Watch Danielle Deadwyler's speech at ELLE's 2024 Women In Hollywood Event.
Category
✨
PeopleTranscript
00:00Thank you, Al. Thank you, Nina Garcia. Thank you, Netflix. Thank you, Paradigm. Thank you, Play. Thank you, Shelter.
00:07Thank you to the Washingtons. Thank you to my piano lesson family.
00:12I'm compelled to speak on monuments in this moment.
00:18Those that are historical and artistic, sculpted with the intent of legacy in both directions of its potential,
00:27past and futures, public and private, harrowing and heartening.
00:33I know this country has hidden many monuments, concaved that which was erect and full and with infinite promise.
00:43It, too, has melted down some of the hardware of hatred from public spheres and public squares through resistance.
00:54Hollywood is a monument unto itself, a shifting, complex and complicated and richly public legacy of glamour, intellectual and fleshy ecstasy and ubiquity.
01:10And there is a private one, silent, pulsing.
01:16It is not just giant, stark white block letters.
01:23T.K. Smith, an art historian and curator and a friend of mine, in a short essay titled If You See Me Weep, speaks of his love of a certain type of monument.
01:37And it's one that I, too, am intrigued and halted by.
01:41It's the type that offers us the living, something to help us survive in the present, be it a warning, a lesson or hope.
01:52I was given the moniker The Witness via this humbling honor from Elle.
01:58And it couldn't be more apropos because I am a watcher and a listener who dares not to forget.
02:06Where T.K. says, forgetting is foolish, foolish and seductive.
02:12I do not forget women.
02:14I do not forget trans women.
02:16I do not forget black women.
02:18I do not forget non-binary folks and all of our efforts, our crafting and our labor again and again and again.
02:26I do not forget our quotidian experiences, our love, our art, our sex, our beauty, our danger.
02:38They are more than a hope.
02:40They are a monument to our being.
02:43They are our stories of becoming, of unbecoming.
02:48Monument is not only an object.
02:50It is immaterial.
02:53Story is monument.
02:56And so in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, boy Willie brings seeds.
03:02They are harrowing and heartening, past and future.
03:05And they are incubating in the womb of a truckload of watermelon that he goes to sell to some white folks in 1936 Pittsburgh, right?
03:13Right.
03:15And so these seeds of becoming, they are an impetus to make urgent the monuments of ancestry for he and Bernice.
03:26The watermelon seeds, the watermelon load ignites the living.
03:31It ignites the siblings and the family.
03:33They're in the monument, the piano, which is a warning, a lesson, hope and action.
03:43I pray a boy Willie and his truckload of fruit bring you urgently to a monument.
03:50One that is sculpted in past, present and future.
03:55Sculpted in love.
03:57Thank you all so very much.