Healing and Truth-Telling: Aishah Shahidah Simmons papers

Post contributed by Ren Bickel, Technical Services Archivist for the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture

The Rubenstein Library is pleased to announce that the Aishah Shahidah Simmons papers are now open for research. Simmons is a Black feminist lesbian Buddhist practitioner, dharma teacher, and award-winning writer-filmmaker. Through three decades of cultural work, Simmons has created films which address Black lesbian identity, and sexual violence in Black communities, including her feature-length, award-winning NO! The Rape Documentary (2006). National Book and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, says of NO!, “If the Black community in the Americas and in the world would heal itself, it must complete the work this film begins.”

Simmons’s Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse, brings together diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors and advocates who, through first-person transformative storytelling, explore child sexual abuse within Black families and communities. Feminist activist and author 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.”

The daughter of Civil Rights activists and scholars Michael Simmons and Dr. Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, and the sister of Grammy Award-winning DJ and record executive Tyree Cinque Simmons (DJ Drama), Simmons grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is married to Black lesbian trailblazer Sheila Alexander-Reid, founder of Women in the Life. Simmons founded the multi-media company AfroLez ® Productions in 1992 while participating in a scriptwriting workshop at Scribe Video Center taught by her mentor, the late award-winning author and filmmaker Toni Cade Bambara. During the workshop, she wrote Silence…Broken, which she developed into a short film in 1993. The company later produced In My Father’s House (1996), among other films. NO! The Rape Documentary was funded by individual donors, community-based funders, and granting agencies such as the Ford Foundation, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and the Valentine Foundation. The film had its world premiere at the 2006 Pan African Film & Arts Festival in Los Angeles, CA. Simmons’s films have been included in film festivals around the world and have been screened by many educational and activist organizations.

Simmons’s writings have been published in media such as USA Today, The Root, Ms. Magazine, The Feminist Wire, The New York Times, Lion’s Roar, Black Perspectives, and Left of Black, as well as in newspapers in Philadelphia and Chicago, among other cities. She has held artist-in-residence and guest faculty appointments at universities such as Williams College, Temple University, Scripps College, Spelman College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago. Since 1995, she has led over 400 workshops and dialogues in the U.S., Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. She is an Insight Meditation (vipassanā) teacher, including as Resident Teacher at Delaware Valley Insight.

The Aishah Shahidah Simmons papers were acquired as part of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the Archive of Documentary Arts. The collection is comprised of 39 linear feet of materials that document Simmons’s professional career, filmmaking endeavors, and personal life. Researchers will be able to explore Simmons’s writings, correspondence, working files, and an extensive collection of audiovisual materials documenting her life and work. The materials will provide insight into independent filmmaking in the 1990s and 2000s through an intersectional Black feminist lesbian lens and preserve the personal stories of many Black women survivors of sexual violence who courageously chose to speak their truth.

Technical Services Archivist Ren Bickel prepared the collection for research use. Reflecting on Simmons’ papers, she notes, “This collection documents Simmons’s deep commitment to a Black feminist approach to survivor-centered cultural work, especially in her years-long quest to make NO! The Rape Documentary. Researchers will find an array of information about the practical aspects of creating independent documentary films, from securing funding and managing logistics, to writing, filming, and editing. The stories Simmons gathered of Black women survivors’ experiences are powerful and affecting. I’m so excited to see what researchers will discover and how they’ll incorporate the materials into their own writings and projects.”

We are excited to make this singular collection available to students, scholars, and other researchers.

“Placing my papers at Duke marks an important moment in my life and work. As a Black feminist lesbian survivor-healer whose cultural works, writings, and images are survivor-centered and rooted in non-carceral accountability, reaching communities globally, I am grateful that this work will be held with intention across the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the Archive of Documentary Arts, accessible to generations who can learn from this work as ground to stand on and build beyond what I could imagine.” – Aishah Shahidah Simmons

Header image: Portrait of Aishah Shahidah Simmons by Studio TSHAY