Pariah Celebrates Black Poets and Poetry

In her acclaimed first feature, Pariah, writer-director Dee Rees showcases poetry in both the film’s style and content. Alike (Adepero Oduye), a Black, lesbian teen poet growing up in Brooklyn, juggles her multiple identities as she tries to define who she is. Film Comment writes, “She adopts different garb throughout the film, seeking the style and sounds that will represent her with the same authenticity as her poetry.”

In her original screenplay, Rees did not imagine Alike as a poet. Her producer and editors, however, kept suggesting that Alike embodies a poet’s imagination. Rees tells Women and Hollywood, “I said no because I didn’t want to be the typical first-time filmmaker where the protagonist is an artist and does the poetry thing and I didn’t want it to be a cliché.” Sitting in a Starbucks one afternoon, however, Rees both changed her protagonist into a poet and wrote the poem, “Broken,” which sums up Alike’s struggle. The British Film Institute writes, “Alike’s poetry, narrated by Oduye over the film’s eclectic soundtrack, allows us a doorway into her mind.” Rees tells Women and Hollywood, “This kind of poem basically lets you know that she is going to be okay and conveys her sense of alrightness with the world.”

From the Audre Lorde quote that begins the film to Alike working with her teacher, poetry is essential to the story. But poetry is also part of the film’s form. In “Pariah: Song of the Self,” Cassie da Costa writes, “Her films insist that a narrative isn’t so much what happened as how it happened to us. In Pariah, a poet unravels her story as it unravels her.” The Carletonian writes, “Her poetry begins as the only way in which she can express herself, but by the film’s end, she uncovers a sense of independence of a more active kind.” In her poem “Broken,” Alike writes, “Breaking is freeing / Broken is freedom / I am not broken, I am free.”

Watch Pariah on Apple TV or Amazon now!