Following is the full transcript of actress MaameYaa Boafo’s TEDx Talk: Being the Real Me Without Apology at TEDxAccra conference. This event occurred on April 11, 2015.
MaameYaa Boafo – Actress
Thank you.
So, once upon a time there was a little African girl who traveled the seas. She lived all over the world: she saw the statues; she saw the sculptures; learned different languages and knew all about cultures. But no matter where she would go, how near or far, there was always one thing that remained in her heart: to be a storyteller on stage and on screen; to be an actor. Yes! This was her dream, to entertain and educate. How hard could it be as Joan of Arc, a spy named Kate. Oh, the possibilities! But, little did she know that for this career, she’d have to do a lot of work to overcome her fears.
She’d have to grow a layer of skin so thick that she would not break her heart, and later recognize that she was set apart. “You’re not that tall, and you’re not slim. Now about your hair, and that skin,” were often things that she would hear in subtle ways, year after year.
So what’s this little girl to do? What will she do to make it through? How can she turn frowns into nods? How does one go and beat the odds? For what she’s longed and dreamed to be was seen as an anomaly. Well, clearly this is not a fairy tale. My name is MaameYaa Boafo and I am an actor. Honestly, it hasn’t been that long ago since I started introducing myself as one.
Being an artist from an African upbringing you know how it goes when you approach family to say you want to pursue this. For me, some of the responses I would get were, “Oh, okay. Umm, so what are you really studying in school, though? We hear about the acting, but what is your real degree?” Or I would get, “Oh! MaameYaa! Eh? Naa de! How? Why? Are you trying to tell me that you went to America to study acting, theater?! Oh oh, eh?! Uh, lawyer, doctor. This is hobby hobby!”
So, needless to say, I would then respond with, “Well, I have a degree in journalism and I know French.”
My upbringing, most of my childhood was spent in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We came right after the Civil War and we went to a little American missionary school called Bingham Academy. So I was exposed to American culture for the first time. And I was mesmerized by all these movies that we would see, and our teachers were American, and they had all the stuff, and I was just so enthralled by it. There was one TV channel in Addis, and they would show some American TV shows. So, a different world! I was like, “Wow! What would it be like to be a student at Hillman College? How fun it would be to have ice-cream and sing with your friends like on ‘Kids Inc.’?”
But my favorite thing to do at school was — well except for, you know, studying because I was a hardworking student — I liked the library. And I was introduced to all these books. My favorite was “The Baby-Sitters Club”. I loved “The Baby-Sitter’s Club”, it was like my Bible. I loved it so much… Yes! Okay, you know what I’m talking about. I loved it so much I created a song about all the characters for a book report. I was the only one who wrote a song. I stood there and sang in front of my classmates, I felt so comfortable and I was like, “This is what I want to do!” So I was always excited about class plays that would come up. But I never got any of the parts I desired. Kindergarten, “Gingerbread Man”. I wanted to be the Gingerbread Man. I got the role of Sheep Number 2. “Baaaa,” that was my line. “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat”. I wanted to be Joseph. I didn’t care if it was for a guy or a girl. I was a guy, I played one of the brothers and this was my line: “Now what do we do?”
Fifth grade was “Queen Esther”. Now, it’s a play on a historical, Biblical character, this beautiful queen who saved her people, had God’s favor on her. I got the narrator. I was at the beginning, the end and in the middle to say, “What happens next.” Well, what happened next was this pattern all throughout high school. But I still had this desire in my heart. So much so, even though the odds were against me, but I didn’t have the guts to approach my parents and tell them I wanted to study acting for college. It didn’t even make sense based on my reality.
So, I went to a liberal art school called Hood College. I studied broadcast journalism in French, there was no theater there. But I still had this desire in my heart, I was like, “I will take it upon myself to learn as much as I can.” I’m in the States and I have all these resources where I can watch films that I had heard about, that are now at the library. I went to community theater and watched those plays, I read books, I read plays. There was a Shakespeare company where I volunteered, and they gave me my first professional role. Now, my character came at the end of the play, but I had a whole monologue as the courtesan in “Comedy of Errors”. And I learned so much by watching the professional actors that were on stage and took all in, and I was like, “If I’m going to do postgraduate studies, it has to be acting.”
