#my black girl magic syllabus

Lingui, The Sacred Bonds (2021 film)

Chadian master Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s latest is a generous exploration of the intricate support networks women weave to survive the harsh laws of men.

Chadian cinematic pioneer Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (A Season in France, TIFF ’17) returns to the Festival with his latest triumph, a bold portrait of a commonly silenced struggle cast unexpectedly out into the open.

Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), a craftswoman living in the outskirts of N’Djamena, has built a life of her own since being exiled from her family for having a child young and unwed. Now 15, her daughter Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio) has been expelled from school for her own pregnancy. Refusing the price women are often expected to pay with their bodies, Maria decides she will have an abortion despite it being illegal in Chad and forbidden in Islam. However determined her battle may be, Amina insists her daughter will not face it alone.

This time bringing a distinct look into the hidden life-worlds of women living overexposed to the whims of men, Haroun presents an ode to the quiet care engineered relationtionally, in spite of perilous scrutiny. This journey flows unpredictably through the networks women weave to survive too frequent life-threatening violence and unrelenting patriarchal social control. Effortlessly evocative, stunning in its weighted use of silence and reserved perspective, Lingui observes what it means to rely on another as a way of being in the world, where there is commitment to imagining possibilities as much as to creating them when and where they are foreclosed.

NATALEAH HUNTER-YOUNG

taken from: https://www.tiff.net/events/lingui-the-sacred-bonds

Blossom by Sha Sha (2019 EP)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFHM43P24CE

https://www.blazonmagazine.co.za/music-review-sha-sha-blossomssha/

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in her Head by Warsan Shire (2022 poetry)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/26/warsan-shire-bernardine-evaristo-suoperstar-poet-beyonce

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/14/warsan-shires-portraits-of-somalis-in-exile

The Blue Eyes of Yonta / Udju azul de Yonta (1991/2 film by Flora Gomes)

Yonta is a beautiful young woman growing up in the city of Bissau, a generation after her nation has gained independence. She develops a secret crush on Vincente, a good friend of her family and a hero of their country’s struggle, beginning a story of unrequited love in the developing city. Meanwhile, Yonta herself has a secret admirer, a shy young man names Zé, who sends her love letters copied from a Scandinavian book. It is from one such letter that the film gets its title. A lovely, delicate work about youthful illusions, both personal and national, that powerfully demonstrates director Flora Gomes’s marvelous talent for eliciting wonderfully nuanced performances. Only the second film from Guinea Bissau and Gomes, The Blue Eyes of Yonta shows us how alike we all are when it comes to matters of the heart.

taken from: https://africanfilmny.org/films/the-blue-eyes-of-yonta-udju-azul-de-yonta/

Borders / Frontières (2017 film by by Apolline Traoré)

On a bus en route from Dakar, Senegal, to Lagos, Nigeria, four resourceful women must band together as they navigate the risks that come with traveling alone while female, fighting back against threats of violence, sexual harassment and government corruption at each border crossing. This slice-of-life drama from Burkinabé director, Apolline Traoré, pays tribute to the bravery of West African women asserting their independence in a patriarchal society. Borders won three prizes at FESPACO 2017, including the Paul Robeson Prize for the Best Film by a Director from the African Diaspora.

from: https://africanfilmny.org/films/borders-frontieres/

On Black Sisters Street by Chika Unigwe

On Black Sisters Street tells the haunting story of four very different women who have left their African homeland for the riches of Europe—and who are thrown together by bad luck and big dreams into a sisterhood that will change their lives.

Each night, Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce stand in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, promising to make men’s desires come true—if only for half an hour. Pledged to the fierce Madam and a mysterious pimp named Dele, the girls share an apartment but little else—they keep their heads down, knowing that one step out of line could cost them a week’s wages. They open their bodies to strangers but their hearts to no one, each focused on earning enough to get herself free, to send money home or save up for her own future.

Then, suddenly, a murder shatters the still surface of their lives. Drawn together by tragedy and the loss of one of their own, the women realize that they must choose between their secrets and their safety. As they begin to tell their stories, their confessions reveal the face in Efe’s hidden photograph, Ama’s lifelong search for a father, Joyce’s true name, and Sisi’s deepest secrets—-and all their tales of fear, displacement, and love, concluding in a chance meeting with a handsome, sinister stranger.

from: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/181696/on-black-sisters-street-by-chika-unigwe/

Passing (2021 film dir. by Rebecca Hall)

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/film-tv/a38162469/passing-is-a-film-about-race-from-the-black-gaze/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/movies/passing-black-lesbian-women.html