Intersecting Histories: The Story of Her Skin

ohma

Intersecting Histories: The Story of Her Skin

By Nyssa Chow

 

For the women born in the 1920s in Trinidad and Tobago it was often the women who kept the secrets; they held the stories of the family. It was in the company of women where one could remove the veil; it was in that space that one could be weak, and have your shames dignified.
They passed on advice, and strategies, generation to generation, talking in hushed voices over tea; over the wall in the garden; one woman to another.
Each of these wisdoms has a history, but that larger history is rarely told – only the wisdom remains as inheritance for the next generation. This project looks at what these wisdoms reveal about the historical, and sociological, embodied reality of life that made them necessary. The project takes a form of a multimedia, literary nonfiction essay. It is based on interviews with grandmothers, mothers, and granddaughters, within individual families.
 
View project here.

Nyssa is an alum of both Columbia’s MFA Program and OHMA. Her thesis, Intersecting Histories: The Story of Her Skin, won the 2017 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. She was awarded the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, which recognizes a literary work of nonfiction that uses oral history, for Still.Life. Nyssa was also a recipient of the Hollywood Foreign Press Award, the Women in Film and Television Fellowship, the Toms Fellowship, and the Academy of Motion Pictures Foundation Award. She was the recipient of a Sloan Foundation Grant, and in 2014, she won the Zaki Gordon Award for Excellence in Screenwriting. Her nonfiction essay, “How to Become a Monster,” was published in the Spring 2018 issue of Ploughshares.

Nyssa has taught writing for film and theories of meaning creation in narrative at SUNY Purchase and has been working with OHMA students as a Teaching Fellow since 2016. Nyssa will be teaching a year-long sequence of classes on narrative, writing, visual thinking and multimedia storytelling for OHMA.