A Lot Like You Poster
By Rahkia Nance
Seattle-based filmmaker Eli Kimaro thought she knew all the ins and outs of her first film. After all, it was her brainchild, conceived and nurtured over a four-year span. But the final product ended up being far different from what she envisioned.
A group of women’s voices longing to be heard found their way into Kimaro’s ear and into her camera.
After months of interviews and research, she has put together “A Lot Like Us.” Part documentary and part genealogy, the film explores the role of female genital mutilation in Chagga culture, the third largest ethnic group in Tanzania.
“Anyone who’s ever gone in search of where they’ve come from is going to be able to connect with the film,” she said. “I hope people come away with it inspired to seek their own truth and dig deeper. This is so much more than I ever set out to do,” she said. “I was thinking this was going to be a home video.”
FINDING HER OWN JOURNEY
Kimaro grew up the daughter of a Tanzanian father and a Korean mother. Born and raised in Bethesda, Md., while Kimaro’s annual trips to her father’s homeland helped merge the gulf between her multicultural heritage, she often felt a disconnect between herself and her Tanzanian relatives.
“They didn’t seem that crazy about me,” Kimaro said of her aunts. “There wasn’t a feeling of warmth. I just gave them a really wide berth when I was younger. It felt bitter and it felt like resentment.”
Her uncles still live on the same coffee farm where they were reared. Her aunts, all married off, remain within walking distance. And after her father retired from the World Bank, he planned to return home to begin a new chapter in his life. And that was the story Kimaro thought she would tell.
“I wanted to look at how dad was readjusting,” she said. “But in the course of my dad’s journey I found my own.”
Chagga culture is not one documented in books. Instead it is found on the tongues of the people who speak the language and in the hands of those who pass down traditions. But that legacy is quickly fading, Kimaro said.
“Chagga language is disappearing,” she said. “Children aren’t allowed to speak Chagga. From the time they start school they speak Swahili, then English. I wanted to capture the family memories and history and folklore so (my daughter) could grow up hearing what Chagga sounds like. That’s half of who I am and a quarter of who she is. I can’t be the end of that line.”
MARRIAGE
In Kimaro’s mind, she would be creating a digital heirloom of sorts for her then unborn daughter. She and her partner would travel to rural Tanzania, video equipment in hand, to document the songs, dancing and language that are quickly fading from tongues. Fully charged from an intro to filmmaking class, Kimaro spent five months between November 2004 and February 2005 interviewing subjects for the film.
It had been three years since Kimaro had last visited Tanzania. Things were different now. She barely recognized the turn indicating where the road bends to lead to her father’s home. Kimaro was no longer the little girl shying away from older relatives. She was a young mother-to-be who had spent 12 years as a rape and domestic violence counselor. Yet that experience could not have prepared her for what she was about to hear from the mouths of her aunts.
“They started telling stories about female genital mutilation and their experiences and how they got married. Those stories were stories I had never heard. I had never heard anyone talk about it and they hadn’t shared these stories with anyone.”
All of the women, Kimaro said, reported getting married as a result of being kidnapped and sexually assaulted.
“That is how they entered into the institution of marriage,” she said. “That was how they launched into the rest of their lives. It was completely nonconsensual, with a man they couldn’t stand. Divorce doesn’t exist.”
More jarring than the women’s stories was the manner in which they were told, Kimaro said, between laughing and joking, but still very matter-of-fact.
“All of the women I interviewed were unbelievably strong women, which makes it hard to understand being subjected,” she said. “I don’t know if they were strong because of it, despite it or a combination. They’re not minimizing it. That’s just their realism of life.”
Her aunts’ stories contradicted Kimaro’s Westernized concept of trauma.
“Our understanding of trauma and the impact of trauma on people is that it can be silencing,” she said. “It can be hard to access those memories and it can be dissociated. These women remembered. They were the holders of the stories of what happened.”
HAVING OUR SAY
Five years later, Kimaro still doesn’t know why she was chosen to tell this particular story. But she doesn’t question her role. Instead, she’s come to cherish it.
“I have had an incredible opportunity to be a steward of Chagga culture,” she said. “That camera has become my mirror. I am seeing more of myself in my family than I ever imagined.”
Presenting Chagga culture in its entirety helps others to understand, Kimaro said.
“You’re learning about the good and the beautiful and the bad and the said. You can’t piece it apart. You have to look at it all, even the secret underbelly of it.”
And that mirror has also become a tool for self-enlightenment that she hopes her children will use one day.
“What I wanted to do is go and make a film that would be bringing Chagga culture back to my kids so they could see and learn more about who they are and where they come from,” Kimaro said. “I’m going to follow this through and see where it takes me.”
Kimaro said she would like to travel with the film and also plans to show it up and coming film festivals.