feature image photo from the film A Mother Apart – Courtesy of National Film Board of Canada.
“I was most bruised by the people who wanted me silent.”
In a new documentary about her life, lesbian Jamaican poet and memorist Staceyann Chin is anything but silent. She is loud and unafraid to tackle the difficult parts of her history, which include abandonment, violence, her sexuality and, most importantly, motherhood, from both her perspective as a mother and a daughter.
A Mother Apart digs into Chin’s relationship with her mother Hazel, who abandoned Chin multiple times in her childhood. After promising to return within weeks when Chin was nine, Hazel disappeared. It would be years before she was found.
“I suppose I only set out to tell my story,” Chin tells me ahead of the documentary’s premiere on PBS. “But you can’t tell your story without telling your family’s story.”
“It’s even more complicated because I’m a memoir writer,” she continues. “But I’d like to think I’ve done my best to make sure my mother is portrayed in a fair light, in a true light.”
I believe she more than excels at what she was trying to do in telling her story.
Throughout the film, which took about six years to make, Chin goes around the world to piece together who Hazel was and what would have pushed her to abandon Chin and her older brother. First, she finds herself in Montreal, where she and her daughter Zuri travel to the home her mother lived in for many years when Chin was a child.
During the trip, they speak with neighbors who have nothing but fond memories of Hazel. At the same time, they are shocked to learn Staceyann was not the child they had briefly met. In fact, they didn’t even know Hazel had two children she had left behind in Jamaica. Despite the shock, they assured Chin that this sudden revelation didn’t change the way they felt about Hazel. She obviously felt their sentiment horrifying and frustrating.
Chin exploration of her mother’s past is frequently cut with scenes of her on stages around the world performing her poetry, much of it grappling with her abandonment and feminism. She is a fierce and fiery performer and writer. Strike that, she is a fierce and fiery person; everything about her explodes out of her pores.
While much of the first hour of the film rightfully treats Hazel as a ghost whose memory exists solely to taunt the daughter she left behind, she becomes an alarmingly real presence in the latter portion of the film. In her twenties, she found her mother living in Germany and learned she had a little sister, who has an equally fraught relationship with their mother despite being “raised” by her. The relationship between the sisters is deep.
Hazel in the present does finally appear when Staceyann travels to Germany after Covid restrictions are lifted. Neither sister has communicated with their mother since the pandemic began, but that doesn’t keep the older sister from trying.
“I keep people; I’m a people keeper,” Chin tells her mother and sister over lunch. It’s the reason she continues to make an effort to maintain a relationship with her mother, even though the older woman seems reluctant at best to live up to her end of the deal.
“I will always do the work to hold onto you,” Chin states firmly.
When Hazel finally appears on-screen, I didn’t realize how desperate I was to actually see her and hear her voice. Once she’s given the space to tell her side of the story, I had to reconcile the woman on screen with the same one I knew inflicted constant cruelty on her children. Chin and filmmaker Laurie Townshend do an amazing job never painting Hazel as a hero or a villain. She’s just a woman who made certain choices.
Hazel’s participation in the film is fascinating. Not everyone would be so willing to show up, knowing how their decisions would likely be perceived. “[Hazel was] owed the opportunity to respond to my stories about her,” Chin tells me. “And I think she did a hell of a job.”
In the final half hour of the film, Chin watches the interview with her mother while the director films her. After pausing, she reveals she has never asked her mother why she left directly but explains she knows why her mother left her: Her choices were to languish in poverty for the rest of her life or start over and have a better life someplace else with someone new.
Chin has a “deep empathy” for her mother. However, the young girl in her cannot fully forgive Hazel for leaving. It is a wound that is far too deep, no matter how much she can empathize with her mother’s choices. She explains her mother may not be dealing with the same kind of “deep loneliness” she was if she hadn’t abandoned or mistreated her children.
“Why do you keep coming back for her?” the director asks. “I don’t come for her,” Chin replies. “I come because it is the decent thing to do.”
“It’s a kindness I can offer her,” she continues. “It’s also a kindness I can offer myself.”
As the film ends, Chin says, “I think the more you understand about the process of mothering, the more grace you can extend to the mothers who perhaps mothered you in ways that might have bruised you.” The final shot is of her and her daughter Zuri on a hill, the sun high in the sky between them.
Throughout A Mother Apart, we get these lovely little nuggets of Chin’s relationship to her growing daughter. Through old social media videos and current conversations the two have, we’re able to piece together the deep love they have for each other. It was her relationship with her daughter that I was most interested in when we talked.
“There was a sense that the only way I was going to experience motherhood, the mother/daughter relationship, was if I became the mother,” Chin explains.
Staceyann Chin is a single mother by choice. She touches on Zuri’s origins in the documentary, where she explains even though she was an out lesbian, she married a gay poet named Peter. Together, they believed they were going to be pioneers of the new “modern family,” she tells me.
Peter got cancer and died before they could make their modern family dream a reality. What came next was nearly ten years of clawing uphill. It wasn’t easy for a single lesbian (her sexuality is always a matter of fact, never a source of contention in the documentary) to procure sperm in the late aughts, and it was even harder to find Black sperm. “Your standards start very high,” she jokes. “And then you realize you don’t really have much choice.”
Chin describes her once “feral” need to get pregnant with a touch of humor. It was so strong, she considered propositioning men in airplane bathrooms to get her pregnant just because she liked their teeth. However, everything changed when Peter’s brother CJ entered the picture, offering his sperm. And with that, the original dream she had longed for came true.
Zuri has a relationship with her father and his family, which is beautiful, but not without sorrow for Chin. “You grow up and you thrash about what your parents didn’t do and what your mother fell down on and how she failed you,” she says of her feelings. “And then by the time you have your own kid you’re like ‘oh my god.’ There are some things that she might need that I absolutely can’t provide. And I’ve worn the sorrow of that. That has made it easier for me to see my mother’s failings as limitations that she had no control over.”
Over the course of the film, Zuri goes from first grader to tween, which is quite a time period to cover. “My daughter is young, so she’s for the most part happy to be a part of the project,” Chin says. “She’s proud of who she is and who I am. Time will tell if she remains that way. I have tried to let her know that there is room for her to disagree. This story is true for me. But it could be entirely different if she decides to share her story when that time comes.”
A Mother Apart will be available to stream free through PBS until the end of October.
This sounds fascinating and powerful, thanks for sharing!
Love this!
i’m crying!