Imagining a Different Future: Family Accountability in Eliaichi Kimaro’s A Lot Like You

When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s moving and complex documentary A Lot Like You at the Seattle International Film Festival in June 2011, one of my first responses to this film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. Having just finished reviewing The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities for Bitch magazine, I was interested in seeing more concrete examples of community accountability, which the authors define as “any strategy to address violence, abuse or harm that creates safety, justice, reparations, and healing without relying on police, prisons, childhood protective services, or any other state systems.” A Lot Like You brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context.

I sought out Eliaichi, a Seattle filmmaker and activist, for an interview and was excited to learn that she also sees her film as capturing the beginning of a family accountability process. The film was originally titled Worlds Apart, and its change to A Lot Like You reflects the journey that Eliaichi embarked upon while creating this documentary about her relationship to her father’s side of the family – the Chagga tribe in Tanzania, who live on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The first cut of the film emphasized the cultural differences in her family, which “spans many different continents and worlds,” but the final version emphasizes Eliaichi’s connection to her Chagga relatives.

After growing up in Tanzania, her father Sadikiel Kimaro earned a scholarship to pursue his PhD in economics in the US where he met his future wife, Young, a student from Korea. While his five siblings remained behind in Tanzania, Sadikiel spent the next forty years or so working for the IMF, while Young worked at the World Bank. They raised Eliaichi and her brother in a suburb of Washington, DC. After her parents retired to Tanzania, Eliaichi and her partner Tom decided to join them with the intention of filming for nine months, partly because Eliaichi felt only a “hazy connection” to her Tanzanian family in spite of having spent every other summer there as a child.

Setting out to portray culture in Tanzania, they interviewed members of Eliaichi’s family and filmed different aspects of Chagga life, but often bumped into cultural disconnect and miscommunication. In the film’s voiceover narration, Eliaichi describes how “everyone around us performed their version of Chagga culture, one they thought that I, as a tourist, wanted to see.” The first cut of the film was focused on Eliaichi’s father’s story, but included interviews with her two aunts who describe, in brutal detail, how their marriage rituals involved violence. Her aunts did not know that Eliaichi was also a survivor of trauma.

When Eliaichi and Tom screened Worlds Apart to a Seattle test audience in September 2009, they thought they were just about done with the film they’d been working on for the past seven years. They focused on perfecting details such as the film’s soundtrack and subtitles, yet Eliaichi describes “feeling nothing” when she watched the screening. A local filmmaker took her aside and told her that she had made a “nice” film, but if she didn’t step towards her aunts’ stories, then she was doing them a disservice and being complicit in the silence that had kept them quiet about their experiences for most of their lives. He suggested that she ask her parents if they knew about how her aunts got married.

The next day, Eliaichi sat down to interview her parents about her aunts’ stories. While her mother did not know anything about these rituals, her father did know and said that those practices are not violence, but something that must be understood within their cultural context. After this exchange, Eliaichi realized that her story could no longer center on her father: “I am Chagga because of him, but my understanding of what it means to be Chagga can get only so far by following his path, and then there’s a fork where his path goes one way, and mine goes the other.” Eliaichi described “getting real” with what it meant to have Chagga women’s history as part of her history. Although she added only one scene to the film (the conversation with her parents), she rewrote the entire narration to center her own experience. Once she became the center for the film, the narrative focused on her connection to Chagga women, and the changed title, A Lot Like You, reflects the new emphasis.

What begins Eliaichi’s journey through her family’s cultural history is her desire to pass on a Chagga cultural inheritance to her daughter. But what deepens the story is her realization that she actually wants to shift the next generation’s stance toward family trauma by bringing it to light. Faced with the daunting task of representing her extended Chagga family, her parents, her own traumatic experiences, and her aunt’s trauma, Eliaichi still manages to avoid reducing Chagga culture to this connecting thread in the film. In fact, one reason this film works as a model for doing accountability work is that Eliaichi contextualizes her personal family story within a social, historical, and political context of African decolonization, transnational relations, race, class, and gender politics. The result is a complex and beautiful film that brings the audience along with Eliaichi to bear witness to some difficult truths.

Eliaichi Kimaro

Interview with Eliaichi Kimaro:

W: One thing I appreciated about your film is that you don’t try to simplify identity: You acknowledge class and culture differences in complicated ways. Can you say a little more about how you reconcile the class differences between your American and Chagga families?

