Watch this powerful new film about white guilt… | Little White Lies

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Watch this pow­er­ful new film about white guilt and Black womanhood

01 Dec 2020

Words by Leila Latif

People in colourful outfits walking across a grassy field with trees in the background.
People in colourful outfits walking across a grassy field with trees in the background.
Soma­lia Seaton’s A Response to Your Mes­sage is a per­son­al reflec­tion on this year’s Black Lives Mat­ter protests.

Soma­lia Seaton has made a name for her­self as a gift­ed play­wright, steadi­ly craft­ing an impres­sive body of work for the­atres includ­ing Strat­ford East, the Lyric, Soho The­atre and the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny. Her plays offer insight­ful and uncom­pro­mis­ing per­spec­tives on race, fam­i­ly, iden­ti­ty and womanhood.

A Response to Your Mes­sage is her first for­ay into film, an exper­i­men­tal short based on a let­ter Seaton wrote to her white friends and col­leagues who reached out to her in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the ensu­ing Black Lives Mat­ter protests.

I didn’t speak to some of my clos­est white friends for about three months,” says Seaton. I was with­out lan­guage. I felt like the lan­guage that I had spo­ken to them with, or we had shared was no longer in my mouth. And so I was jour­nal­ing and it turned into a let­ter. Then, at some point down the line, I shared it with Susie [Woko­ma] and rather than read­ing it and then tex­ting me back to talk to me about it she record­ed her­self read­ing it and sent it to me. There was just some­thing so pow­er­ful about hear­ing it in some­one else’s mouth and real­ly painful, and the seed of this film was planted.”

In the film, images of Black women danc­ing, mov­ing and relax­ing are inter­spersed with shots of a group of Black women and girls dressed in gowns and afro-futur­is­tic regalia in a sun-dap­pled wood­land. I want­ed to bring Black women into nature,” Seaton explains, to pick up the rhythm of nature and that flow of nature. To reclaim that space and have our feet in the soil and ground our­selves.” All the while, a voice nar­rates Seaton’s let­ter, address­ing an unseen white friend:

I don’t need cheer­ing up. I don’t wish to house your guilt. I don’t wish to house your shame. I don’t wish to house your awk­ward­ness. I don’t wish to house your fragili­ty. I don’t wish to join your book club. I don’t wish to hear about that one time you called out a racist. I don’t wish to be intro­duced to your replace­ment token you’ve recent­ly met. I don’t wish to house the emo­tion­al labour of our big talk. I’ve got no room for that at this moment in time.”

Much of the footage is self-record­ed, with a diverse group of inter­gen­er­a­tional Black actors, artists, dancers and per­form­ers giv­en a broad brief to inter­pret. They were sim­ply asked to engage in motion and depict rest, peace and joy”. The pow­er of that act feels rev­o­lu­tion­ary in a time where we are more used to see­ing Black women on screen run­ning from slave mas­ters than prac­tic­ing sun salu­ta­tions. I’m so sick of see­ing specif­i­cal­ly Black women’s bod­ies muti­lat­ed, abused, endur­ing, per­se­ver­ing and hav­ing resilience,” says Seaton. I want to see women engaged in plea­sure, sex­u­al­ly and in many oth­er ways. We don’t talk about it enough, that there is some­thing that hap­pens to us cul­tur­al­ly and phys­i­o­log­i­cal­ly when we con­tin­ue to see images of our­selves engaged in that duress.”

There is a renewed pow­er to Seaton’s mes­sage fol­low­ing the recent elec­tion of Joe Biden and Kamala Har­ris. Black women mobilised, turn­ing out in record num­bers, and the media acknowl­edged their hard work as many well-mean­ing lib­er­als expressed their grat­i­tude that Black women had saved’ them. For all that this may be true and worth acknowl­edg­ing, it also fur­ther rein­forces the idea of Black women as bru­talised beasts of bur­den work­ing for a col­lec­tive self-inter­est rather than towards their own goals.

The idea that we’re sup­posed to sus­tain and per­se­vere, it makes me so angry,” says Seaton. You’re just sup­posed to endure cul­tur­al­ly as well as in wider soci­ety. You’re sup­posed to house the short­com­ings of men and you’re sup­posed to house the short­com­ings of white peo­ple. You’re sup­posed to be real­ly hum­ble. You’re not sup­posed to be too angry. That goes some­where. It costs us. It costs us in com­plete phys­i­o­log­i­cal health. And I’m so sick of it as a les­son that we teach young Black girls, to just work hard. Real­ly, the code for Black women when we talk about work­ing hard and is overex­ert yourself”.”

A Response to Your Mes­sage comes as a balm in a year where Black women have had to deal with their vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to the pan­dem­ic and white suprema­cy, their lack of inclu­sion in pol­i­tics and cul­ture and being, to para­phrase Mal­colm X, the most dis­re­spect­ed, unpro­tect­ed and neglect­ed peo­ple of all.

A year where we are bom­bard­ed with images of vio­lence against Black bod­ies, where Janelle Monáe is raped and tor­tured for Antebellum’s self-pro­claimed satir­i­cal pur­pos­es and Black politi­cians like Diane Abbott, Dawn But­ler, Kamala Har­ris and Stacey Abrams are treat­ed with open con­tempt across social and main­stream media.

A year where Black trans women were mur­dered in record num­bers while so-called fem­i­nist’ icons and colum­nists in pur­port­ed­ly pro­gres­sive news­pa­pers dehu­man­ised them and debat­ed their right to exist. Most of all, it serves as a reminder to us all of the pow­er of sanc­tu­ary and the impor­tance of savour­ing the joy of exist­ing with­in your own skin.

Watch A Response to Your Mes­sage below and find out more at are​spon​se​film​.com

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