by Lucius Dechausay, CBC Arts
I first heard about this film in 2018, when filmmaker Laurie Townshend was developing the project for Toronto’s Oya Media Group. At the time, she was following the lives of four women whose activism informed their approach to motherhood. These were mothers on the front lines of radical change who deeply understood the immense responsibility of raising children who would, hopefully, not grow up in the same systems of oppression that they did. (As if parenting wasn’t already hard enough.)
Eventually, Townshend came to focus on one subject: the artist Staceyann Chin. Chin’s story — and her complicated relationship with her mother — is the heart of A Mother Apart.
Chin was born on Christmas Day 1972, and her mother left before she was even one month old. They reconnected briefly when she was nine and then not again until Chin was in her 20s. The abandonment had an impact on her that would be unfathomable to most, but Chin channelled any feelings of pain, anger and resentment into her art. She became a critically acclaimed dub poet who has been on 60 Minutes and Def Poetry Jam. She even appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show to share her experience as a gay Jamaican woman.
While her poetry is ferocious in its rawness and approach, it is her candour and vulnerability that keep you invested in the film’s journey. In the doc, as an adult, she tries to reconnect with her mother. As a parent herself, she looks back at her own mother’s choices with new-found perspective, sympathy and humility.
Mothering is deeply hard and there is no single right path, but I can’t wait to see how Chin navigates the experience with her daughter at her side, searching for the answers she’s been asking her whole life.
