice to the voiceless. These young women possess a rare courage. Spirited, ambitious and attractive, they make engaging subjects. The cinematography (by Nasr) is not particularly striking in The Boxing Girls of Kabul and it is a no-frills documentary formally. The director is modest and unadorned in both style and approach. The interviewer is a silent presence; the boxers as well as trainers and family members speak for themselves. This works well as they appear to reveal their hopes and fears quite openly. The documentary, however, is simply too short at 52 minutes. The trio’s stories could have been further developed. It is evident that they box for themselves, their gender and their country, but it would be have been rewarding if the filmmakers had explored their motivation more deeply. Their influences could also have been cited. Which fighters (male or female) inspired them?

The young women are trail-blazers in a patriarchal society still plagued by religious extremism. They are, equally, children of war. For decades, Afghanistan has been blighted by conflict. Bizarrely, the documentary does not mention that ongoing war between foreigners and the Taliban. The prolonged presence of the American military in Afghanistan is curiously absent from all conversation. It would have been interesting to know the boxers’ thoughts on the conflict as well as the role of the West in relation to the status of women in Afghanistan. The Boxing Girls of Kabul gives relatively little historical background and context. It does not explain how the Taliban came to power or shed new light on their mindset. (If you want to learn about the roots of Taliban, start with Ahmed Rashid’s 2000 book Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia.) 

Listening to Shahla’s conservative brother was, then again, quite enlightening. His obsession with what others think reveals a deep lack of imagination and reflects a fear of difference. Social conformity seems to have a tyrannical hold on him. The documentary does, however, unsettle stereotypes about both Afghan men and women. This is invaluable. Nasr has created an affecting, compassionate portrait of proud, independent Afghan womanhood in The Boxing Girls of Kabul. Ultimately, there are few things more moving than witnessing the endeavors of an oppressed group or people.

Rachael Johnson has contributed articles to CINEACTION, www.objectif-cinema.com and www.jgcinema.com.

Women in Sports Week: Documentaries That Inspire

This is a guest post by Marcela De Vivo.
The history of sports films goes back as far as the history of the cinema itself, starting with Thomas Edison’s silent celebrations of strongmen and prizefighters to cerebral sports dramas like Moneyball. Given the second-class citizenship afforded to women’s sports, it’s no surprise that few of the countless cinematic love-letters to athletics have showcased female athletes.
Over the past decade, however, a number of low-profile yet potent documentaries have arrived to stir up the rules. Here are five documentaries any fan of women’s sports—or sports in general—will not want to miss.

The Life of Million Dollar Babies (aka Golden Gloves), 2007. Directed by Leyla Leidecker

The Golden Gloves competition is the most storied amateur boxing tournament in the U.S. More than any other sport, however, boxing has been a true boys’ club, and an unspoken tradition barred females from entering since its inception in the 1920s. A new round of equality began in the mid-90s when a streetwise Brooklyn female pugilist named Dee Hamaguchi joined forces with the ACLU and pried the door of bias ever-so-slightly open.

Through a narrative pattern we often see in sports docs, we follow eight hopefuls striving for their personal bests as they keep their eyes on the prize of the 2005 finals in Madison Square Garden.

The Life of Million Dollar Babies is a powerful window upon the friction athletes often face not only on the field of gender, but also race and class. While male boxers are funded by the USA Boxing League, a technicality disqualifies females from financial support. When we witness the winner of the climactic quarter finals, a brassy Puerto Rican unable to go on to the finals simply because she can’t pay for it, we can’t help but feel the sting of social inequality.

The Heart of the Game, 2005. Directed by Ward Serrill

Perhaps a female-oriented cousin of the classic documentary Hoop Dreams, The Heart of the Game is at its core about the inspiring, unlikely relationship between African-American basketball player Darnellia Russell and tax lawyer-turned-coach Bill Rensler.

Russell’s remarkable journey begins with her struggle for identity at an almost exclusively white, privileged high school, plunges into her unexpected motherhood and the complications of being a teen mom and athlete, and climaxes with her graduation from high school and garnering of her region’s Player of the Year Award.

A movie as much about growing up as about sports, this gem will uplift anyone with a heart … and with its shoestring budget of $11,000, it’s a testament to the possibilities of independent filmmaking.

Unmatched, 2010. Directed by Nancy Stern Winters and Lisa Lax

A standout episode of ESPN’s ongoing 30 for 30 documentary series, Unmatched is a deftly-edited wealth of candid interviews that plays out like an epic clash of the titans. From their inauspicious entrance onto the women’s tennis scene in the early 1970s to their elevation to sports icons, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova are bared to the audience in an intimate portrait of ardent competition and mounting admiration that matures across a span of over 80 fiery matches.

As a nuanced essay on the complex relationships obtained through time-ripened sports rivalries, this feature is truly “unmatched,” and along the way sketches the seismic shifts that have defined women’s tennis throughout the decades.

Training Rules, 2009. Directed by Dee Mosbacher and Fawn Yacker

Subtitled “No Drinking, No Drugs, No Lesbians,” the short, bittersweet Training Rules is an expose of another front on which female athletes face prejudice: discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Made as a political consciousness-raiser by a lesbian activist and a psychiatrist, Training Rules brings to light the paranoiac witch-hunting atmosphere that pervades Penn State’s women’s basketball team. (In light of the notorious sex abuse scandal that rocked that school’s football team, the film is a doubly potent indictment of hypocrisy and double standards.) By focusing on the especially tragic case of Jennifer Harris, a promising hoop-star whose career was crushed by bigotry, Training Rules makes the pain of discrimination personal and impossible to ignore.

Dare to Dream: The Story of the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team, 2005. Directed by Ouisie Shapiro

As with several of the docs already mentioned, Dare to Dream is not just about the struggle of individuals’ struggles for acceptance but also the grueling journey toward legitimacy within a particular sport. Over the course of the film’s duration, we get to know pioneering players Brandi Chastain, Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, and Joy Fawcett, as well as the sweat and devotion they invested into making a once laughed-at franchise an Olympic spectacle.

All of these films are as packed with joy and pain as any glossy Hollywood product, and through the passions of their filmmakers, convey a sense of humanity few fiction flicks can compete with. By taking us through the lows as well as the highs, the crushing defeats as well as the delirious triumphs, these films inspire us by capturing the ineffable richness of sports and even life itself.

Marcela De Vivo is a freelance writer who works with Northwest to educate women on staying healthy and feeling their best. She enjoys getting outside and staying active with her daughter. Find her on Facebook today!

‘How to Lose Your Virginity’ or: How We Need to Rethink Sex
How to Lose Your Virginity promo.
 
