Empowering people with black history
A few years ago, Melodye Micere Van Putten would never have imagined having a film made about her life.
Her Ashay Rites of Passage curriculum had been cancelled — just five years after she began empowering Dellwood students with black history.
She was devastated.
And then Kristin Alexander came calling.
Healing History, her documentary about Mrs Van Putten, will debut at the Bermuda International Film Festival tomorrow.
The American filmmaker hopes it will inspire the reimplementation of the programme that ended in 2009.
The film follows Mrs Van Putten as she teaches adults in Bermuda, meets with students in Philadelphia, and writes and performs poetry.
“That was my life’s work,” said Mrs Van Putten. “I felt a spiritual calling to do this. When you empower a people who have been historically exploited, that is threatening to the status quo.”
Students in Ashay repeated the mantra “I am valuable and I have genius”, and Mrs Van Putten believes this frightened some people in power. Healing History has also been picked up by festivals overseas including the Pan-African Film Festival in Cannes, France and the Africa World Documentary Film Festival in St Louis, Missouri.
Mrs Alexander is based in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Her husband, Ken, is a consultant for Arch Insurance (Bermuda). She’d made an earlier film about Bermuda, Trusting Rain.
She met Mrs Van Putten’s husband, Carvel, while visiting the Fairmont Hamilton Princess where he works as a doorman. He told her about his wife and her work.
“I found Melodye very interesting,” she said. “I think the work she is doing is very important work and I felt it needed to be shown in a film.”
Mrs Van Putten was initially a bit reluctant to be involved.
“I looked at the filmmaker’s work and I didn’t see any other people that looked like me,” she said.
In the end, she found it to be a wonderful experience.
“Kristin brought all her equipment to Bermuda and we filmed here,” she said. “She followed me around. Then we went to Philadelphia and she filmed me with a group of seven and eight-year-olds who are using my curriculum in their social studies programme.”
Mrs Van Putten said the film really captures what she does.
“She did it in a way that is powerful and purposeful,” she said. “When I found out it was showing next month at Cannes, I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I was so excited.”
Mrs Alexander, who is white, said she wasn’t taught very much black history in school.
“We started at slavery, but there is so much more to African history,” she said. “I have done a lot of portraits about people in the past and it made sense to do one about her.
“I think her programme should be reintroduced in Bermuda and should be taught throughout the United States. It is an education we all should have had.”
Mrs Van Putten was born in Philadelphia and grew up during the civil rights era.
“I was there when history was being made,” she said. “When I was a child Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were still alive. When James Brown said: ‘Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud’ it changed us. “We were no longer Negro, we were black.” She has a master’s degree in African American studies and is certified in multicultural training and education from Temple University’s School of Social Work in Philadelphia.
Thirty years ago, she started teaching black history workshops in Philadelphia for children to inspire and empower them. In 1989, Time magazine named her a rising star. She was also recognised by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
She came to Bermuda in 2000 to work as the social studies education officer for the Ministry of Education and met her husband. A black history workshop she started evolved into her Ashay Rites of Passage programme.
Today many of the Ashay graduates are young adults.
According to Mrs Van Putten, they often come up to her and ask why the programme isn’t still taught. Some of them have children of their own and want their children to learn what they did.
Healing History will be screen at the Liberty Theatre at 6pm. Tickets are $15.
For more information see www.biff.bm.
It’s not just filmmakers who are after Melodye Van Putten’s story.
Berkeley Institute drama teacher Shalane Dill has written a play based on her work, Everything We Should Be. It’s showing at the senior school on Saturday night.
According to Miss Dill, the students are enthusiastic about their latest production.
“Rehearsal for Everything We Should Be was cancelled one day because I had an appointment, and The Berkeley Players still came and rehearsed,” she said. “They don’t have to be at every rehearsal and yet they still come to every one.”
Miss Dill wrote Everything We Should Be based on Mrs Van Putten’s poetry. She’s written five books including Obama Time and Soul Poems: Life as Fertile Ground.
The story takes place in the cultural studies classroom of a high school.
“It is completely fictional,” said Miss Dill. “It is about seven students from different backgrounds. One teacher is trying to bring them all together.”
She said Mrs Van Putten’s words are deeply inspiring. One of her favourite lines in the play is: “Some of the students seem so angry but what are they really fighting for? If we are going to fight lets fight together to make things better.”
Miss Dill, 30, was inspired to write the play after signing up for Mrs Van Putten’s Ashay University programme, which teaches adults black history and culture and seeks to empower them with knowledge.
“It was wonderful,” said Miss Dill. “Really for me it was the confirmation of things I was taught by my parents. It confirmed all the things I wasn’t taught in school. There is so much we need to know to fill in the gaps.”
Mrs Van Putten recently visited the students before rehearsal and meditated with them. She also gave them a poster showing an African history timeline. “They were so excited to get the poster,” said Miss Dill. “These days my students are all walking with their shoulders back.”
Everything We Should Be will be held in the school cafetorium. There is a patron reception at 7pm and showtime is at 8pm.
Tickets are $15, or $30 for patrons and available from the school office. Part of the proceeds will go to Ashay University’s educational programmes.
