something i'm tentatively calling a black history month diary

"seeking mavis beacon," on being a "real" person, DIY and being incog-negro

i was born during black history month, which is always a strange, tumultuous set of days for me. it has nothing to do with other people and everything to do with an added pressure i apply when it comes to celebrating myself and celebrating the people i belong to. i want to keep the practice of doing little, sustainable things. it matters.

sometimes i watch movies.

“seeking mavis beacon” is a documentary film about two DIY detectives who search for the model who was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. the documentary moves through the experience of searching for her now whereabouts via digital archiving. the two black women who teamed up for the search also interview scholars, make artwork and set up a hotline so they can find her.

what i found immersive about the documentary was their relatability to the moment and to research as a creative process. they adorned an empty room with the artifacts they collected from scavenging for evidence and filled up a wall with photos like those red stringed private investigation boards. they decorated with cute little lights, posters, and created a media wall of old televisions stacked on top of each other. they made an altar to the model of whom Mavis Beacon is designed, and filled the room with cozy furniture and a long table to work together with. what it ended up looking like is this beautiful ode to a black girl’s teenage bedroom, one that simulated the memory of learning to type and communing with the spirit of Mavis Beacon.

i personally love a mystery and a relentlessly curious detective. something about these two black girls assuming that role for themselves and filming every moment, including their failures, the literal filmmaking setbacks and standstills, was very sincere. because yeah, if one were to start an ultra-niche passion project during COVID that required speaking to people and digging in peoples’ garages around the united states, one might find difficulty. someone might get COVID! someone might get sad! someone might get in a fight! someone might have actual homework to do that has nothing to do with the project! those are just a few of their conflicts.

not to mention their scientific headquarters was within a bizarre empty, abandoned-looking facility, overpowered by nosy and overbearing white landlords. in some moments of the documentary they are filmed arguing with the building owners about what they are doing and why they are taking up space in the way that they are.

there is something about living in a work space and using the work space as a home base that feels like a full, whole-hearted commitment to the art you are making. it is even more intense when that work space is used for creating a black girl sanctuary and an incubator to process humanity’s relationship to technology.

while watching it starts to feel like they are searching for someone who is insisting on their right to be unfindable. for me, Mavis Beacon’s elusiveness contrasts with cultural conversation topics surrounding black girls and how no one notices when we are missing (#sayhername comes to mind). i don’t mean to say that black girls who go missing are girls who might not want to be found, but that the documentary questions at the beginning seem to be “where is she? what happened to her? what was done to her?” and slowly they shift to “why should she have to talk with us? who are we to find anybody who doesn’t want to be found?”

i reconsider my presence on social media all the time. i take breaks from instagram, i have almost completely removed myself from facebook except for buying furniture, and i’m mostly an observer rather than a conversation starter when it comes to sharing information and being visible to people. part of my reasoning for my lack of participation is because there are enough people speaking on these platforms. i have plenty to say, and i express those things when necessary to my community. to assume a role of speaking out whenever i feel prompted to means a presumption that i have something to say that is different than at least ten other people, and i don’t believe that to be true.

SPOILER ALERT: they don’t find her. well, they do, but she doesn’t speak with them or go on camera.

black people asserting their right to go incog-negro make sense to me. to me that is different than deciding to be a “private person” like the sought-after person in the movie is described. to be anonymous. there is a lot of power in abstention from being in a position of hyper-visibility especially if one was already a part of a massive typing software that used one’s likeness to market to millions of people. and in an age where it has become increasingly ethically murky with uses of peoples’ likeness in AI, we are at a point where we must all set boundaries for ourselves.

it brings me to think about what it means to be real. i want to know what it means to be insistent upon when you are seen, and in what way. do i give myself the right to disappear? there is more than one way to be invisible, so it’s not just like when i stay in my apartment for two days and/or refuse visitors to my dwelling. i want to feel more real, like a person people will miss, or someone worth investigating and never finding.

what feels real to me is being able to own what i watch and consume. it is to write about the things i believe in, like how i think AI is not a “new frontier” (it is dumb) and it is in fact a train we should have stopped (regulated) because it will be something that helps metaphorically push us off a cliff (the planet is burning). it feels authentic to be engaging in going analog, because the internet is not mine. in fact, the internet shifts and morphs at the behest of people who have billions of dollars. there is something about the internet that feels like it can never be taken away, and that’s because of the people on it and how they use it. so, i want to invest in people. i want to own my music and movies, have a network of people i know to contact in case of an emergency, know how to read a physical map, and touch things, make things, build things. i’m laughing as i type this because so much of the writing in my mfa thesis in the last year is how much i love the internet and what it means to me.

last year i bought a DVD player and then movers shattered my TV. i’m back to square one with my entertainment set-up but i have been working on widening my DVD collection to be larger than what i had when i was a kid (our family collection was small, the highlights being a dance documentary called “mad hot ballroom,” “sesame street presents: follow that bird",” “shrek 2,” and the fourth harry potter movie).

i am still going to be tapped into the visual representation of being a black girl. i find it to be important to have conversations about what our impact has been, and how the need for deep research and investigation into ourselves has value. i appreciated “seeking mavis beacon” for that transparency and its messiness because it made me think about my own.