Written by Leigh Kolb
If you talk to a feminist for a significant amount of time, you’re going to hear about virginity–specifically the value placed on women’s virginity in our culture and the persistent virgin/whore dichotomy that places women in an impossible sexual bind (and not the good kind).
The 2013 documentary How to Lose Your Virginity follows filmmaker Therese Shechter’s reflections on her own “loss” of her virginity in her early 20s. Her first-person narrative gives way to interviews with experts and sexual novices interspersed with historical tidbits and definitions.
Shechter features excellent interviews with feminist heavy hitters–Joycelyn Elders, Scarleteen founder Heather Corinna, Shelby Knox, Jessica Valenti, Hanne Blank, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown, and love and relationship coach Abiola Abrams, among others. Shechter speaks to numerous young people about their perceptions of virginity and sex–including those who claimed/reclaimed virginity or actively shunned it. She talks to the president of Harvard’s chastity club and she goes on location with the co-founder of the “Barely Legal” porn series, Erica McLean.
How to Lose Your Virginity poignantly points out that in our culture, if you are a woman and have sex, you’re doomed, and if you don’t have sex, there’s something wrong with you.
Shechter covers all of her bases, and leaves no sexual stone unturned.
I pressed play to watch How to Lose Your Virginity thinking that I didn’t have that much to learn. I think/write/teach about these issues a lot. However, I  was captivated throughout the entire film. Shechter tackles what we know–virginity mythology, hymen obsessions, queer definitions of virginity, purity balls and the virgin-whore dichotomy–and takes it all a step further, researching and delving into others’ stories and history.
A crew member of Barely Legal shows the white panties that the virginal “first-timers” wear during shoots. The female owner and director points out that her films are about the “first memorable time that you [as a young woman] liked the person.” 

 

My favorite part of this film is that it is upbeat from start to finish. There’s no anger, there’s no judgment. I don’t want to riff on the “angry feminist” stereotype, but I know I tend to get pretty worked up and, well, angry when I talk about our culture’s toxic obsession with female sexuality and expectations of virginity. Shechter’s ability to teach, dismantle, expose and explore is remarkable. The audience is left with newfound knowledge with which they can criticize myths of virginity in our culture. However, the audience is also left with respect for everyone’s stories–those who are remaining virgins (no matter their personal definition), those who don’t and those who have no idea what it all even means. When a documentary can do that, it succeeds in a big way.

 

The phrase “purity balls” will never not make me giggle.

Throughout How to Lose Your Virginity, Shechter establishes common ground and values every individual’s experience, criticizing only the cultural myths that make us feel fear and shame about our sexuality. Even when she tackles pornography and purity balls, she does so with respect and cultural criticism, not disdain.

She wishes that it wasn’t called “losing your virginity,” but instead making your sexual “debut,” and that sexual experiences are a series of first times that create our sexual history. In her peppy, happy narration, she asks us to not think about losing virginity, but instead losing the mythology about virginity that’s controlling how we think about sex.
Now that is something worth losing.
Shechter, who got engaged during filming, tries on wedding dresses and comments on the fantasy and recent history of a white-clad virginal bride. She jokes and laughs with the store attendants, but shows us that the fantasy has gone on long enough.

 

How to Lose Your Virginity is a selection from Women Make Movies, an organization that “facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women.”
________________________________________________________
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

 

‘The Grey Area: Feminism Behind Bars’ Explores Transformative Feminism in Prison

The Grey Area: Feminism Behind Bars promotional still.
 
Written by Leigh Kolb
 
With the success of the memoir-turned-Netflix-TV series Orange is the New Black, the feminist blogosphere has been abuzz with commentary and analysis. Besides looking at the show as an artifact within a vacuum, many feminists are taking this opportunity to think about incarceration–especially in the case of female prisoners. While the show is entertaining, the reality behind the fiction transcends one privileged woman’s memoir.
The 2012 documentary The Grey Area: Feminism Behind Bars examines the lives of a group of women in a maximum security prison in Mitchellville, Iowa. Filmmaker Noga Ashkenazi was part of Grinnell College’s Liberal Arts in Prison program in 2009 (her senior year).
Ashkenazi said,

“I wanted to make a documentary about my experience there because I had a feeling that teaching a feminism class at the women’s prison would be a good framework to talk about women’s issues in the criminal justice system in general and to bring the stories of these women to the public through this film.”

So she gathered footage, edited it, got funding, and released the film. And The Grey Area provides an excellent framework for discussing the oft-ignored issues surrounding incarcerated women.
The film opens with sobering facts: the number of incarcerated women in the US has grown 800 percent in the last three decades. Two-thirds of the women in prison are there for nonviolent crimes. Eighty percent of incarcerated women have a history of being victims of sexual assault and/or domestic abuse.
The documentary was filmed at the Iowa Correctional Institute for Women.
The Grey Area presents the stories of inmates–their whole stories, not just their rap sheets–cut with interviews with prison officials and social workers and commentary from the three young female college students who are conducting the Grinnell course on feminism to the prisoners.
The interviews with and footage of the incarcerated women are incredibly moving. The nature of their crimes highlighted the title of the film–there are so many gray areas, yet our prison system only has settings for black and white. Toward the end of the film, the prison warden herself said that about 20 percent of the prisoners actually need to be there (she says the rest aren’t violent or a danger to their communities).
The way the women respond to the weekly classes on feminism (with topics such as motherhood, bodies, sexual assault and privilege) is poignant and insightful. When the class wraps up, the women are asked about the impact of feminism. They eagerly claim the title of feminist, and respond with comments on how talking about feminism has “empowered” them. More than one says that being in prison helped her identify as a feminist because she learned she didn’t need to depend on a man. One says, “Our lives are posters for what not living in a feminist society can do.”
These women’s stories were highlighted throughout the documentary.
The Grey Area isn’t simply a snapshot of the college course on feminism. While the college students have insightful things to say, the real excellence in this film lies within the prisoners’ stories and the professionals’ commentary. Ashkenazi did an excellent job of gathering and editing footage to create and sustain suspense and elicit an emotional response from her audience. The parole hearings and anxious hopes for commutations were nerve-wracking and sometimes heartbreaking. The follow-ups with the inmates are uplifting and devastating.
Toward the end of the film, you learn how many commutations Iowa’s governors have granted in the last 30 years, and you feel as if you’ve been punched in the stomach.
The Grey Area tackles a subject that we all too often ignore and forces us to face the fact that justice is neither blind nor black and white. Cycles of abuse, sexual assault, poverty, objectification and social injustice are all feminist issues, and are all under a microscope in America’s prison systems. It’s our job now to have the conversations and work to effect change. Documentaries like The Grey Area provide a clear, in-depth context for having conversations beyond what happened on this season of Orange is the New Black.
The Grey Area: Feminism Behind Bars is a selection from Women Make Movies, an organization that “facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women.”
______________________________________________
Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

Documentary Explores the ‘Forbidden Voices’ of Three Female Bloggers

Forbidden Voices movie poster.


