It's culture!
yogurt, 13 rejections, and play with me
¿What you heard?
“It’s culture!” Siaka exclaims after drumming serouba.
I smile back though that culture isn’t mine.
Léopold Senghor, Senegal’s first president, characterized “le différend entre Négro-Américains et Négro-Africans” as décalage: “a simple shift — in time and in space”.
My encounters in Senegal — the Pop Smoke-inspired Wolof rap, two men nicknamed Tupac, pop-locking choregraphed into sabar, a DJ mixing mbalax with “Dear Mama” — have revealed that shift as something to be celebrated, not undone, proving that Black folk need to know Africa like yogurt needs to know milk.
^Peep the popping my Dakar dance teacher slips into his Simb Gaïndé.
Let’s connect to our origins ‘cause milk smacks, but my nigga…
We’re YOGURT! We got cultures.
What you doin’?!
I sent Gullah Binyah: Aisha Been Watts to 23 festivals.
So far, I have been rejected by 13, accepted by two, and am waiting to hear back from eight others.
A lot of folks use data like this as a scorecard evaluating the success of a film, but I’ve learned that the festival game isn’t even the strongest sport out there, and so festival admissions tallies are actually a skewed metric for an artist’s accomplishment.
I have friends, for example, who were admitted to Sundance and so, now, have a bunch of clout but still don’t have no job.
Meanwhile, Sundance rejected me, but Artists At Work, a non-film program that has zero industry recognition, liked Aisha Been Watts enough to award me 18 months of full-time salary with benefits to make another episode…
So do my 13 rejections really matter?
What you seen??
GABBY’S DOLLHOUSE: THE MOVIE (2025) is an inferior Toy Story 3 (2010) copycat cat film. Yet, by the end, it had the pro-play evangelist in me thundering with righteous approval.
I once summarized character arc as…
The child knows. The adult forgets. The fulfilled adult remembers.
Arc structure posits that we live in our truth (i.e. essence) as children until a wound pushes us towards an artificial self (i.e. identity) as adults.
I hope my best friend abandons her trauma-informed false identity and rediscovers her essence like Vera.
Adrift in an artificial adulthood, she too has forgotten play.
She has neglected recess for romance, leaving me Lotso-ed, crippled and crazed and spouting mad villainies like…
Fuck your husband! Fuck your marriage!
Play with me.