The watermelon woman

Sometimes you have to create your own history, the watermelon woman is fiction

Hello girls, gays, and a special hello to gay girls today,

Summer is around the corner and I’d like to let you know that the summer special on this my little publication for this year will be a series of short stories/micro fiction that I will publish in French and English. Now, a little bit over 600 of you seem to find interest in what I write and it still amazes me. Some of the stories will be for subscribers only so, I hope you find in your pockets the will and desire to support my writing. I haven’t found a general title for those short stories yet but I can tell you there will be about dating, relationships, sex, sensuality with summer as a backdrop . Am I properly teasing you ? Am I ? I hope I am.

Today, I’d like to tell you about a movie I’ve just finished watching . “The watermelon woman” by Cheryl Dunye. It is a black lesbian movie that has been on my list for many years now but I had never found the right moment to watch it. In the movie, we follow Cheryl (the director and lead actress) a 25 years old woman going after the story of a black actress she saw in a black and white film from the 1930s, where the actress played a mammy. Cheryl is intrigued because the credits of the movie only list that actress as “the watermelon woman”, no names or nothing.

I first heard of this movie around 2017/2018, in the middle of my deep radical afrofeminist era, during a night I attended a conference in Sciences Po Paris (a private elitist university). The speakers were french afrofeminists and I think it was organized by the black feminist or antiracist association of the school, I remember when I got to the school, the bouncer, a black man, gestured to the direction of amphiteatre without saying a word, almost rolling his eyes like silently saying “oh yeah I know why you’re here,”. I guess that university had not seen such a concentration of heawraps and Afros and kinky Marley hair, in a while. It was funny.

The last time I stepped foot at Sciences Po Paris was when I was 18 and interviewing to get into the school. I did not get in, I was very dissapointed in the moment but a few years later, I was very happy I didn’t get in. According to the stories Charlotte, a friend of Chinese descent told us, I would have ended up slapping somebody white rich son early and got into real trouble. She was the only one of our high school that got in and even her profound will to blend into whiteness at all costs had not protected her from the sharp slaps of frontal racism. Anyways, all that to say this film had been on my list ever since comrade Martinican/Congolese/french afrofeminist author Laura Nsafou, mentionned her in speech about the fetishization of black women bodies and stereotypical roles in the media.

To my surprise I actually liked the movie. I don’t why I thought I wouldn’t like it, probably the poster, yes I think it was the poster. I still don’t think the poster does the movie justice. It was directed in 1996 and somehow I had assumed I would have a lot of trouble finding it online because how popular are black lesbian films exactly ? but I didn’t. I think it was recently remasterized or something, because the images were very clear for an almost 30 years old independant movie. In an hour and a half the movie manages to explore the themes of archives, memories, fetishization, friendship, and black lesbianism of course. I don’t usually like lesbian films even though they aren’t too many to begin with, the latest film I saw was Rafiki and I didn’t like something was off. I’ve liked the season of master of None directed by Lena Waithe and I’ve also liked the series Twenties so maybe it’s the film format I have a problem with ? Oh but I’ve liked the Handmaiden, but the Handmaiden is a masterpiece, it’s in its own category. In The Watermelon Woman, what caught me really was the whole narration about memories, whose stories are passed down and whose stories remain unwritten, without a title, without even a proper name. I think the director did an amazing job at alternating the images of the black and white archives, those of the documentary being shot by the main character AND those of the actual movie. It’s a movie about a documentary about a movie star. Those multiples mise en abyme would usually confuse me but Cheryl blends it seamlessly. And she plays in the movie too. Give it up for Cheryl.

And she did all that while looking fly as fuck

Cinema seems to be a theme that surrounds me a lot lately. I’ve been attending a few black film festival here in the Paris region and I’ve been wanting to write an article about them. By the way, if you know any (paying) platform that would be interested by an article about the multiplication of black film festivals in France since the late 2010s and the history/reasons behind it, please let me know. The Watermelon Woman reminded me of how capitalism doesn’t care about your creativity (as if I had forgotten) and how hard it is to make film. I’ve been trying to make afilm I wrote in 2020 and I’m close to being discouraged to be honest. The movie also made me think of how most of us won’t make money with our movies or even our books, or our art but we do it, for the posterity (amongst other thins), to leave a mark, so that maybe in 60 years time, a 25 years old student will see herself in us, in our work and go after our names, our stories. It reminded me that I still have not seeing any movie by Sarah Maldoror, why do I always miss it when they screen her films ? Not that she was a lesbian, but why do I always miss the screening of her films ? Weird.

You know what ? I think I’ve found the reason why this movie moved me, it’s because it explores the fine lines between searching for one’s past, trying to reconnect with one’s ancestors to validate one’s present, one’s existence. But at the time, we cannot be tied to the past too much , for too long or it will prevent us from looking at the future, we will get stuck in some type of metaphysical spiritual limbo. And this dance is very hard, especially when you’re black, or a black queer woman like Cheryl, who wrote at the end of the her movie, which is now a queer classic : “Sometimes you have to create your own history, the watermelon woman is fiction”.

Okay, well, in Conclusion : if you haven’t done it yet, don’t wait years like me, go watch The Watermelon Woman, TODAY (or tomorrow.)

Bye!

Nzinga