By Janet Smith, createastir
Why would a woman abandon her child? Can a daughter still love her after being abandoned? And can she hope to turn things around with her own child in the next generation?
The new documentary A Mother Apart explores these hard and semi-taboo questions in brutally honest and vivid detail, thanks to the candour of its subject, Jamaican-American spoken-word poet and LGBTQ2SIA+ activist Staceyann Chin. Her mother Hazel abandoned her in Jamaica, when Staceyann was just nine years old, to move to Montreal with a boyfriend. She stayed out of contact except for the rare times when she impatiently agreed to accept her young daughter’s collect phone calls.
Chin has an extraordinary talent for articulating the way that abandonment shaped her. Haunted for decades by the idea she was not worth staying for, she recalls the deep longing she felt to live in the house her mother inhabited, “with a refrigerator that had enough food”, or the way she would idealize her parent as being strong and able to navigate the world (later discovering the reality to be starkly different). The fantasies and memories often come to life through vivid cut-out animation, created with collaged old photographs.
Her mother’s absence would leave Staceyann vulnerable to abuse in Jamaica, especially as she came out as a young adult, driving her to the more accepting world of New York City.
