Discover the rich legacy of care and compassion among Black Americans, passed down from generations and ingrained in their culture.
UConn’s Humanities Institute held a Fellows Talk on Wednesday hosting Martine Granby on a Black American Legacy of Care. Photo by Connor Sharp/Daily Campus
The University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute held a fellows talk titled “Familial Archives and a Black American Legacy of Care” by Martine Granby on Wednesday. Granby is an assistant professor of journalism and has worked as a filmmaker. The fellow’s talk showcased her documentary “Ten Seconds of Sugar,” a film “chronicling a legacy of caretaking, motherhood, and silence of Black women’s mental health,” according to the UConn Events calendar.
The documentary is still in development, but Granby described the contents as centering around various women in her family. The stories involve her grandmother, Shirley Ford, her mother, Felita Granby and herself. Her grandmother worked as a nurse and her mother currently works as a therapist. Granby commented, “I come from a long line of caregivers.”
Yet Granby noticed a trend in her family and other Black American families: that their mental health was largely ignored or managed differently. In a clip from the documentary, Ford described her way of coping with hardships as through prayer for all parties involved. This differs for both Granby and her mother, who she says also uses “denial as a coping mechanism.”
Originally, the documentary wasn’t centered around her own family. Granby stated that she originally followed the stories of three other families located around the United States. She came to find that when interviewing them and trying to understand their stories, she would recount her own tales and experiences with mental health in the Black community. Over time she realized that the type of story she was trying to convey would have been better suited as a personal narrative.
only recently did i fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, i have absorbed not only the stories themselves but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories — like her life — must be recorded.
She mentioned a film titled “When My Sleeping Dragon Woke” when recounting the emotional toll that the documentary took on her and her family. “One scene from that movie felt like a gut punch,” Granby stated. From this, she “began making this film as a form of intervention for [her] and [her] mother.”
Granby expressed that the goal of her documentary is to “give ourselves permission to envision what it’s like to ask for care for ourselves. Mothering and care are woven throughout this film.” Creating this movie has allowed Granby to see her family in a different light — to see how generational trauma has affected her and her loved ones. “Only recently did I fully realize this: that through years of listening to my mother’s stories of her life, I have absorbed not only the stories themselves but something of the manner in which she spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories — like her life — must be recorded,” Granby said.
This is not the only thing to come out of her documentary, Granby also discovered that before becoming a mother and a nurse, her grandmother was a member of The Teen-Clefs, a musical girl group during the 1950s. A detail such as this shows how the women in her family transformed to become the caregivers she knows today. “Their chosen profession was to care for other people, but they really didn’t know how to do that for themselves,” Granby expressed. Unfortunately, Granby said that her grandmother was unwilling to sing for the documentary.
A response came from Dr. Richard Ashby Wilson, a Board of Trustees member and professor of law at UConn. He asked Granby to further elaborate on the personal hurdles she faced when creating the movie and why she chose the biographical documentary format. As described before, she felt that her family’s story was one that needed to be seen by viewers. She also encourages all documentary filmmakers to do a piece that involves themselves. In her time as an interviewer, she said it is important to understand exactly what you are asking these people to do when they sit in front of a camera. Telling your story can be an intrusive experience, so filmmakers need to understand what is on the line for these people.
Unlike previous research or stories, Granby wanted to not only look at the trauma of these families but how they coped with it. “This film is for many iterations of myself,” Granby stated. From every iteration of her as a child all the way to what she will be like in the future.
#BlackHistory #LegacyOfCare #CommunityLove