#SayTheirNames: Viola Davis, LaShana Lynch, Thuso Mbedu, Sheila Atim, Jayme Lawson
The Woman King
September 29, 2022 by Mitzi J Smith PhD
I saw the film The Woman King on Sunday, September 25, 2022. It was for me a spiritual experience. I don’t think I can adequately voice how it made me feel. The acting was excellent; the story line (inspired by the historical all-women’s army of the Dahomey peoples in West Africa) was riveting, and I will not divulge it because many have yet to see it. I will admit as a survivor of sexual violence, it was slightly triggering; I was grateful that the film was careful to only show enough of the sexual violence to give viewers a sense of what happened and not to create a voyeuristic full-on re-living of the event. I turned away for seconds at some of the fight scenes. I had to tell myself ‘the women survive and they win,’ which is not the case in our society where the ‘warriors’ are all men for whom we too often make excuses when they violate women and girls.
To see, in The Woman King, young women come to the realization of what they are capable of achieving by seeing other women like them who achieved (and help them to achieve) the unimaginable to the extent that they are looked upon, if not with eyes then with heart and soul, as sacred. Go see The Woman King and you will know what I mean. We are already sacred, but it seems Black women often sacrifice much in racialized, patriarchal or misogynoir societies to be seen as sacred. In The Woman King, women from different tribes and who had been violated by family and community were welcomed into the sisterhood of women warriors who trained to be as courageous, skillful, resilient and more so than the all-male warriors among them and in surrounding tribes. It is better to be “the hunter rather than the hunted.” The vision is to break-free from the arrangement they had entered into with European enslavers to sell their own people. Go see The Woman King! [Also see the documentary High on the Hog]. I exited the movie theatre full and yet wanting more. I left speechless and bursting with praise. I love what I witnessed and what I felt. I will see The Woman King again and maybe a third and a fourth time.
Anything that Black women do that is worth doing (or the audacity to simply be somethings), especially of this magnitude and impact, is always subjected to unfounded criticism that attempts to discredit and demonize. And attempts to diminish and sabotage come from every direction, even from within the Black community. Some have said The Woman King is not entirely truthful or historical. It is not a documentary (and even those are re-presentations or interpretations). What cinematic retelling is or can be? It is inspired like a lot of such films by a historical reality, the all-female soldiers of the Dahomey [today the Republic of Benin]. And it is meant to inspire the audience. I was inspired, indelibly inspired. Here is a link to a comic strip created by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization based on the history of the all-female soldiers of the Dahomey [today the Republic of Benin]. I encourage you to read beyond social media posts, to visit a library, or a credible source. And go and see for yourselves! Here is a link to Viola Davis’s response to the criticism in the LA Times.
#SayTheir Names We love Viola Davis! Keep doing whatcha doin’