E: Where do you go as a four year old to make sense of that kind of class difference in your family? When I was a child, my cousins were living in mud huts assembled with cow dung and sticks with no running water or electricity. How do you explain that to kids at school who came back from very different summer vacations? How could we exist at the same time? I think back to that conversation we had on the ski lift when my dad told me that the money we spent on ski tickets that day was more than his brothers were going to make all year. As an economist, my dad must have been always making that conversion in his mind.

Having that degree of poverty in my family has been hard and incredibly shameful. Having more privilege has also been shameful. I could never explain my visits to Tanzania to my friends, so I talked about going on safari, something they could relate to. Being pulled aside as a kid by my aunts and uncles who asked for $200 or a car or food was very hard. It’s messy all around. It showed me that when you have such disparities of wealth, it brings out the messiness in all of us. It’s hard to come away from that feeling like you’re on the up and up. The one directive I had with the film was to sit with the messiness of all of it…to just sit with the messiness of race and class, of the migrant experience, and my dad being the lucky one to leave, and what that means to be the beneficiary of that, to try not to whitewash anything.

W: In the film, you ask, “I wonder if there is a cost to us from my parents’ hard won success?” Can you say more about that cost?

E: It’s framed as a question because I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m sure that the economic mobility and access to privilege and lifestyle that we’ve gained does not come without consequences. As challenging and hard as life is at home for everyone, I’m still not convinced that there hasn’t been a cost: a loss of culture. The whole film was born out of that feeling of loss. When my partner and I started thinking about having kids, I knew that this Chagga piece for my kids was going to become even more remote. What did I have to pass on? My partner is Portugese and Irish. My kids are going to have a mixed experience that I can’t even begin to understand. How could my daughter anchor one quarter of her identity in this piece of culture? I was trying to capture it with this film, but it turns out you can’t do that.

W: Your story holds mostly gentle discoveries until your aunts share their stories of violence. How did they come to tell these stories? How do they feel about their stories being told on film?

E. We didn’t have a warm relationship; it wasn’t like this was a natural progression. We never had anything beyond surface conversation. But I was insider enough to have access to my aunts, yet outsider enough not to know any better than to ask questions about how they got married. I approached them with curiosity, and once their stories started coming, it helped that I had been working as a domestic violence counselor for twelve years. I just sat with their stories because I didn’t have the language to counsel them; my Swahili and Kichagga were not good enough. They were not used to being listened to, so what I could offer was not interrupting them or pretending that I didn’t hear them or shutting them down in any way.

I think that sharing their stories was the first step of being able to process their trauma. They got to give voice to trauma that they had been living with their entire lives. My aunt described how God told her that the day would come when she would be asked to tell her story. And I don’t so much believe in a Christian God, but when my aunts talked about how God was with us that day because our conversation was so much bigger than us, I had to agree. I knew when we had that conversation, it was the heart of the film. But it took us six more years to learn how to center that experience.

And it’s still hairy about what it means to give informed consent. My aunts had never seen a film; they knew that I had a camera and would be sharing this with my family and friends back at home. I tried to explain it to them, but if it’s not in your lexicon, it doesn’t mean anything. In some ways that was helpful because they weren’t really cognizant of the camera. My mom came to the world premiere, and I’m sure that after she went back, she talked with them about having that experience. But what does informed consent mean when you don’t know what you’re consenting to? I’m struggling with that.

W: At the festival screening, it was so powerful to hear you tell your own story and your aunts’ stories of sexual violence in a packed movie theater because these stories are not often discussed in public. Thank you for doing that. You really model a process of seeking out marginalized voices in your family and allowing those voices to shift your understanding of family narratives.

E: I wish I set out to make that movie, but I did not. Yet being a survivor, I have always had a sense of inevitability about my own abuse… like if it didn’t happen when I was seven, it would have happened at some point. I don’t know if it’s because I was abused at such a young age, but that feeling of inevitability was embedded in my bones. Once I had a daughter, that feeling freaked me out, and I really needed to deal with it.

W: It makes sense that it wasn’t where you set out to go because it is difficult to turn toward trauma, but you had the courage to change direction. Through the process of making this film, you are passing on a different legacy to your daughter by calling out what is usually hidden and covered up.

