Film review: A Mother Apart unpacks a painful legacy of abandonment at Vancouver Queer Film Festival

NFB documentary traces a spoken-word poet's complex relationship with the woman who left her as a child in Jamaica

By Janet Smith

Staceyann Chin and her daughter Zuri in A Mother Apart.

A Mother Apart screens September 19, 7:45 pm at VIFF Centre, with Laurie Townshend and Staceyann Chin in attendance, as part if Vancouver Queer Film Festival—Out on Screen

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.

Director Laurie Townshend, who dedicated six and a half years to shooting this National Film Board documentary, contrasts Staceyann’s search for her mother—a quest that takes her to Germany—against scenes of the poet’s own nurturing, unconventional bond with her young child, Zuri. The final, hardest leg of the journey finds Staceyann returning to Jamaica, where most of her pain still lives.

Staceyann Chin returns to Jamaica, late in A Mother Apart.

A Mother Apart’s most fascinating scenes attempt to unravel the motivations of the absent Hazel who continues to avoid her daughter’s tireless efforts to pursue a relationship with her. But Hazel remains an enigma; stoic and hard, she defies psychological analysis. In one excruciating scene, the adult Staceyann waits at a café in Cologne for literal hours for her mother to show up. And so it’s Staceyann’s gradual acceptance, and something approaching empathy, that become the crux of this film. Being Black, female, and poor has affected each woman’s trajectory in complex ways that don’t have to be spelled out.

A Mother Apart is about a kind of forgiveness, albeit a messy, sad one. But even more, it’s about finding a voice. As the explosive, arresting spoken-word artist says, she has learned that secrets eat away at you, that she “was most bruised by the people who wanted me silenced”. Even, it hurts to acknowledge, the mother who wouldn’t accept her own child’s collect calls. 

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