Mixed Race Studies

Staceyann Chin Worries About Money, and Selling Out

The New York Times
2016-01-14

Laura Collins-Hughes

The day she traded in her little two-door convertible for a crossover S.U.V. — “a mom car,” she calls it — the performance poet Staceyann Chin went home and cried. It wasn’t enough that pregnancy had forever altered her body. Now, as she saw it, motherhood was taking away her sex appeal, too.

“But those are the ways it changes your life,” said Ms. Chin, 43, who has a curly, deep-red mohawk, a Jamaican lilt to her speech and, at her throat, a pair of silver necklaces, one of which is emblazoned with a single word: BadAss.

“And then you meet a whole bunch of other people who think moms are sexy,” she added cheerfully over dinner on Lafayette Street before a performance of her latest solo show, “MotherStruck!,” at the Culture Project. “Very strange, but true. They’re everywhere.”

The play tells the story of Ms. Chin’s determined quest to have a child in the face of considerable obstacles, such as being a cash-strapped, single, lesbian artist-activist with paltry health insurance. (In vitro fertilization? Definitely not included.) When at last she does get pregnant, it’s a victory, but a fragile one. At 14 weeks, she begins to bleed. And bleed…

Read the entire article here.

The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir

Scribner (in imprint of Simon & Schuster)
2009
304 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780743292917
eBook ISBN: 9781439159378

Staceyann Chin

No one knew Staceyann’s mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother’s house in Lottery, Jamaica, on Christmas Day. Staceyann’s mother did not want her, and her father was not present. No one, except her grandmother, thought Staceyann would survive.

It was her grandmother who nurtured and protected and provided for Staceyann and her older brother in the early years. But when the three were separated, Staceyann was thrust, alone, into an unfamiliar and dysfunctional home in Paradise, Jamaica. There, she faced far greater troubles than absent parents. So, armed with a fierce determination and uncommon intelligence, she discovered a way to break out of this harshly unforgiving world.

Staceyann Chin, acclaimed and iconic performance artist, now brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a brave, lyrical, and fiercely candid memoir about growing up in Jamaica. She plumbs tender and unsettling memories as she writes about drifting from one home to the next, coming out as a lesbian, and finding the man she believes to be her father and ultimately her voice. Hers is an unforgettable story told with grace, humor, and courage.