“Real queens fix each other’s crowns”: The interiorities of Black (British) girlhood in Rocks (2019)

ABSTRACT

This article explores and analyses the production and representation of Black (British) girlhoods in Sarah Gavron’s film Rocks (2019), and the effects this has had on Black women and girl actors, film-makers, and audiences. Adopting a critical Black (British) girlhood framework that is rooted in Black feminist theory, it explores how Black girls’ interior worldbuilding in British screen media and beyond can be a source of empowerment and affective memory work for these groups. Centring the voices of Black girls and women, this article locates the interiorities of Black (British) girlhood within practices of resistance and self-definition, the formation and maintenance of girls’ intimate friendships, and their intergenerational solidarities. Methodologically, it analyses the film’s narrative alongside interviews from the actors and creatives, Black women’s written memories of their girlhoods, and essays from young Black girls living in Britain to reveal how Black (British) girlhood is relational, embodied, and emotionally affective.

KEYWORDS:

• Black girlhood
• affect
• adultification
• worldbuilding
• care
• Rocks

Black feminist scholarship that focuses on racialized and gendered representations within film and television tends to focus on Black adult women, their on-screen representations, and their viewing experiences (Bobo 1995; Hobson [2005] 2018; hooks [1992] 2015; Sobande 2020). This scholarship has made critical interventions in the fields of visual culture and media to contribute an intersectional analysis of the media industry in relation to the social, domestic, and cultural experiences of Black women. However, a focus on Black girls and their experiences of and involvement within screen media has received far less critical attention. This is not only due to the systematic marginalization of Black girls and women within the industry, but also because of the conflation between girls and women in Black women’s media collectives and empowering discourse, where the term “girl” often “functions as a means for community building” and an expression of commonality (Jordan-Zachery and Harris 2019, 25).¹

Theorists of Black girlhood have acknowledged that within Black feminist critique there is a lack of analysis and articulations specific to young Black girls (R.N. Brown 2009, 2013; Jacobs 2016). As Ashley L. Smith (2019) writes, “Black girlhoods have not equally been engaged in the self-naming and self-empowerment project of Black feminism, as they are not explicitly included in the overall writing, analyses, and theorizing” (24). Contributing to a growing body of scholarship specifically interested in media representations of Black girls and the ways they use the media as a strategy for self-definition, playfulness, and resistance (Gillam 2017; Phelps-Ward and Laura 2016; Wade 2022), I examine how Black girls’ worldbuilding and care practices are depicted in the film Rocks (2019) and how these are implicated in theories of Black girlhood as well as Black women’s memories of their girlhoods. This article articulates and uses Black (British) girlhood as a feminist epistemology to closely read Rocks and its cultural effects on Black women and girls.

Black feminist scholars have provided the language to begin to theorize Black girlhood as they attend to the ways that gender, race, and sexuality impact Black girls’ experiences of and access to childhood. For instance, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) use of “intersectionality” and Patricia Hill Collin’s ([2000] 2009) “matrix of domination” highlight that oppression is experienced through coexisting aspects of one’s identity, including race, gender, sexuality, and age. These terms are useful to remind us to consider how Black girls experience oppression based upon multiple aspects of their identities in ways that differ from Black women, Black boys, and white girls.

This article’s conceptualization of Black (British) girlhood builds upon Ruth Nicole Brown’s (2009) definition that encompasses “the representations, memories, and lived experiences of being and becoming in a body marked as youthful, Black, and female” (1). Similarly, I do not claim that Black (British) girlhood depends upon “any essential category of identity” such as age or emotional and physical maturity (R.N. Brown 2009, 1). Instead, usage of the term in this article will refer to a period when one becomes and/or is socialized to be a Black girl. Black (British) girlhood, then, is relational; it encompasses how we relate to one another, ourselves, and the world around us, in a way that is informed by our social positions and/or memories of being a Black girl. Scholarly theorizations of Black girlhood in the Anglosphere tend to be centred on Black American experiences, and, to quote Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe ([1985] 2018), “although [the Black American experience] speaks directly to our experience in Britain, it does not speak directly of it” (1). Although there is little scholarship on Black girlhood in Britain, literature and community-led grassroots organizations that address the needs of Black girls are helping to shift and platform this discourse. These include Ebinehita Iyere’s (2022) creative and expressive space for Black girls, Milk Honey Bees, which speaks to the young people who are “split between three worlds” of what it means to be Black, British, and girl (8), and Iyere’s and Sofia Akel’s (2023) subsequent report on Black girls in Lambeth. By way of contributing to these conversations, this article explores what Rocks can teach us specifically about Black girlhood in a British context.