Written by Leigh Kolb

In repressive societies, voices of dissent are dangerous to the regime, and are stifled as quickly as possible. The documentary Forbidden Voices, by filmmaker Barbara Miller, weaves together the struggles of three female bloggers who have done tremendous work against the governments that have tried, sometimes successfully (but only temporarily), to silence them. 




Yoani Sanchez


Yoani Sanchez, Cuba
Yoani Sanchez’s blog has been censored by the state. She has been beaten by police. She says, “I live in fear.” But she keeps writing. She has been profiled as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people and toward the beginning of the film, she’s unwrapping and lovingly sniffing her brand new book, Cuba Libre. Sanchez is featured in Forbidden Voices as a prominent Cuban blogger. She not only spends her time writing and covertly updating her blog, but she also holds blogging workshops for other writers and is a human rights activist (the film focuses on her work for a specific political prisoner who is on a hunger strike). 
Sanchez’s parts of the film–since she is still active in her country–are powerful and disturbing. The recording of her being beaten by police is played and there is footage of protests and state-sanctioned counter-protesters. While Sanchez is not safe–she knows her phone is tapped and constantly feels like she’s in danger–she keeps working. She says that she does so for her son, so she can answer him when he asks, “Mom, what did you do to help change things?”
Farnaz Seifi
Farnaz Seifi, Iran
When Farnaz Seifi started her blog in 2003, the Iranian government had little to do with censoring the blogosphere. Six months after she and a few other women started blogging about women’s issues in Iran, the censorship and arrests began. 
In the film, Seifi explains how the Iranian revolution caused women to lose all of their rights. She cites the legal case that if a man’s genitals were to be hurt in a car accident, there’s more money awarded to him than if a woman is killed in a car accident. 
Seifi says that she was drawn to blogging because “You can be the media yourself.” Shortly after, the government started filtering the word “women” and access to the women’s rights activists’ blogs was denied. Feminist groups held peaceful protests, and police responded with brutality (the film has footage). Seifi was arrested, and she now lives in exile and works with Reporters Without Borders. When she is featured in Forbidden Voices, it’s clear that she aches for her family and for making change in her home country. She, against her desires to have her name out there, blogs anonymously to protect her family. Seifi speaks of the “cyber war” and that at this point it is a “cyber army vs. the government.” Online activism and social media have been a central focus during the uprisings in the Middle East, and Seifi’s interests in writing about the abuses of women’s rights have helped keep the momentum going. 
Zeng Jinyan
Zeng Jinyan, China
Zeng Jinyan has used blogs and Twitter to speak out against human rights abuses in China. Her activism has resulted in house arrest (which is shown in the film). Her husband was imprisoned for over three years for his AIDS/human rights activism, and she and their new baby were kept in an apartment. But she continued to write. 
In the film, she says, “I’m desperate. I don’t know what to do.” She is continually shadowed by agents (in one chilling scene, they repeatedly try to block her from moving forward on the sidewalk). Their apartment was searched, phones and computers were confiscated and their internet was shut off. She argues that their freedom of speech is protected by the Chinese constitution, but it’s being ignored. Jinyan explains the “great firewall of China,” the cyber police, and the fact that many people don’t even know about Tiananmen Square. “Everything resembles Orwell’s 1984,” she says. She focuses on how cruel the house arrest is for her daughter, who is growing up with an imprisoned father and no access to parks. Jinyan says, “My keyboard now is the only thing that helps me bear my sorrow and indignation.”
Forbidden Voices is a compelling and deeply disturbing documentary that makes those of us who freely sit at our laptops and type realize how much we take for granted, and how powerful these women’s voices are in their repressive societies (and how threatening that power is, which is evident in the fact that they are continually threatened and silenced). The end of the documentary points out that there are thousands of Internet activists in jail right now. This wave of courageous blogging, especially at the hands of women like Sanchez, Seifi and Jinyan, is a threat to patriarchal, repressive regimes. May their voices stay strong. 


Forbidden Voices is a selection from Women Make Movies, an organization that “facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women.”

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

‘Salma’: The Poetry of Repression and Seclusion

Salmai movie poster.


Written by Leigh Kolb


In the village of Thuvarankurichi in rural India, young Muslim girls are locked away once they start their periods. While their early years are filled with school and play, once puberty hits, they are taken away from the outside world and relegated to the confines of their family homes until they are married (which often happens soon after menses).

Salma was one of those girls. The internationally acclaimed documentary Salma explores her return back to the village after she has, despite innumerable odds, become an accomplished poet and politician.
Her determination is highlighted throughout the film, and no amount of dramatization is needed to convey the depths of despair for the women in this culture and the odds that were–and still are–against Salma.

Interviews with family members show how conflicted many of them are about Salma’s success. Her father says, “She’s a good girl, but she’s too clever.” Her aunt says also that Salma has always been “clever,” although she was also always “disobedient.” The women around her have poignant observations on what it means to be a woman in their society, but are unsure how to change it.

When Salma was removed from the outside world, relegated to a basement room with a small grate for a window, she was still desperate to learn and read. Groceries came wrapped in old newspapers, and she would dig them out of the trash so she had something to read. She was in despair over her situation, and she says the “anger was boiling inside me”–so she started writing poetry. Her poetry grew out of the intensity of the realization that her life was to “get married, have kids and die.”

Salma, a Tamil poet and politician.

She finally was forced to marry the man who had been chosen for her, and she tried to continue writing. She would keep a journal, and the journal would disappear. She would write on torn-up bits of paper and hide the paper and pens in boxes of sanitary napkins and under blouses–they would still disappear any time her husband found them. She finally discovered a place that she could hide her writing, and would smuggle it out to her mother, who would send them to a publisher.  
We are able to follow Salma’s rise to power through a window of her world, which still isn’t perfect. Her husband says that he’s accepted her gift, but he clearly harbors a great deal of anger and resentment–their relationship appears cold and distant. Salma seems exhausted and tired of fighting in many scenes, except when she has the opportunity to talk to young girls about their plans and futures. 
Salma consistently encourages girls to stay in school, and is most alive and exuberant when speaking to young women about their educations. Her heart clearly breaks as she watches other young girls get whisked out of school and into arranged marriages. She is working through her writing and through her leadership to empower and educate young women and has success in preventing child brides, but all too often, the traditional culture wins. 
One of the most poignant and difficult aspects of this film is the complexity of Salma’s family members. Her mother was both her captor and her rescuer–she took her out of school and locked her up, but also helped her get her poetry published. Salma’s husband is angry and for years destroyed her work, but he now supports her political and writing careers. It was difficult as a viewer to try and condemn her family, because each of them is portrayed as a complex human being with clear motivations. It’s incredibly powerful when, as a viewer, you are left with the heaviness of a complex reality.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the film is hearing the next generation of men speak. Salma’s nephew doesn’t want his mother (Salma’s sister) going to the movies, and he’s critical of Salma’s choice not to wear a head scarf. He goes on and on about how burkas are women’s rights, and they should wear them for “men and society.” He doesn’t want his mother going to the cinema “for her own good,” and expresses disappointment in Salma. Salma’s sons, too, seem to disapprove of her and she says that being in the village turned them against her. 
While Salma’s successes and continued influences on women’s lives are powerful forces, the battle is not won. The film does a beautiful job showing that.

