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I love a good foreign film. I get taken away to another place and inevitably find myself submerged in someone elses life. So, last Saturday, I rushed to the Creative Alliance Theater in Baltimore, ready to get swept away into the film, Difficult Love.
But that didn’t happen. In fact, it was the opposite.
Difficult Love is a film about native South African photographer, Zanele Muholi, who takes nude and controversial pictures of LGBT people. The furthest thing from pornography, her art shows love, vulnerbility, gentleness and strength.
The reason I couldn’t be swept away was because I was taking frantic notes, in the dark, all over my day planner; engrossed in an effort to record names of other LGBT activists. Muholi, her subjects and the community who supports her are working to reduce the amount of ignorance in today’s brainwashed and homophobic society.
If I hadn’t already heard stories of torture and seen bloody bruised images of gay women who’ve been raped and killed in South Africa, the movie would have made me cry. But, to my surprise, I was not sad, I was hopeful. And I was proud.
This is a message for my sisters in South Africa:
Dance African Womyn
You make music and take pictures
You teach and you work
You did good girl, you did good
You cry and hold each other
You remain daughter and son
You clean and you cook
You visit family and bring love
But do you dance?
In a club with liquor and smoke
you tell your story with art
You dance a little – or a lot
But do you tribal dance?
Holy ghost filled
spinning
flinging
back breaking to the beat
Dance
I can’t hear you
I think you love me
Your words of hatred are not for me
Dance Dance Dance
Dance
under the moon
with me tonight
Dance
free in the field
with me tonight
Dance
under the bridge
in the sunlight
Dance
in the street
back breaking to the beat
Until you don’t feel the ground
or notice me watching you
Live In Color – Shannon