Titan Tonya

June 2, 2023June 29, 2023 R.L. Witter

Among those included in a 2016 Huffington Post feature, “21 Couples Who Exemplify The Beauty of Black Love,” think Martin and Coretta, Barack and Michelle, Ossie and Ruby Dee, Denzel and Pauletta, are Spike and Tonya Lewis Lee.

While many of us first became acquainted with Tonya’s iconic filmmaker husband, Spike, during the mid-80s’ savvy and avant-garde Black film renaissance, it’s his stunning wife Tonya, who’s now rippling filmmaking waters. Her groundbreaking works transcend entertainment and disrupt the status quo, and her Sundance Film Festival and Peabody Award-winning documentary Aftershock, detailing the Black maternal morbidity crisis, does just that.

Aftershock powerfully chronicles the shattered lives of two Black men, Omari Maynard and Bruce McIntyre, and their families, as they together traverse the horror of losing the women they loved. Both suffered losing their wives to fatal post-birth conditions. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say Black women are three times more likely to die from maternal complications compared to White women.

At a recent interview with the New York Association of Black Journalists, Lee candidly shared the impetus behind her Black health crisis film’s focus and the rippling effect that happens when a Black woman dies of childbirth complications. “I was just coming off another film I produced,” Lee began, “and there were a couple of articles that came out about what was happening with Black women dying from maternal complications. And I said to myself, ‘people really need to know what’s going on.’ We’re hearingabout statistics, but the statistics are not really human beings, and so I really wanted to humanize the issue of maternal death. I wanted people to understand that families are left behind; that when a woman dies from childbearing complications, there is a real loss to not only her family, but her community.”

She continued, “I wanted to explore what the solutions could be to fix this situation, to talk about it, raise awareness about it, and then figure out how we, as a community, make for better outcomes.”

Lee’s work does more than simply draw attention to a deadly health crisis facing Black women, she does so through an evocative and intentional character-driven narrative that contextualizes the historical lack of value of Black women, their reproductive systems, and their health. The film visibly widens and centers stakeholders who were previously on the periphery: Black men, Congress, constituents, and doulas— revivified and centuries-old midwifery practicioners who can benefit Black women.

The filmmaker, wife, mother, and former attorney says her esteem for and knowledge of great Black men, especially the men who helped raise her, served as inspiration to humanize and chronicle the lives of widowed Omari Maynard and Bruce McIntyre. They are compassionate fathers, human beings, and leaders “who help tell the full story” of this seismic cultural crisis.

Regarding her film’s protagonists, Maynard and McIntyre, Lee says, “When I watch them in the film, I mean, even now I get emotional, because they are beautiful men. You can see the love of the women [Shamony Gibson and Amber Rose Isaac] through these men. I just think they’re phenomenal, because not only did they love these women, but they also love their community. They turn their pain into action so that other people, hopefully, will not go through the same thing.”

Lee added, “It’s great to see, quite frankly, the Black women in Congress who’ve been doing this work and carrying the ball for us. I hold them up and appreciate the work of Lauren Underwood and others in our Congress who are doing the work.”

Tonya Lewis Lee’s impact on film and culture— uniquely alongside the body of work of her famous filmmaking counterpart—is titan, too. She’s the other filmmaker “Lee” whose work is helping to make things “mo’ better.”

Titan Tonya