My decision to enclose “British” in brackets signals the fraught relationship between Black girls and women, and notions of Britishness (see Hirsch 2018). While I do not intend to deny Black women’s and girls’ right to claim a British identity should we wish to, I do acknowledge that many Black women and girls have been failed by the nation state, have struggled to find belonging in Britain’s national media industry, and have ultimately refused “British” identity markers altogether (Gayle 2020). However, Britain is the geographical and national environment that contextualizes our experiences of Black girlhood and so “(British)” becomes a spatial condition fundamental to this article’s theoretical framework. Bracketing “British” also gestures to the diasporic relationality of being Black in Britain where our cultural influences and identities might also include and draw from our Caribbean, African, and North American heritages, ancestries, and cultures (J.N. Brown 1998; Gilroy [1987] 2002). Therefore, the use of “(British)” signifies how space, place, nation, citizenship, and belonging determine Black subjectivity. It signals that “black matters are spatial matters” and contextualizes Black girlhood in relation to these geographies, ideologies, and ways of knowing (McKittrick 2006, xiv).

This article analyses Rocks to reveal how Black (British) girlhoods are intimately formed through our relationships with others and with the spaces we occupy. As relationality and affect underpin my theoretical understanding of Black (British) girlhood, I argue that Black girls’ worldbuilding in British screen media can be a source of empowerment, memory work, and healing for Black women and girls. The following section provides an overview of the film and details the analytical approach taken. This is followed by an exploration of how Black (British) girlhood is represented within this film, with a focus on Black girls’ practices of self-definition, interior worldbuilding, and care for one another. It also explores the affect it holds for Black women and girl audiences and creatives which is contextualized by a critical discussion of the British film industry’s treatment of Black girls and women. The article demonstrates that Black (British) girlhood is affective, experiential, and embodied, and, in response to my own embodiment of Black (British) girlhood and in the spirit of Black feminist theorists, I use “us” and “we” to reject the boundaries between researcher and researched (Collins [2000] 2009).

A brief note on Rocks

Co-written by Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson and directed by Sarah Gavron, Rocks tells the story of 15-year-old Shola “Rocks” Omotoso, played by Bukky Bakray, who feels she must look after her younger brother Emmanuel after their mother leaves them one morning due to her undisclosed poor mental health. Over the few days that we/the camera follow/s Rocks around East London, she struggles to care for her brother and attempts to shield him from the reality of their mother’s absence. Simultaneously, she attends school, tries to source extra money, and dodges social workers, all the while relying on the support of her friends. Eventually, the increasing pressure leads her to skip school, steal money from a new friend, and take Emmanuel to stay the night in a small hotel. Rocks is a difficult watch that tells a complex narrative of trauma, loss, and the insurmountable pressure inflicted upon a young girl. However, woven within this story is another which speaks to a Black girl’s place in her community, how her friendships are formed and sustained through care, and her attempts to assert her agency. The film is heavily punctuated with moments of joy, childlike play, and young girls’ creativity. As I shall shortly demonstrate, Rocks exposes the contours of Black girlhood; how it emerges through relationships with other Black girls, adults, and environments, as well as how it is shaped by Rocks’s sense of self.

My decision to focus on Rocks stems from both the critical acclaim it has received and the method of its creative production. The young girls were selected through open casting and had no prior acting training; instead, the girls brought themselves and their experiences onto the set and into the roles (Bakray 2022). As the film was created through collaboration, the girls could contribute to the storytelling, character creation, and narrative design. Rocks offers an example of how Black girls have been able to channel their creativity to resist previous depictions of their girlhood and redefine them on the screen.

This article consists of a critical analysis of the film, which is contextualized by Black feminist theories, and theories of Black girlhoods; it includes discussion of reviews and interviews with the actors, writers, and audience, which demonstrate how affect and feeling are central to the articulation of Black girlhoods. These perspectives also include those of the young essayists featured in Ebinehita Iyere’s (2022) collection Girlhood Unfiltered. Though the words of Black women audiences, writers, and theorists are referred to, the voices of Black girls in Britain are centred in this engagement with the film. As Farah Jasmine Griffin (2016) reminds us, “it is essential that we give voice to the black girls who, for far too long, have been uniquely denied an individual identity” (n.p.). This polyvocal approach addresses the marginalisation of Black girls in Britain, centres their creative practices and intellectual thought, while it also contributes to theoretical scholarship on Black girlhoods which is often centered on Black American girls and their experiences.