Salma still must confront resistance from her family and the next generation.

It’s also important to note that the practice of shutting girls away–literally and figuratively–upon puberty is not relegated to conservative Muslim cultures. In Salma, a young Hindu girl is shown getting married, stunned and sick-looking. In America, there is the Christian Patriarchy movement, which keeps girls in the home and away from higher education. While Salma captures the devastation of patriarchy in one little corner of the world, the ideals and practices are not confined to India by any stretch of the imagination.  
Filmmaker Kim Longinotto has spent her career highlighting the plight of oppressed women, and she does so in Salma with grace and precision. Salma doesn’t simply present the life of a Tamil poet; instead, it is a suspenseful unfolding of a complicated story without a wholly happy ending. Salma–the film and the poet–shows the great power and limitations of one woman who takes a stand against the confines of her environment. It’s a reminder of the great strides that still must be taken around the world for women’s equality. As Salma tirelessly points out, education is where it all must begin. And in a larger culture that has a history of keeping women from literacy and silencing their voices, this is an imperative step. 
Salma is a selection from Women Make Movies, an organization that “facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women.”

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri.

’20 Something’: Youth and the American Dream

20 Something Documentary Poster

Written by Amanda Rodriguez

The documentary 20 Something is a labor of love for its creator Lanze Spears.With a non-existent budget while sleeping on floors as he filmed, Spears followed and actualized his dream, which is exactly what 20 Something is about.

20 Something trailer.
The documentary follows a handful of early “twenty somethings” who are struggling to “make it” in the world. Spears isn’t documenting any aspiring teachers, accountants or chefs, though; his subjects’ dreams are of fame, fortune, stardom and critical acclaim. We’ve got a model, a painter, an actress, an indie filmmaker and an artist working through communication and digital design. 
I was disappointed that the two women Spears followed were interested in professions that placed a very high premium on physical appearance (the model and actress), and I kept thinking even the inclusion of a dancer would mix things up a bit because, despite the fact that her carefully sculpted body would continue to be paramount, she would be using hard-earned physical prowess, technique, and discipline. It turns out that Spears’ follow-up in his series is 20 Something New York, following a trio of, you guessed it, dancers, all of whom are women! Though more limited in its exploration, I’d definitely be interested in seeing Spears’ take on the New York dance scene, the struggles of female dancers to make it in that business, and get a chance to see how accurate Black Swan‘s depictions of ballet life really is.
(To be fair, the model, Clare, like the male communications specialist and graphic designer Taylor, finds her passion in advertising and graphic design with a more nuanced perspective on success in the “real world,” unlike her foundering starlet cohort Anastasia.)
The documentary stylistically reminded me of a more compassionate version of MTV’s The Real World. It was a bit too hip, didn’t always delve deep enough, and had some painfully artistic shots and stomach-turning use of camera filters. I wanted the film to critique the American Dream more than it did because success isn’t out there for everyone. Everyone can’t be rich and famous. Sometimes how hard you work doesn’t make a dent, and that is just how life is.
However, 20 Something very much captured that bittersweet 20 something feel, caught between dreams and the real world, one’s perception of one’s potential and the cold need to earn money to survive. Some of our stars compromise their dreams (Anastasia gives up on LA, deciding to teach English as a second language, hopefully in France in order to get involved the French film scene) while others expand their vision (Sean begins to imagine curating art, his and others, in a gallery dedicated to medium inclusivity as well as human diversity). The cast’s slowly dwindling naivete made me sad for them, forced me to roll my eyes at their self-absorption, lingering like baby fat, and inspired me a bit to dream again, as it reminded me what it was like when I was that age and the future held so many possibilities.

‘A Girl and A Gun’: A Look at Women and Firearms in America

A Girl and A Gun movie poster
Written by Amanda Rodriguez
Trigger Warning
Cathryne Czubek’s A Girl and A Gun is a powerful documentary that broadly surveys the incendiary topic of women and firearms in America. The film shows us the many sides of women and gun ownership, including safety and self-protection, competitive sport, family and culture, anti-violence and gun control activism, and women  who are the victims of gun violence as well as those suffering the consequences of having used a gun to kill another person. Not only that, but Czubek gives us an overview of women and guns throughout American history, including the commercialization and sexualization of the issue. Most importantly, though, this documentary tells the very real and very human stories of women.
First we’ve got writer and blogger Violet Blue who feels guns are empowering and sexy. Violet finds that being open about her status as a capable gun owner (a traditionally-coded masculine tool) shifts threatening online conversations to a more level field. This makes me wonder how many productive dialogues could be had on and off-line if so many women weren’t silenced by intimidation and bullying tactics due to a perceived helplessness that is exploited in order to win an argument (and reinforce patriarchal hegemony, of course). 
“You move through the world as a target when you are female.” – Blue Violet
Robin Natanel is a tai-chi instructor whose house was broken into by an unstable ex-boyfriend. We also meet Sarah McKinley, a widow and mother of an infant, who shot and killed a home invader. Though she abhors violence, Robin purchased a gun because she realized she was the only one who could keep her safe. Both of these women find that the police and the law could not protect them during an attack, even in her their own homes, supposedly the safest and most private of spaces.
“People ask me how I came to own a handgun. I tell them because I have felt the fear.” – Robin Natanel
On the other side of the issue is Stephanie Alexander, a victims’ rights activist, whose daughter, Aieshia Johnson was injured as an innocent bystander in a shooting. Aieshia is paraplegic as a result of the shooting, and the mother and daughter differ on their feelings towards guns. Stephanie sees firearms and violence as the cause of her daughter’s life and mobility being irrevocably altered. Aieshia, feels particularly vulnerable as a woman in a wheelchair and the survivor of a violent crime, so she carries a gun. We also meet Karen Copeland, an inmate, who is serving time because she killed her girlfriend. Karen weeps as she describes the terrible act that she believes would have been prevented had she not owned a gun. The consequences of guns along with their power to destroy are palpable in these three interviews. 
A Girl and A Gun also underscores the gun industry as well as Hollywood’s propensity for the commercialization, exploitation, and sexualization of women with guns. The gun companies goad and exploit women’s fears. 
Scotsdale Gun Club ad playing upon and, perhaps, exacerbating the female fear of attack in the public sphere.
These companies discovered in women an untapped market, so they whip up the fear frenzy while producing pink guns and designer concealed-carry handbags.
As a woman, this fear of the violation of your person is not unfounded, nor are the gun companies the only ones playing upon it. In fact, it’s hard not to see mainstream media as perpetuating that cycle of violence by dehumanizing and objectifying women at every turn.
I find this ad (for gang-rape) offensive, and it certainly triggers me.

