‘A Mother Apart’: Staceyann Chin’s beautiful exploration of being a mother, when her own mother abandoned her

In a profoundly impactful and emotional journey, Jamaican-American poet and activist Staceyann Chin reimagines the meaning mothering in the film A Mother Apart. Travelling from U.S. to Montreal, Jamaica and Germany, following the mother who abandoned Chin, director Laurie Townshend has brilliantly constructed an exploration of Chin’s intentional parenting, and the complexity of Chin’s identity as a daughter, now with her own daughter, Zuri.

“People have been trying to buy my story, … one of those men that everybody’s like, ‘Thank God I didn’t make that film with him,’ because of all the terrible things that have happened to a lot of women,” Chin told Yahoo Canada in Toronto. “Hollywood, filmmaking people blow smoke up the ass, they tell you, ‘Oh my God because we have a deal with Netflix’ or ‘I have a really good friend who’s really interested and I talked to them, and they’re like, we can do this.'”

“Laurie came to me and said, ‘I really feel like I should make this movie … and I don’t have any money,’ which people in film never say. To get you on the hook they talk about all this money and how Brad Pitt is going to come and like live in your house while they make the film. But there’s a way that she was very honest. She said, … ‘I haven’t made a film before, … but I’m Jamaican, I think your work is important and I think your story matters, and this is the film I want to make.'”

Initially, the concept was that Townshend would follow four women, but as the project evolved, Chin become the entire focus.

“I was captivated, a little confused, or confounded, and inspired by how somebody could transform trauma of abandonment into this miraculous example of triumph in motherhood,” Townshend said. “I was really, really curious about [how Black mothers] were raising their children, and how they were able to do that in a way that preserves the heart and the spirit of that child, in the midst of all the other things that were happening.”

“My feeling was that the mothering ethic is that thing that I think is going to save the world. And the powers that be are going to be trembling when these young children being raised by people like Staceyann grow up and start to demand how they’re going to be seen and treated. I was just very much convinced of that and Staceyann was living that out in a very public way. She was giving space for Zuri to be whoever she is, who she came into this world to be. I was very, very much inspired by that and I wanted to follow this family and get to know them better.”

‘I don’t want to give the city the satisfaction of who I have become’

Among the captivating moments in A Mother Apart is when we see Chin go to Montreal, where her mother lived after leaving Chin and her sibling in Jamaica. It was a difficult journey to make. As Chin explained, for 15 years of her life she was preparing for her mother to send for her from Montreal, but it never happened.

“Especially in my 20s and 30s, there were lots of invitations for me to come to Montreal to speak or to work, or to perform theatre,” Chin said. “I was always like, ‘Well it’s going to be cold there,’ and then I would go to Minnesota, or Saskatchewan.”

“I kind of had to admit to myself then that there was a large part of me that was resisting coming to Montreal and as every good, Black, feminist, lesbian [of the 2000s], I had to go back to therapy and say to my therapist, I think I don’t want to go to Montreal. … I said, I don’t want to give the city the satisfaction of who I have become when they didn’t want me when I was nothing, when I wasn’t anybody. They don’t deserve me. “

Then Chin knew that when the next invitation came to go to Montreal, she would have to go to city, particularly after having Zuri. Chin said she was, “practicing the courage of knowing why I am the way that I am more steadily and consistently.”

“I’m doing my best to make sure Zuri doesn’t wear my trauma the way I might wear my grandmother’s or my mother’s,” she said.

“I don’t necessarily believe that things stayed in my mother’s DNA and were passed on to me, and I don’t feel like I took those things and passed them on to Zuri. But what I believe is Zuri will watch me navigate the world and she will take her lessons on when to be silent, when to speak up. When to believe a battle can be won. When to step into a battle that you know can’t be won. When to measure your survival not with the weight of the wins, but maybe with the magic of having the courage to face them anyways.”

Chin stressed that sometimes fighting that battle isn’t for you personally, but so others, including other generations, know that “fighting is a way to respond.”

“My mother left, she left before I was conscious, and so when I see this in the film I think, I came into consciousness knowing that my mother was not here, that she had gone,” Chin said. “I understood that I was abandoned and that I wasn’t enough to make her stay.”

“But I also learned that if I needed to go it was possible. So that my feet were not permanently rooted in soil that wasn’t good for me.”

‘You have to be empowered to defy motherhood’

A Mother Apart also reflects the message that our relationships in life, particularly a relationship between a parent and a child, is ever evolving, and “mothering” looks different for each person.

“You have to be empowered to defy motherhood,” Townshend highlighted.

When we do get to hear from Chin’s mother, one of the things Hazel expresses in the film is that her daughter understands why this abandonment happened. Chin believes that her mother is “being protective” of the part of her life that he is most “ashamed” of.

“To say, ‘I didn’t want children,’ … that’s the most horrible thing a woman could do or say in the world we live in today,” Chin said. “I think I see it in her where she did not want to be a mother. … Transactional sex was perhaps the way that a beautiful young Black girl from the sticks in Jamaica could earn money, could make a better life, could chart a path outside of that abject poverty. And she didn’t have access to contraceptives and didn’t have access to abortions.”

“I feel as if what my mother can’t or won’t say is that, … I was in the breeding house of a political era in history … and the only way to step out of it was to leave these two children. Because … she didn’t carry it full term until she was 40 years old, which was 16 years later. … She exited the process of the breeding machinery of the capitalist structure, … but she’s still a Black Caribbean woman in her 70s so she can’t say, I didn’t want to raise nobody’s babies.”

For Townshend, the goal of A Mother Apart was never to make a biopic, which led to the brilliant balance that’s found in the film between Chin’s personal story, and following this trail behind her mother Hazel.

“[Staceyann] says it in the beginning, everything she does is in resistance to and in compliance to being a mom. It was about Staceyann and Zuri, and their journey and their walk together,” Townshend said.

“And the example that she has given me, the way that she mothers, is really what has ultimately helped me understand why I made this film in the first place. And it was about learning how to mother myself and not necessarily becoming a mom to somebody else.”

A Mother Apart is screening in the Inside Out film festival in Toronto on June 1 at 1:30 p.m.