So, this time I did approach my parents, and they were like, “OK, this is a Master’s degree.
So, you could teach acting, you could be a teacher. OK, as long as you get a degree in it.” Now, it sounds easy, of course there was a lot of back-and-forth and, “Are you sure it is what you want to do?” And my mother had her heart set on me being a reporter on CNN International. So, I found myself in Chicago auditioning for graduate schools in pursue of a Master in Fine Arts and Acting. And I get into zero degree programs. There was one school that accepted me in California but it was not a degree program. But it was somewhere where I knew I could learn something, and start off my journey or continue my journey and get that knowledge. I made a deal with my parents: I was going to go there for one year, while I was there I was going to audition again for graduate schools. This was a program that would travel in different towns, so it would be in San Francisco. And if I did not get in, I would come to Ghana and whatever I’d have learned, I would have found a job here and work here.
So I went to California and I started thinking, “Man, to do those applications again, find auditions again, put myself out and possibly get rejected again, I’m not sure I want to do it.” I went back and forth and I missed the deadline. My parents did not know this. Now, my parents have always been a familiar face in the audience when I was a kid doing school plays and whatnot. When I moved for college, they haven’t been a reality but they happen to be in the audience today, so I want to do a quick shout-out to my parents. And it is also my dad’s birthday.
Now, birthday boy over there once helped a Sudanese refugee family move to California; and in that process one of their five children was left behind; and my dad made it a priority to bring them together, to reunite them. Since then, they have always been so grateful to my family, they are so welcoming to us. You know, don’t take anything for granted is what I have learned just being in a home of a refugee aid worker.
So, I am now in California, I have missed the deadline, I live in LA, this family have offered to drive me to San Francisco — I’m a horrible driver — and they live in San Diego. That commute is up to 10 hours. They were willing to drive me 10 hours to have this walk-in audition on Sunday because I didn’t apply I was like, “I’m going to go, hopefully walk in an audition.” We get there and all of those auditions are scheduled. It happened to be that I overheard someone say that the walk-in auditions were down the street. At this time, it’s late, we still have 10 hours to drive back, they have to go drop me off, then go back to San Diego and get ready for Monday, the following day. So, I prayed I was like, “God please. Just one school, at least I can tell my parents that I tried.”
So, there was one school that has an opening, they just came out of lunch. So I quickly run there and I go in, I do my audition. The auditor looks at me and says, “I remember you from last year, you really want this: you were in Chicago last year, now you are in San Francisco. Now, the reason why I did not pick you was because you were too general. You need to be specific. Do it again.” I was like, “Wow! A second chance within a second chance.” So I do my monologue again and she is saying things while I’m doing my monologue to compel my character even more. I had never experienced this, and my character went to a whole new level that I had never noticed, ever realized. It was so fulfilling. And I was like, “Thank you, God. If I don’t get in at least I know that there is something in there that I can take and bring to Ghana and find a way to make something out of it.”
But a few days later I got a call that I had been accepted to Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts. And then all my insecurities just came right in front of my face. What if the audition was a fluke, after all she was coaching me through the whole thing. And what did I really know about acting? I meet my classmates and they were this talented group of people, who had got their Bachelor’s in Acting, or they had the roles that I never had. Their resumes looked great, mine had sheep N° 2, narrator, a singing pirate in the background and some other things. So I really got insecure. And I really let it get the best of me.
My three years in grad school were the hardest years of my life, because I got in the way of myself. So what I would say to you is Number 1: love yourself, nurture yourself. Even when I was in Switzerland, Kenya and Ethiopia, I was usually in settings where I was one of the few black girls and it was made very apparent to me that I was not like a whole bunch of other people. It affected me. I mean, my parents would affirm me but I was like, “They don’t count, you know, they have to say that.” I took them for granted and I weighed more on what other people thought about me. Don’t do that.
