Strengthening Our Collective Alchemical Resilience
by Natalie Bullock Brown, Documentary Accountability Working Group
I was fascinated by, and so grateful to attend a Trauma Informed Resilience Orientation (TIRO) workshop offered by Lumos Transforms, a social enterprise that offers training on trauma-informed frameworks for healing. I had the opportunity to participate in the workshop as a representative of the Documentary Accountability Working Group, or DAWG, which is a proud member of the Color Congress. It was explained to the members of the Congress that the TIRO is “a culture-setting exercise that offers us a framework for our engagement with one another.” Color Congress has partnered with Lumos to offer wellness support for the monthly Congress Meetups. Despite the fact that Congress member organizations are all working toward a more liberatory, equitable and caring approach to non-fiction filmmaking, we largely don’t yet know each other — so some gentle ground rules for how we engage together seem appropriate.
What TIRO encourages is a look inward at the triggers and trauma we hold as individuals, which we can often knowingly or unwittingly weaponize and use against each other, even those with whom we seek to share community. And I have to say: if the members of the Color Congress can adapt TIRO into our own self care praxis, we can extend that care and regard into the Color Congress, and then into the documentary field.
One of the features of TIRO that struck me is the acknowledgement that both “privilege and disadvantage are loaded with stress and trauma.” That makes sense to me, given evidence, for example, that descendants of both the enslaved and slave holders, generations later, hold the dehumanizing stress and trauma of the Translatlantic Slave trade in their bodies. And the weathering effects of the daily experiences of racism on Black people — Black women in particular — are continually enumerated. When I consider how the documentary film terrain embodies this dichotomy of privilege and disadvantage, and the stress and trauma therein, I think about the increasingly pervasive trend of extractive films by largely white filmmakers about people of color from vulnerable communities (Sabaya, Jihad Rehab, etc.), and how incredibly unapologetic these filmmakers appear to be when called out for the harm they create. There is often trauma embedded in the actual stories of the films’ participants, in the harm done to those participants, and even their communities, through the inaccurate, sometimes unethical, often sensational telling of their stories. We rarely discuss how the act of dehumanizing [or harming] another person or community has the consequence of also dehumanizing [or harming] the perpetrator. This work is thus relevant to all.
As is true with most things, the macro — our cultural and societal collective experiences — can inform the micro — the more specific, interior and personal ways that we exist — and vice versa. There are systems, like white supremacy, patriarchy, racism and transphobia that inflict widespread, ongoing trauma. And there are the ways that trauma can get very specific for us as individuals when we experience it where we are, as who we are, and get entangled with it along the way to who we want to be.
As a member of DAWG, which has been working for several years on a framework for filmmakers that is focused on increasing the amount of transparency, consent and care that participants experience when they agree to become involved in a documentary film, I’m encouraged by the potential for TIRO to, at the very least, give BIPOC folks in the documentary field a very potent tool to recognize and address our own trauma so that we don’t impose it on others, especially film participants. Of late, I’ve been learning and thinking a lot about the very specific type of trauma that participants in documentary films often, unfortunately, experience. DAWG’s initial attempts at our framework were informed by what we felt was a clear need in the documentary field for some sort of code of ethics that could help guide filmmakers in their engagement and regard for film participants. But as we talked to the participants of a number of different documentary films, it became clear that our framework would not only need to be values-based, but also trauma-informed.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget some of the comments made during DAWG’s documentary participant convenings. One described feeling like a “dissected frog” as they submitted to the production process. And yet another shared that they felt like a cartoon character once they saw the finished work — a film that was supposed to be about that participant’s life, but which in the final analysis rendered their personhood and their lived experience as unrecognizable to them.
I’m grateful that Dr. Kameelah Rashad — a psychologist and founder of the Muslim Wellness Foundation — was in those participant convenings. Dr. Rashad helped us — me — to better understand the implications of trauma that laced the participants’ comments. The person who holds the camera wields power, no matter how much we actually wield it in our day to day lives. The truth is, despite the marginalized intersections of my Blackness and womanhood, my cishet, middle class, educated status give me privilege that I have to be mindful of when seeking to tell a story of a marginalized community that is not mine.
As I look around the United States, if not the whole world, all of which seems to be almost completely at the edge of mayhem and destruction, what I know to be true is that it is often easier for the people who are most likely to be devastated by societal crises to “punch down”, blame and attack each other, than to “punch up” with that same energy at the systems and citadels of power that can seem so impossible to dismantle. The effects of white supremacist narratives about BIPOC communities, and the internal surgery needed to extract that messaging in order to heal from the internalization of those narratives, is real. Even within movement building work that the Color Congress seeks to nurture amongst its member organizations, the trauma and stress that comes from constantly fighting, can run deep.
During the TIRO presentation, one of the trainers used the phrase “fight world” to describe our present, collective circumstances. That phrase hit home not only because of the multitude of ways that BIPOC folx, and women, are continually oppressed, but also the ways that personal trauma and triggers can keep us in constant fight or flight mode. What I learned is that because we are constantly responding to stressors, we often don’t know when to let our guard down and remove the armor we are conditioned to use to protect ourselves physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. What TIRO challenges us to do within the Color Congress is to develop the discernment to know what energy we need as individuals at any given point in the work we do to shape a new and more liberatory world for ourselves and each other. Wisdom to know when to fight, and when to step back and rest. It’s also a call to foster what TIRO refers to as “alchemical resilience” — a “flexible strength to overcome adversity and change systems of inequity and oppression into places where we thrive.” Don’t we all want this type of resilience? I know I do. If I can embody the TIRO principles of safety, trust and transparency, collaboration and mutuality, peer support, cultural humility, voice, choice and self agency, and my peers in the Color Congress can model those same principles, what a ripple effect that could produce in the doc field. Truly, we can only do liberation work, and encourage others to do it, if we are seeking freedom within our own selves, in our own lives. I’m extremely hopeful about the potential for Color Congress to support us in doing just that.
As freedom fighter Angela Davis has said:
“We have to imagine the kind of society we want to inhabit. We can’t simply assume that somehow, magically, we’re going to create a new society in which there will be new human beings. No, we have to begin that process of creating the society we want to inhabit right now.”
Let it begin with me.
Natalie Bullock Brown is an award-winning producer, an Assistant Teaching Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at North Carolina State University, a 2021 Rockwood JustFilms Fellow, and a proud member of the Documentary Accountability Working Group (DAWG). She also worked as StoryShift Strategist for Working Films, with which she collaborated in the organization’s deep engagement in the promotion of ethical and accountable documentary storytelling.
