Watch this pow­er­ful new film about white guilt and Black womanhood

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