However, Hollywood would have us believe that the now prevalent imagery of women with guns is empowering to women. Sometimes, of course, it may be. Strong female characters who step into the masculine-tagged realm of guns, violence, and action can be fun and inspiring (think Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor or Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley). More often than not, though, these images are empty, showing us woman as sex and gun as dick.

Don’t tell me that’s not a phallus.

Though she focuses most on the women who own guns, Czubek doesn’t tell us what we should believe, nor does she give us an answer. Instead, she unfolds the complicated and very individual motivations of women with regards to their choices and firearms. Czubek shows us, too, that we have a history and culture that are at play in all of our decisions and rationalizations. In the end, Czubek allows women to tell their own stories, the stories of the ways in which they navigate a world fraught with impossible rules, threats, and expectations.    

Sarah Polley’s ‘Stories We Tell’: A Radical Act

Movie poster for Stories We Tell

 

Written by Stephanie Rogers.
We live in an age now when things seem … less “real” to me. Facebook lets us put our private lives on display, and even then, it’s a version of our lives that we edit, exaggerate perhaps, and invent—all for public consumption. People become overnight stars when homemade YouTube clips go viral—often another version of an edited public performance. Our television shows, especially Reality TV—and even shows such as American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance—present stories that appear to be true but are, in fact, edited for a public audience.

So, how do we define “real” anymore or, for that matter, what is “true”?

 
Polley and her father in Stories We Tell
Sarah Polley explores this concept in her wonderful documentary, Stories We Tell. While the film focuses on her family background and a long-kept family secret of sorts, it ultimately explores memory—how it aids and fails us, and how the act of storytelling sometimes requires us to fill in the gaps. This isn’t a new concept by any means, but Polley’s decision to tell her story through film, and to put that story on screen for a wider audience—in a society (and film industry) that consistently devalues women’s work and women’s stories—is a radical act.

Mary Jo Murphy gives some background on the film in her New York Times review:

A bit more about “the story”: Ms. Polley is the youngest of five siblings. Dad was an English actor in Toronto; Mom, an actress, had two children from a marriage before she met him. She died of cancer when Sarah was 11, and at some point after that, one or more of her much older siblings began to tease her about her paternity. Eventually she did a little investigating.

When she found her answer, and talked to her father and siblings about it, she became fascinated with how each of them was “telling the story and embellishing the story and making the story their own.” The act of telling the story, she said, “was changing the story itself.”

Polley’s father in Stories We Tell
I love the idea of the past existing as fluid, ever-changing. And Stories We Tell touches on that, reminding us that people truly do live long after their deaths—in the memories and celebrations of those most important to them. I certainly don’t mean to sentimentalize the story because it’s not a sentimental film (which isn’t to say that the audience in the theater wasn’t a weeping mess), but I want to convey that a woman making an emotionally gripping film about herself, about her mother, about motherhood even—is absolutely a radical act. Some disagree. Mike LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote the following in his review (titled, “Stories We Tell Review: Not Worth Telling”):


Polley is making a film about her father, her late mother, her siblings. She should protect them. What she shouldn’t do is offer up the resulting feel-good whitewash to the scrutiny of a watching world. She shouldn’t force on strangers the task of sitting through this. And she shouldn’t present a work of vanity and closed-in narcissism as an exercise in soul baring, because it’s embarrassing for everybody.

Polley’s mother and father in Stories We Tell
In actuality, the most important part of this film—and what makes it feminist—is precisely its “vanity” and “closed-in narcissism.” Of course, I wouldn’t use those words to describe it—I’d say “intimacy” and “closed-in confidence”—because they play into the dominant ideology that women’s stories aren’t important. And Stories We Tell is exactly that—Sarah Polley’s story: embellished, re-enacted, unsure, important. She interviews her father(s), her siblings, her mother’s former lovers, and her mother’s friends, all while keeping herself outside the frame and directing her subjects, or “storytellers” as she calls them, to tell their individual version of events. How Polley chooses to direct the film, to edit it, to interrogate the assertions of her storytellers, and to learn from them—that is her story. And telling it is a radical act.



Leigh Kolb wrote a piece for Bitch Flicks last November called, “Female Literacy as a Historical Framework for Hollywood Misogyny” in which she suggested that, “When women finally break through and are able to tell their stories, those stories are immediately dismissed as silly and trivial.” She goes on to say:

Perhaps this bleak, largely anti-feminist landscape in Hollywood is more deliberate. If we acknowledge women’s long history of being neglected education and literacy, and that women have been repeatedly told (or observed) that their stories lack action and intrigue for a broad audience, how can this not have larger social effects? And at some point, do we come to the conclusion that these messages are what the dominant group wants?

Polley’s mother in Stories We Tell
The good news is that reviews like the one written by Mick LaSalle, who refers to Stories We Tell at one point as “the opposite of a courageous piece of work,” look ridiculous next to all the praise for the film. In fact, if we’re lucky, maybe the success of Polley’s piece will spark a larger conversation about the marginalization of women and minorities in our culture, about whose stories “deserve” to be told and who gets to tell them. This film—if “the personal is political” still means anything in the age of my multiple fake Facebook identities—needs to be seen. It deserves to be seen. It’s a film about women knowing and not knowing one another. It’s a film about forgiveness and disappointment and searching for one’s identity and place within the family. It’s about existing as both participant and observer in one’s own life. It’s about longing and loss and how we define families. It’s about the art of filmmaking itself. It’s about mistakes and motherhood and heredity and unconditional love.

