melissa shook

About How to Fight: Portrait of Joyce Watson

“How To Fight,” an experimental video documentary using video footage, interviews and black-and-white photographs, explores the outcome of an immigrant’s struggle to provide an entrance to the American dream for her children. The central figure is Joyce Watson, an eighty-six year old woman who still lives alone in the tiny superintendent’s apartment she’s occupied for over forty years in a wealthy neighborhood of Greenwich Village.

Core Ideas that her story embodies are embedded in the difficulties this disadvantaged black woman from Guyana faced when she immigrated to New York City in the 1950’s. 1. The problems she had piecing together jobs to earn enough to support her two children, Roma and Orson. 2. The ways she taught them about the racism they inevitably would face. 3. The faith this single parent had that excellent educations would allow her children access to meaningful jobs and opportunities. 4. The ways in which her children and grandchildren have benefited from Joyce’s determination and 5. How they are trying to help an increasingly frail woman who tries to hide her fears of losing control, losing her independence and having to move.

Joyce is a strong, female protagonist who has used guile and determination to prove that, no matter how hard a person has to scratch, it is possible to make the dream of providing a better life for one’s children happen. Her aspirations and tribulations, told in a melodious Caribbean accent, are those that immigrants as well as poor and middle-class Americans can identify with.

Aesthetic Vision:
“How To Fight” has multi-layered voices – Joyce’s, Roma’s, her daughter Leah’s, Orson’s and Jim’s. Each adds perspectives to the core themes. Also, the connection and conversations between me, an older white woman (age sixty-seven) and mother of an inter-racial daughter, and Joyce, an older, outspoken black woman from a different culture, allows another perspective on aging, class expectations and the subtleties of racism.

This project has been a labor of love, intimacy and determination. Joyce and I have been friends since 1972. I met her because one of the three jobs she held then was babysitting for children after school. Her son, Orson, and my daughter, Krissy, had scholarships to the same private school in Greenwich Village and he took her home with him where I picked her up after work.