E: Yeah, the film ends with that image of my aunt holding Lucy. In the first cut of the film, the image felt sentimental and cloying, but in this version, after you know what my aunts have gone through, it carries a much different emotional weight.

Eliachi's daughter and aunt

W: The second emotional turning point of the film is your conversation with your parents about your aunts’ stories. How did it feel to have that conversation, and how did it shift your relationship to your parents?

E: That was possibly one of the hardest conversations I’ve ever had with my parents. My dad didn’t know at the time that I was a survivor. My own story is in the movie because I needed to say why my aunts’ stories moved me so much. I needed the audience to understand that when I sat down with my parents, my dad didn’t know about the abuse. Because if you think he knows, that is a very different conversation.

I was not prepared for what he said because I’d convinced myself that my dad couldn’t have known. Because if you know that is true about your sisters and how they got married and how your mother possibly got married…if you know that is true for all the women in your life, the chances are likely that that’s how they entered the institution of marriage, where do you have to go as a human being to survive that? How is it even conceivable that he could go on, move forward, and thrive the way he did, holding on to this knowledge without losing himself in whatever he’d have to lose himself in to numb out, whether it’s alcohol or drugs? I was totally floored that not only did he know, but that after living in the US for forty-one years with the wife that he has, with the kids that he has, he would still have a hard time reaching for the fact that what happened to the women in his family was actually a legitimate harm that was violent and traumatic.

In the moment, I shut down, and his words set me reeling. I couldn’t talk; I was very grateful that my mother was there and able to be my voice on film. Because I had never told my dad about my own abuse, I felt limited in what I was able to say without being through the roof emotional about my response. The fact that my mom was able to be so measured and articulate made it possible for me to be there. She was able to hold that space of conflict with my dad in a way that was still loving and maintaining of his dignity and humanity, while calling out the limitations of his point of view. Her response made the conversation tolerable, but it still spun me out; all my trauma came up again, and I just had to retreat to the page, and write it out.

W: It is a jolting moment in the narrative, and I can only imagine how jolting it was for you to realize that your dad does know about your aunt’s abuse, and he’s trying to normalize it. At the same time, I realize that your dad bore the weight of representing his culture in the face of so many Western racist assumptions about how women are treated in Africa.

E: Yeah, his understanding was that I was going to make a film about Chagga culture to celebrate it, and he didn’t understand why I would get hung up on this one aspect of the culture. It must have been hard for him to understand outside the context of my own experience. I was probably the last person with whom my dad wanted to have that conversation, let alone on camera with lights blaring. I’m capturing that moment where he has to explain for the first time how he understands the Chagga practice of marriage. Yet I think we did a good job conveying the beauty and brutality of Chagga culture– what’s good and what’s hard.

I’ve reached a place of spaciousness and compassion for my dad after recognizing what might have been going on for him. What freaked me out during that conversation was that he didn’t look like himself. I think I may have been seeing my dad at the exact age when he first learned about this practice. He wasn’t his best self; he may have been regressing to when he was an eight year old trying to make sense of this reality.

W: I really appreciate how you center the survivors’ stories in your family, but also clearly hold on to love for your dad. It’s a wonderful model for how to start a family accountability process.

What are your future plans with this film?

Because of where we’re at in the world of independent filmmaking and digital media, there’s no limit to what we can do. It’s an exciting time to figure out how to move this into the world. But I was an activist before I was a filmmaker, so I want to partner with non-profits and activist groups who will help us have important conversations about mixed race, gender violence, and restorative justice. I want to show it at conferences and campuses and make it available at schools. I want the film to inspire conversations to go deeper.

There is a collective power of putting this out into the world. Our tagline that the truth has no borders refers to the ripple effect that started with my aunts who summoned me to rise to the occasion eight years ago. In the process of hearing their truth, I was compelled to tell my own truth. We found that once we decided to center the film on my experience, it had a huge effect on everyone who made the film from the composer to the editor. We all came to a deeper understanding of our identities, how we move through the world, and how we impact others. Everyone who sees the film has their own response. If my aunts hadn’t chosen to open up, that never would have happened. There’s something about the film that is bigger than any of us, and it is calling out the truth in all of us. The story demanded of me what my aunts had demanded of me. It compelled me forward. For those whom the film impacts, it’s all about speaking one’s truth.

Chagga women singing traditional work songs