And, perhaps most importantly, it’s about a woman in Hollywood—an industry that boasts less than 20% of women film directors and an ever-shrinking number of available roles for women—refusing to accept the devaluation of women’s work, getting behind a camera … and daring to tell a story. 
Sarah Polley, badass

The Remarkable Story of ‘Anne Braden: Southern Patriot’

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (2012)

“I believe that no white woman reared in the South–or perhaps anywhere in this racist country–can find freedom as a woman until she deals in her own consciousness with the question of race. We grow up little girls–absorbing a hundred stereotypes about ourselves and our role in life, our secondary position, our destiny to be a helpmate to a man or men. But we also grow up white–absorbing the stereotypes of race, the picture of ourselves as somehow privileged because of the color of our skin. The two mythologies become intertwined, and there is no way to free ourselves from one without dealing with the other.” – from “A letter to white Southern women from Anne Braden,” 1972
Written by Leigh Kolb

Anne Braden didn’t think that guilt was productive. 
She thought that what got people involved in the civil rights movement was a vision of a different world.
Born in 1924, Braden grew up in Anniston, Alabama–where the Freedom Riders’ bus was fire-bombed in 1961. She talks about being a young white child in the south, and seeing her mother’s house cleaner’s daughter wearing her hand-me-down clothes. They were different sizes, so the clothes didn’t fit right, and Braden says, “Something happened to me when I looked at her. I knew something was wrong.”
Braden dedicated her life to exposing and fighting against racial and economic injustice. She was subversive. She was arrested. She was praised by Martin Luther King Jr.

She wanted a different world.

Anne Braden
Braden is the subject of the documentary Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, which is available on DVD and at select screenings nationwide.

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot trailer

Award-winning filmmakers Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering created this first-person documentary, and its brilliance rests greatly on the fact that Braden herself and her contemporaries, biographer and mentees tell the story. The seemingly hands-off approach by the filmmakers (no audible interview questions or voiceovers) works incredibly well, and lets Braden’s remarkable legacy unfold on its own merits. The soundtrack is appropriately present, but not noticeably so, as it should be in a documentary.

This documentary, in short, is amazing. Aside from the technical success of the film is the fact that Braden herself was an extraordinary human being.

Braden says that when she had the realization that something was wrong, it was like photography: “You put the film in the developing fluid and it begins to come clear, but it’s been there all along.”

The images kept becoming clearer and clearer to Braden as she worked as a journalist in the south and covered the courthouse, seeing black men be imprisoned for looking at white women the wrong way, and seeing how murdered black people were not newsworthy.

She didn’t feel guilt. She felt motivated to change her world.

Early on in her career, Braden recognized that issues of class and race were inextricably linked. She says,

“I was in a prison and life builds prisons around people and I had the prison that I was born white in a racist society. I was born privileged in a classist society. The hardest thing was class. I don’t know that I could have ever broken out of what I call the race prison if I hadn’t dealt with class.”  

She married Carl Braden, who was a “radical” activist active in the labor movement. “We got married to work together,” she says. By 1951, Braden was combining marriage, motherhood and activism.

Early on, her activism focused mainly on writing for and talking to black audiences about white people’s roles in racism and classism. The head of the Civil Rights Congress, William Patterson, told her that black people already know what she’s telling them–she needed to talk to white people, because they are the problem. She remembers that he said to her, “You know you do have a choice. You don’t have to be a part of the world of the lynchers. You can join the other America–the people who struggled  against slavery, the people who railed against slavery, the white people who supported them, the people who all through Reconstruction struggled.” She says, “I was very young, and that’s what I needed to hear.” Her work began in earnest.

The Bradens bought a house for a young black family, the Wades, in an all-white neighborhood (it was a way around segregation–Andrew Wade gave them the down payment, the Bradens purchased it, and then transfered the deed). The Wades’ home was shot at, crosses were burned in the yard and a bomb was set off underneath their daughter’s window (remarkably no one was physically hurt).

The Wades, showing where rocks had been thrown and broken the windows of their home.

The bomber was never caught or tried, but the Bradens were, along with five other whites who helped defend the Wades’ house. They were charged with sedition–it was, prosecutors said, all a plot by communists to overthrow Kentucky and the nation.

Braden says that “If you use every attack as a platform, they can’t win and you can’t lose. It works like a charm.” They used their arrest and jail time as a platform. “You can’t kill an idea anyway,” she says. “To a segregationist, integration means communism.”

The film highlights footage from Ku Klux Klan rallies, newspaper stories, meetings, marches, beatings and shootings during the red scare and the civil rights movement. The footage–often presented without narration–is powerful and provides the visual, historical context to Braden’s stories.

The film moves forward through each decade, highlighting social justice struggles (especially regarding race and economic injustice) and Braden’s continuous role. The complexity of anti-communist sentiment, the freedom of speech and association and violence of the ongoing civil rights struggles are examined in depth.

It was difficult watching the momentous struggles and changes of the 60s make way into the 70s, when she says, “That sense of being part of something larger gets lost.” Political activists were repressed and imprisoned, and much of the momentum was lost.

Anne Braden

As the footage from the 70s surfaces, it’s in color; all of a sudden history doesn’t seem so far away. When white women are screaming and chanting about “Niggers” when busing was implemented in 1975, and throwing rocks at the buses, it’s jarring how close it all is. David Duke screams about white power. Communist workers at an anti-Klan rally are shot and killed in the late 70s.

In a statement that seems all-too true today, Braden says of the lasting legacy of this era:

“And this idea of reverse discrimination took hold of the country, and I think it’s the most dangerous idea that’s ever been inflicted on this country. It tells white people that the source of their problem is people of color and it’s such a damn lie because it’s based on the theory that what black people got took something away from white people, and that is the opposite of what happened, every piece of legislation everything that happened that the black movement won, helped most white people and certainly poor and working class white people.”

At a 1980 rally in response to the communist workers’ deaths, she said,

“The real danger today comes from the people in high places, from the halls of congress to the board rooms of our big corporations, who are telling the white people that if their taxes are eating up their paychecks, it’s not because of our bloated military budget, but because of government programs that benefit black people; those people in high places who are telling white people that if young whites are unemployed it’s because blacks are getting all the jobs. Our problem is the people in power who are creating a scape goat mentality. That, that is what is creating the climate in which the Klan can grow in this country and that is what is creating the danger of a fascist movement in the 1980s in America.” 

As the film progresses, we see Braden marching for economic justice and to end police brutality. She stands out, with her cropped gray hair, small body and denim jumpers. Her voice shakes into a megaphone when she speaks at rallies, but her age doesn’t stop her. She keeps marching. When she can’t march, she’s pushed in a wheelchair.

Braden passed away in 2006 at age 81. Right before she died, she said, “I just don’t have time.” She still felt she had too much to do.

Anne Braden and Cornel West

I don’t know that I’ve ever been so inspired by a documentary. By the end, I was crying, near-sobbing–in celebration of Braden’s life, in mourning her death and in feeling a burning fire in my white belly that I needed to do something in this world. Anne Braden had effectively told me that I needed to get to work.

