Black Sheep interview Kim Wayans

A MOTHER’S SCORN
An interview with PARIAH actress, Kim Wayans

This article was originally published in Ottawa Xpress.

Mothers are supposed to be the great protectors of their children. To this day though, homosexuality still seems to be a decisive issue that can tear a mother and child clear apart from each other, making the mother what the child needs protection from. In PARIAH, an excellent coming of age story from director, Dee Rees, this exact breakdown takes place and breaks the viewers’ hearts.

How can a mother turn her child away like this? This is the question Kim Wayans, a veteran actress who is not in fact a mother herself, must ask herself. “She is making a mistake. This is against God, according to Audrey,” Wayans begins to explain to me of how she felt her character might be feeling after discovering her 17-year-old daughter, Aike (Independent Spirit nominee, Adepero Aduye), is a lesbian. “So she is in danger now of being banished to hell. There’s that. Then there’s a mother’s disappointment of all the hopes and dreams she had for her daughter disappearing.”

Wayans attributes this disappointment to the emptiness in Audrey’s world. “It’s coming from a person who is not happy in her own life. She is ostracized from everyone. She is a pariah herself,” says Wayans, who was not involved in the original short film PARIAH was adapted from. “This shell of a woman has projected so much onto this little girl. As a mother, I failed because she is not what I wanted her to be.”

Having gotten her start on the Cosby Show spinoff, "A Different World", Wayans is perhaps best known for her work on her brother, Keenan Ivory Wayans’ sketch comedy, "In Living Color". Her experience in comedy has posed some challenges for Wayans attempts at dramatic acting. “The funny thing is the challenge doesn’t lie with the performance. The challenge lies with the labeling and putting people in boxes.” It was easy to tell she was relieved to have gotten the chance to play this part. “I’m either telling a comedic story or I’m telling a dramatic story but I’m still telling a story.”

As painful as PARIAH can be at times, it is a genuinely uplifting and honest film. It is Wayans’ hope that when people see the film that it opens a dialogue so situations like this can be avoided in the future. “People are in denial. So many children in the gay community are being hurt every day just by the sheer denial of who they are. We all crave being loved and accepted for who we authentically are, so when you come into opposition and rejection when you’re just trying to express that authenticity, I can’t think of anything more damaging.”

Spoken like a real mother.

PARIAH

PARIAH
Written and Directed by Dee Rees
Starring Adepero Aduye, Pernell Walker and Kim Wayans

Alike: I am not running. I am choosing.

Simply put, PARIAH is a very special film. By the very nature of its independent roots, it is itself an outsider. This small film will surely struggle to be heard and find its place amongst the marketplace. On these levels, the film, a feature version of the award-winning short of the same name, is something of a pariah itself, hoping for acceptance. While the impulse is usually to run from that which could be labelled as other, the opposite needs to happen here. Embrace PARIAH. It deserves all the love it can get.

In one of the film’s opening scenes, Alike (Adepero Aduye), a high-school student with a spectacular vernacular for poetry, takes the bus home from a night out at a local lesbian bar in Brooklyn, New York. She says goodnight to her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), who gets off a few stops before her, and proceeds to change out of her club wear on the bus. While it wouldn’t ordinarily be so strange for a teenager to hide the evidence of her likely unauthorized night out drinking, Alike is not covering her self up, as you might expect. No, Alike was already dressed pretty down to begin with, from her baggy jeans to her even baggier, plain white T-shirt, to her backwards ball cap. Alike isn’t worried her parents will know she was out. No, she’s afraid they will find out just where it was she went out.

Alike, as executed brilliantly with great sensitivity and strength by Aduye, who incidentally also played Alike in the short, is not only trying to fully realize her identity, but she is also desperately searching for the strength to inhabit her own skin. While she finds solace in words on the page, the angry words that are flung around the room regularly at home are making it impossible for Alike to grow. Her style of dress, which her mother (a frighteningly cold, Kim Wayans) vehemently denounces, is a constant topic of conversation. It is somehow easier to address how no daughter of hers will dress like a boy rather than talk about the very real possibility of her daughter’s lesbianism. The passion exchanged between both of these fine actresses is both intense and gut-wrenching.

PARIAH is a visceral experience unlike most in modern filmmaking. Writer/Director Dee Rees provides her audience with a truly honest perspective, unclouded by all bias and without any request for sympathy. Although somewhat crude at times, it has a timely quality that only further invites the viewer into the complicated streets of this particular Brooklyn borough. Rees keeps the action very present and reinforces the need for Alike to break out of the world that is now rapidly crashing down upon her. Carving out an identity for yourself is hard enough as it is but it can be exponentially harder when the direction you find yourself heading in is the one no one wants you to go in. PARIAH embodies this struggle perfectly and rightly beams with a beautiful sense of pride.