Number 2 is get a support system. Now, mine was my family and I was overseas so it was really difficult for me personally to just… What is the word? To reassure myself when I kept feeling about myself the whole time. So I invested in calling cards, and when the lights would go off and I’d have to use Skype to call their cellphone, I would remember that Skype is not free all the time. And it was a huge investment but it paid off. So, you have to make that investment in yourself. It might cost you but in the long run it would pay off.
So by God’s grace, prayers — I believe in the power of prayer — blood, sweat and tears I graduate and now I have a work permit for one year. Now I feel pressured because I have to make something of myself, get someone sponsor me so I can stay here, and all of that. People have usually told me, “You are so lucky, you live overseas, you have the resources, you parents let you do Arts, you know, life just seems so good overseas.” And what they don’t understand is that homesickness is the disease for me. Finding a job anywhere is hard especially as an actor where 1% is really employed. I was dealing with a whole new set of racism, where people would drop hints about my height, my weight, and all of that. And those were the people who had the power to hire me. I let that get to me and I was thinking, “Maybe I do fall short, maybe they were right about my height.” So I get this job, by God’s grace, that sponsored me. It was not my dream job but I understand it was a dream opportunity to get a visa.
Now, this job entailed me to wake up at 2 a.m., find my way to commute all the way to get to my place at 6 a.m., put this heavy stage equipment in a van, drive to different schools, perform, come back, put all the heavy stuff out, start my commute over again and again, and again, and again. It was emotionally exhausting, physically demanding. But I was like, “You know, I’m doing what I love. This is what I signed up for, and despite the hardships and stuff I am doing my passion: I am educating children about anti-bullying, and I’m loving what I’m doing.” So, you have to make the best of wherever you are. That is my advice, no matter where you are, you have to make the best of it.
Also, nurture your relationships. By nature, I am a shy person and sometimes it was hard for me to approach people in my community, because I always felt that I wasn’t good enough. But you have to push through that. I actually found my acting community on Facebook. When I moved to New York, I didn’t know anyone. I found a group called “Casting Actors Of Color”, based in New York. I started introducing myself to people and I found a casting call that was called “An African City”, which was created by a wonderful person Nicole Amarteifio, who saw shows like “Sex and the City” and whatnot, and was like, “How come there is anything like that for African women?” So she created that. And because of her she employed people, catapulted my career, entertained people, and educated people who thought Africans were just impoverished poor souls.
So, she created this platform for herself and there is a community amongst that. I have also learned that in the creative community you have to create for yourself as well. I just told you about Nicole but there are countless others. There is Nia Verdalos. She was a Greek actress who…. Not much was happening for her so she wrote her story, got some great investors and she created “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, which also garnered her an Academy Award nomination. Gurinder Chadha directed “Bend It Like Beckham”, which is about this Indian girl who is the star of basically a Western film, because that wasn’t out there.
Dr. Oheneba Boachie-Adjei is an amazing spinal surgeon. But on top of that, he has also created and invented tools to help this surgery go quicker and be more efficient. And so there are countless others. Chinedu Echeruo created HopStop, which is such a blessing living in New York. It’s an app that shows you what trains to take and how to get there, and how much time will take you. So if it is not there, you create it. We have all the resources to be able to make that. If the resources aren’t there for the tools, there are resources to put it out there, to ask people what can I do to get to my dream.
So, take advantage of that, and find that community, and be confident with who you are because they will love you for who you are. If you are confident, you will draw people to yourself, and you’ll be helping each other and creating a community where you can do whatever you want. So, fairy tales are great, you know, they sparked my imagination as a kid, they all end happily ever after, but I think that real life is so much better. I mean, do you really want to be put under a spell? To fall asleep for years? Until you wait on someone’s kiss, which could be romantic or disgusting? You know, that is a waste of time, to be asleep, whereas in real life you have all this time. Again all the opportunities, all the resources. There is no excuse anymore. Just ask. Internet is there. Ask around. People know people who know people who could help you in this investment… It is all out there. As Solomon said, “As a man thinks, so he is.” So be that person and completely unapologetically. Thank you.