At a march, Braden says, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it’s won.” It hasn’t been, and we must continue her legacy.

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot puts Braden’s lifelong activism into the developing fluid and makes it clear to all of us. We should all look carefully at these images and be moved to not just frame them for display, but to make them shape our world now.

The Flobots’ “Anne Braden”

Leigh Kolb is a composition, literature and journalism instructor at a community college in rural Missouri. 

‘Girl Rising:’ What Can We Do To Help Girls? Ask Liam Neeson.

Girl Rising (2013)

This is a guest post written by Colleen Lutz Clemens.

Girl Rising unites prominent female authors, such as Edwidge Danticat from Haiti or Aminatta Forna from Sierra Leone, with girls such as Wadley or Mariama from their respective countries. Together, Danticat and Wadley, Forna and Mariama, and seven other pairs have their stories of oppression, resistance, community, and family narrated by the likes of Beyoncé or Meryl Streep. Each story works as a discrete unit in the film, using animation, music, and images to give the viewer a glimpse into each girl’s reserve of resilience.
Wadley from Haiti 
Mariama from Sierra Leone

Connecting the nine stories are interludes which show other girls in school uniforms as they hold us up signs sharing dreary statistics about girls in the developing world, such as boys outnumber girls in primary schools by 33 million. The stories teach the audience that these girls live in families that love them—even if that love looks different than it does in “the West”—and that education, poetry, art, and organizing are the keys to giving each girl the tools to recognize her own importance and to find her voice.

One of the interludes.

Girl Rising knows and plays to its audience: women in “the West” with access to basic services and education who have some extra money in the bank and a desire to help other women. The documentary works to connect audience members to a movement with the lofty goal of raising money to ensure more girls are educated worldwide.

I love the idea of educating girls. LOVE IT. I love any movie that takes the time and attention to tell the stories of girls to an audience that otherwise would not hear such narratives. I want every girl who wants (and maybe even doesn’t want) to be sitting on the floor or on a chair wearing a hijab, burqa, or baseball cap in a classroom to be there. If that movie is working toward that goal, then I am just about all in, which as a scholar and critic is pretty much as “in” as I can get. However, what proves potentially problematic is the way in which narrator Liam Neeson offers the convenient promise that once girls are educated throughout the world, then global issues will diminish and all will be right.
Thus, two things are still bothering me after seeing the movie a few weeks ago. First, fixing the world via education seems like a pretty big burden to put on the shoulders of girls. The implication of the film is that if girls would just have access to education, so many of the world’s problems such as poverty and malnutrition would disappear. To me this rings the same bell as when people say, “If only women ran the world, there would be no more wars.” There would be wars. There isn’t some kind of natural peace sense linked to the X chromosome. I want girls and women to have the agency that women around the world have been working for—I believe in that idea and in the movie’s thesis that if girls have education, the world can be better. But I don’t think it is just or fair to expect girls to fix all of the problems the movie seems to think they should fix.
Second, the film exploits the burqa to make its point about women’s suffering. It should be no surprise that the last segment is the one that Western audiences will be most eager to witness: the story of Amina in Afghanistan. This young girl is forced to marry at an age when an American girl would still be hanging One Direction posters on her pink walls. Watching her story takes the viewer’s breath away. The girl seemingly has no agency, no voice, until Western filmmakers come and listen to her. She lives in fear of violence, of becoming shamed by expressing her desire to live a life different from the one prescribed to her by virtue of her gender. She is the image of the Aghani woman Westerners are so familiar with but know little about.
Amina

Here’s my concern: I don’t think any of these problems will go away if she rejects and sheds her burqa. So when (spoiler alert) veiled girls start to run up the hill tearing off their burqas as the music crescendos and the voiceover offers us the idea that liberation is just around the corner once the girls reveal their identities, I cringe. This gesture is a bravery manufactured for the audience. Taking off a burqa is a solution that makes the audience feel good. It echoes the rhetoric of post-9/11 warmongering when suddenly we needed to invade countries in the name of women who needed liberation, a convenient excuse when those same women’s plights were completely ignored up until September 10, 2001. Of course, the movie does this on purpose, allowing us to feel justified all over again in our simultaneous invasion and ignorance.

I admire the girls. I want Amina to have everything she wants, even after only meeting her for ten minutes in the film. Yet I fear the other girls’ stories get lost in the noise of the past decade’s war with countries where “brown, veiled” people live. I was thrilled to be invited to co-lead a discussion after the film, yet the moment the lights went up the audience only wanted to talk about Afghanistan, about the Taliban, about Islam. Ten minutes into the discussion I gently steered the conversation back to the girls, as they had already been forgotten in the audience’s desire, and I might say selfish desire, to forget the bigger issue and make the suffering and anxiety all about ourselves again.
But Amina’s section also contains my favorite part of the film: when she looks at the camera and accuses the audience of being silent. She pointedly asks: what are “you” going to do? Of course, right after this segment, the film gently supplies an answer: text GIVE to 5515 and donate money to the 10×10 organization. I didn’t see a flood of phones light up in the theater. But this move of Amina looking at an audience filled with Americans and calling them out for staying silent in regards to her actual issue—“I have no school to go to, my family married me off at 13”—gives me the greatest of hope. Not her running up a hill taking off a burqa that she probably put right back on when she got to the other side of the hill: I can only imagine that she was forced to put her veil back on, although the film’s website says it cannot offer information about her current status as it may endanger her. But that she would look the West in the eye and say “You cannot forget about me. I will not forget about you. We are in this together”: that kind of girl rising is the kind of movement I want to be a part of, one what works toward greater access to education and doesn’t need to make me temporarily feel good or justified in the process.
Azmera

 

Colleen Lutz Clemens is assistant professor of non-Western literatures at Kutztown University. She blogs about gender issues and postcolonial theory and literature at http://kupoco.wordpress.com/. When she isn’t reading, writing, or grading, she is wrangling her one-year old daughter, two dogs, and on occasion her partner.

Good Hair From Root To End: Why Is Nappiness Still Considered A Sin?

