Steven McQueen's: 12 Years A Slave in Theaters Friday 10/18

Last night I had the privelege to attend a private screening of 12 Years A Slave a Steven McQueen film hosted by John Singleton. The film was amazing. So amazing that I can't stop thinking about it and all the implications it has for me and my life as an African-American woman smack dab in the middle of America raising a African-American male, solo.

The film was simplistically artistic. There were subtle moments that were touching because they were so raw. I don't want to give away the film because I think its an important piece to experience and dialogue about. It was full of expressionism and this subtle angst that was played out beautifully. Its touching, its heavy content , its raw, its poetic, and has a great deal of symbolism, yet simple. Its a simple film. Almost too simple to the point that if you don't get it you miss it. It wasnt over-dramatized, there wasn't this huge build up. I enjoyed the musical score that gave this sort of daunting, horror-like feel .

There was so much content in the film that it almost felt like a modern man in the period of slavery. That was the dialogue that some of the audience members began to engage in. It has these undertones of accepting where we are as a means to survive rather than to live.

The movie is playing on me mentally because I keep trying to figure out where did the paradigm of Black Culture in America shift. We went from slaves, to freedom fighters, to twerkers and trappers?

I began to feel like I lacked the appreciation for my simple freedoms like writing this blog, reading books, speaking up for myself, simple things not even touching on the fact that I am also a college graduate.

There was also some religious undertones where slave masters used select passages of the bible as propaganda as a mental entrapment between the slave's covenant and devotion to God. It reminded me of the new reality show Preachers of LA and other religious events I've attended where the word is shared as a means of personal gain for the messenger and not for the spirtual growth of the listener.

The other issue that touched me was the pain of slaves being separated from their children if the masters didnt find it economically fitting  and now days its nothing for women and men to abandon their children for whatever their reasons are.

I could go on and on about what this movie represented for us currently as a culture and for me personally. One thing that John Singleton said was we should be able to celebrate that we're not in that space anymore and that we've overcome that oppression. He is absolutely right. What's mind boggling to me though, is the way for which we celebrate. We often times celebrate ignorance. I feel like if there was more recognition of where we came from beyond the typical stories, and the understanding of mental and physical endurance of slavery, then we would look at who we are today and fix it.


This may be far-fetched and offensive but I feel like we're still slaves mentally. We lack definace in the sense that we ok countless television shows about grown women that can't get along or is the president's mistress, we glorify oversexed pop stars, we lack social responsibility. I am not exempt. We promote the culture by supporting it, by picking and choosing it and pouring our earnings into it, and glorifying it.

What's even more interesting to me is when people tell us to get over it. That's a period that's over and done and we should just move forward. In a sense that's correct we should push forward, however you can never just forget where you've come from. But as a culture it seems like we have forgotten. We look the other way, We degrade each other based on frivilous, tangible, perishable things, it seems that as we have advanced as a culture we have diminished the value of what that culture is.

Steven McQueen did an amazing job by shaking up the specturm to get us as a people to articulate the viability of whe we were, who we're becoming, and who we should be.

One of the audience members provided a metaphor last night where he stated (paraphased) you can chain an elephant to a stake in the ground and he will try to break free and after years of being chained you let the elephant off the chains and he doesn't run away. Its mental. Its the mentality of being chained over time that keeps it there.

How do we break free? How do we stop being that elephant? Most importantly how did we transition from such a pivotal movement of abolishing oppression to Basketball Wives and the Bad Girls Club?


Puzzled and Amazed. Thank you Mr. McQueen.