PHOTO CREDIT: ZHEE CHATMON
BRIEF Synopsis:
Aishah Shahidah Simmons brings the confluence of cultural work, activism, and a 2500-year-old practice to ground her courage in living this complicated life. A survivor-healer, Black feminist lesbian award-winning writer-filmmaker, Aishah brings her life lens to work reinforced by a 22-year practice of Vipassana Meditation and trauma-informed, mindfulness meditation teacher certifications. More than one year of cumulative silent retreat practice in the U.S. and India, a daily meditation practice, three decades of therapy, and a cultivated community are foundational to Simmons moving through the trauma and suffering she experienced from childhood and adulthood sexual violence.
Aishah’s cultural productions --the 2006 groundbreaking, Ford Foundation-funded acclaimed feature film, NO! The Rape Documentary and the 2020 Lambda Literary-award winning anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse break silences, offer healing paths for trauma, and provide visions for humanely disrupting the inhumane epidemic of sexual violence. Ahead of its time, NO!’s world premiere at the 2006 Pan African Film Festival occurred 19 months before Title IX was successfully applied to campus sexual assault cases and is one of the contemporary instigators of the modern campus sexual assault movements. Since 1995, Aishah has led over 400 workshops and dialogues in the U.S. and in countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. She has received numerous awards, and held Artist-in-Residence and/or guest faculty appointments at colleges/universities and organizations including the University of Chicago, Temple University, Scripps College, Spelman College, Williams College, the University of Pennsylvania, the Weekly Dharma Gathering Platform, Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Elm Community Insight: An Engaged Meditation Society, Morgan State University, Insight Meditation Community of Western Massachusetts, Sounds True, the Highlander Research and Education Center, the Collegeville Institute and Spirit Rock Meditation Center.
Part of the Journey:
Aishah studied closely with her teacher, the late Toni Cade Bambara at Scribe Video Center in the early 1990s. With her self-defined AfroLez®femcentric pen and camera lens, Aishah wrote, directed and produced her widely acclaimed short videos Silence...Broken ©1993 and In My Father's House ©1996 address race, gender, homophobia, rape, reproductive justice, and misogyny.
Aishah is the producer, director and writer of the internationally acclaimed and award-winning feature length 2006-released film, NO! The Rape Documentary. Twelve years in the making and funded by the Ford Foundation, along with many other funding partners, NO! exposes the taboos that cover-up rape, sexual assault, and failed accountability in African-American communities. The film brings together leading and emerging Black scholars, theologians, artists, activists, men, women, and survivors to break silences and commit themselves to reshaping patriarchal cultures of violence against women and queer communities; and, to look at healing in those communities. NO! amplifies the imperative need for survivor-centered, non-carceral accountability. A precursor to the contemporary campus anti-sexual assault movements, NO! was ahead of its time. Its’ 2006-world premiere at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles, CA occurred 18-months before Title IX was successfully applied to campus sexual assault cases.
“If the Black community in the Americas and in the world would save itself, it must complete the work that [NO!] begins.”
—Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book award-winning, and Human Rights Activist
Since 2006, NO! and its supplemental materials have been used continuously in high schools, colleges and universities, rape crisis centers, battered women's shelters, community centers, correctional facilities, churches, and at conferences and government-sponsored events in the U.S., and countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.
The #LoveWITHAccountability® Project emerged from Aishah’s personal incest healing work. Demanding a conversation with her divorced parents about their lack of response to her being sexually abused as a child, Aishah signed "Love WITH Accountability" in virtually every communiqué to them. In doing so, Aishah emphasized that her deep love for her parents could not shield their lack of accountability for the sexual violence she endured as child. Funded initially by a four-year Just Beginnings Collaborative (JBC) Fellowship (January 2016 through December 2019), #LoveWITHAccountability® examines how the silence around child sexual abuse in the familial institution plays a direct role in creating a sexual violence culture in all other institutions—religious, academic, activist, political, and professional.
The 2020 Lambda Literary Award (Lammy)-winning, Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press, Fall 2019), is an anthology that Aishah organized and edited. It builds on the 2016 #LoveWITHAccountability Forum. The collection of courageous, vulnerable writings totaling more than 40-contributions is a hybrid of most of the revised texts that were originally published in The Feminist Wire, fifteen original essays/poems, and a foreword by award-winning writer, Darnell L. Moore. The transformative writings feature experiences and perspectives by diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors, advocates, and Aishah’s mother, who underscores the detrimental impact of parents/caregivers not believing their children when they disclose their sexual abuse. The contributors explore how we can center survivors’ healing process, and simultaneously address childhood sexual abuse without depending on policing and prisons.
Feminist activist Gloria Steinem says of Love WITH Accountability, "With this brave and healing anthology of truth-telling about sexual abuse within Black families, Aishah Shahidah Simmons sets an example for all families. If we could all raise just one generation of children without violence or the threat of violence, who knows what might be possible?"
You can follow Aishah on Instagram and LinkedIn; and stay up-to-date through her Linker.ee.