An advertisement for Good Hair.
“Why should you get a perm?” asks Chris Rock, narrator and co-writer of Good Hair, speaking to a little girl who has endured the burning sensations of relaxers–“the nap antidote” and/or “creamy crack” since age three.
“Because you’re supposed to,” she replies.
Good Hair.
It has been stimulated since birth that European straightness is a coveted desire for its sleekness, bounce, and venerable marriage to a fine toothed comb. In Rock’s documentary that often seems more mockumentary dives into why this is the way of the world for African American women and how men must come to terms with this high cost of hair shame.
I remembered my first perm at age seven. It hurt like the devil. I didn’t get it because I wanted to. I was bullied into it- girls my own age hated my lovely braids coated in Vaseline sheen. So I hated them too and begged my mom for that perm, for that beautiful acceptance. I thought the pain was worth it. But often I regret being brainwashed early and wondered who influenced those same girls to get their heads “straightened.”
Good Hair reveals African American women allowing their children to endure unbearable excruciation at such an elemental age and it is horrendous, especially with “it’s hard to comb” being a prime excuse. We’re not raised to treat natural hair properly. As witnessed in scenes at Dudley School of Beauty- only the science of perming and hot comb techniques are taught. Is it any wonder why parents consider relaxers to be an “easy way out?” It’s an ignorance issue that a rare few want to unlearn.
When I went natural, many African American stylists didn’t want to do my heaping head of feral strands. Often I heard, “I cannot do that!” or “I will only do it if she put a relaxer on that head!” Always spoken with nasty disdain and cruelty. These comments (there are some unmentioned Rated R kinds) built negative self reflection for years.

A six-year-old girl gets her second perm in Good Hair as Chris Rock watches.
When Rock enters hair salons, hairstylists talk about nappy roots like it’s the ugliest catastrophe known to man, while applying burning white “elixir” from root to end to their clients. It strikes an emotional nerve. Those bullying days come back at full force at each wince and laughter from women spending so much time and money burying the truth.
A good friend once told me, “I don’t know why they make fun of your kind of hair when they’re hiding the same thing.”
It has been so heavily ingrained in African American society, in our culture, that all elements of black don’t necessarily equate to beauty and that some elements must be bought. In this instance, hair flown in overseas is much more valuable than attempting to honor and appreciate kinky curled existence.
Rock is also gearing up for a behind-the-scenes hair competition and funnily enough, every stylist feels threatened by Jason, a Caucasian man considered to be the “Rosa Parks” (adding insult to injury) of the contest because he knows African American hair so well. This seems to be the metaphor, the pink elephant in the room that African American competitors “fear” him.
Dr. Melayne Maclin, an expert dermatologist speaks out against the negative factors attributed to relaxers- its harsh, unreadable chemicals and brutal realities set upon little girls. Yet Dudley thrives on this exploitation, being one of the few African American owned hair businesses marketing to ironed out ideology. Strangely enough, in this billion dollar industry, Caucasians make more off African American’s insecurities with Asians being second. How odd is that? It’s as though hair has ultimately become another chain, another barrier and this time, no one is marching around with signs and chanting, “we shall overcome.” A perm is a normal rite of passage- straight hair is victor and nappy roots are a curse.

Her definition of good hair- “something that looks relaxed and nice.”

Rock laughs with them all at the perm’s downside- the murdering scalp sensation, reddened ears, ugly patches where skin has been scorched off. But these women beam proudly, acknowledging worth like a soldier’s battle scars.
After I gave a presentation on black hair’s manifestations in art and design history class, someone asked me, “does black people hair really grow out like that? I’m so used to it being straight like ours.”
The documentary is a cruel implication that only one type of hair is acceptable and defined as “good.”
Rock didn’t find enough women who aren’t being imprisoned by relaxed and European culture. Alopecia survivor, Sheila Bridges bravely chooses not to wear wigs and showcases her bald head beauty proudly. “I never want to feel like I was hiding something,” she speaks articulately.

Tracie Thoms discussing why she loves being natural.

Actress Tracie Thoms appeared to be one of the few celebrity champions. She spoke up on celebrating forbidden other side. She believes that a freedom comes from natural beauty, embracing God given gift while the other Hollywood women were bluntly bragging about their expensive weaves like it gave them confidence and prestige. Thoms, however, was an anomaly. She raises an important question- “to keep my hair at the same texture as it grows out of head is looked at as revolutionary- why is that?”
Whether shaven bald, out free in afrocentric glory, braided, twisted or locc’ed, this “I’m not stressed” hair movement has been gradually rising for years. With entrepreneur women like Lisa Price, owner of natural hair line, Carol’s Daughter, things are shaping up into a new form of Angela Davis/Pam Grier inspired reformation thanks to hair bloggers and urgent call for earthly, less chemical ingredients in haircare.
“If my daughters wanted to wear weave one day, I had to see where it came from,” defeated Rock says, giving up on the idea that his children would actually want to remain natural, continuing to instead expose more vanity of oppressed black women and their disgrace.
He travels as far as to India where women, even crying babies are sacrificed in head shaving rituals called Tonsures- an exchanging of hair for God’s blessings. Sometimes Indian women are robbed of hair in sleep just to appease black market greediness- hair is such a valuable commodity that it is perceived to be wealthier than gold. Clear packages of long, glossy Indian roots are wrapped up like bundles of cocaine and shipped to people who probably know little about the history of this hair, of the person who was shaved bald intentionally or otherwise.
Rock tries, but with no success in trying to sell African American haired wigs. It’s both comical and sad, worsening when an African American woman working at an Asian hair store says, “black people don’t wear their hair nappy anymore.” Her agreeable boss with hands widening (wild “scary” afro), “they don’t want to look like Africa.” He points at the Indian hair and waves down his hands. “They want to wear their hair straight. It’s more sexy, more natural.”
But it is not natural. It is a preconceived, very contrived notion stimulating from white men’s rule that whiteness embodies beauty and thick, coarse, matted naps opposes that law.
And where is the sexiness when it becomes a production, a choreography in a relationship?
Despite men joking and women testifying, weave does get in the way of real life- financially, physically, and emotionally. It is an expensive venture and some women actually do attend to themselves more than paying mortgage and car notes on time. Touching is a natural occurrence in intimacy and to have a law where hair isn’t a part of deal sounds quite preposterous. As these men showcase scandalous stories and speaking of preferring other nationalities, African American women are appearing shallower and less desirable than ever.
But alas this documentary is written by three men and told through the eyes of a man.

Chris Rock talking to scandalously clad women about hair.

It is difficult to watch because this isn’t a one hundred percent honest depiction. These women loving their weaved safety nets aren’t very likeable or representational of a whole culture. Hair is a sense of pride, power, and creativity- as seen in the hair/ fashion show taking much of Rock’s attention. In the natural hair world, severely lacking here, there is no hiding, no masquerades.
“Hair is a woman’s glory,” says Maya Angelou who got her first relaxer at seventy years old. She couldn’t be anymore right.
Rock may close with the fluffy, “it’s what’s inside their heads that matters most” philosophy, but it is a contradiction- what positively reflects on the outside should match what’s within. If there were a sequel to Good Hair seen through the scopes of an admirable African American woman who knows fierce, independent trendsetters worthy of worship and inspiration, most of the men featured in Rock’s production will wish they never defamed her character.