Black girl worldbuilding: Sisterhood, skylines, and social media

In an interview with Black Ballad, a UK-based lifestyle platform created for and by Black women, screenwriter Theresa Ikoko expresses the view that Rocks was “almost always meant for black and brown girls” (Ikoko, Bakray, and Ali 2020). Although the production company refers to the story as one that captures “the joy, resilience and spirit of girlhood”, Ikoko, who speaks to an audience of Black women, is specific about her intention to create a story about the girls who are often left out of dominant stories.² Rocks follows a friendship group comprised of girls from various racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. Within this group, the nuanced depictions of Black girlhood reject monolithic cinematic representations of blackness as the girls tend to their cultural differences and explore one another’s heritages and cultural customs. Rocks is a story about girlhood and how it is entangled with race, class, culture, community, family, and friendship. It visualizes how Black (British) girlhoods are created in the liminal space of self-exploration and exploring with others.

Black (British) girlhood is not easily defined; it is spatial, temporal, haptic, and embodied. In other words, it can be located within geographies, memories, feeling, materiality, and the physical bodies of those who have experienced life as a Black girl child in Britain. The cultural nuances and various representations of Black girlhood that are depicted in Rocks take inspiration from the lives of the girl actors, who were encouraged to contribute their perspectives and ideas to the film’s narrative. In an interview with Vice, Bukky Bakray details how this worked:

[The writers] already had the story but they put it in blocks and they pasted it on the walls and we were able to fill in our own anecdotes and stories from childhood. I mean, we were still children at the time, so it was very much what we were living at that moment. (Gavron et al. 2020, n.p.)

Through the collaborative worldbuilding approach, the girls had the opportunity to draw from their personal experience and lived knowledges to help substantiate the story and represent their girlhoods. Although the overarching narrative had already been written, they were able to contribute an embodied experience of their girlhoods and even request that scenes be reshot when, in the words of actress Kosar Ali (2020), it “didn’t feel authentic” (n.p.). The girls gained a degree of creative autonomy as their voices, stories, and perspectives were platformed, enabling them to see themselves on screen in ways that they had not previously (Bakray 2022). To some extent, this creative approach embraces a praxis of Black girlhood theories because it “emphasizes the agency, creativity, and resistance of Black girls”, where self-definition and exploration are central (Jacobs 2016, 228; see also Iyere 2022; Smith 2019). The creative decisions that informed the beginning and end of the film position the girls as authors of their own narrative. These key moments are marked by an empty black screen that is overlaid with the sounds of a group of girls talking, chanting, and laughing together. As the girls excitedly move from one topic to another, their banter is largely indistinguishable as we listen to their many voices which overlap each other with different tempos, pitches, and tones. But for the girls, who are the architects of their own rhetorical worlds, their banter is coherent, performative, and intentional. However, I will return to this discussion to explore some of the limitations of the girls’ agency within the film.

This disjunction between being part of the group and looking at it from the outside is also articulated by actress and screenwriter Michaela Coel (2021) in her personal manifesto, drawn from her MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh TV Festival in 2018, in which she poignantly gives voice to her experiences of misogynoir in the British screen industry. Writing about her life as a Black girl child growing up in Tower Hamlets, East London, not too far from where Rocks was set, she says:

What carried me through those five years [of school] was the abundance of Black girls, White girls, mixed girls, misfits; my friends were all misfits: a huge gang of commercially unattractive, beautiful misfits, who found the mainstream world unattractive. From the outside we were difficult to distinguish, but on the inside known by name, and nature. (36)

Coel shares how beauty and joy were created within the cocoon of her friendships with other girls. Her experience of her Black girlhood was partially formed in this space where young misfit girls commune to make sense of the world. Coel articulates an oppositional insider/outsider dichotomy for her young friendship group, and in the opening scene of Rocks when the girls’ voices overlay one another’s, they too are “difficult to distinguish, but on the inside known by name, and nature” (2021, 36).

These sonic expressions of girlhood, audible through laughter, banter, and gossip, bring life to the film. They inject vibrancy and playfulness into the heartfelt scenes which capture Rocks’s and Emmanuel’s grief, loss, and confusion. Although Rocks is burdened with responsibility and fear, she is still able to feel and express her joy, innocence, and playfulness within the safety of her friendships. The film Rocks maintains this delicate balance of grief and joy throughout and refuses to flatten the teenager’s emotional capacity. Instead of being presented as a passive character to whom things simply happen, Rocks’s agency persists as she carves out her own space to thrive. Banter and laughter are her method to reassert her autonomy. For this Black girl, laughter becomes freeing. In the words of 16-year-old essayist Elisha Amoako (2022):

laughter to me means to be stress-free, it means me being able to express my joy – it is me being able to release any bad thoughts because as I’m laughing these thoughts are pushed away and no longer matter to me anymore. (76)

Similarly, Rocks’s laughter is a form of her resilience and ability to allow herself to experience joy despite her pain.

Our first visual introduction to Rocks is through a phone screen which captures her dancing on a rooftop in East London, the first of many such rooftop scenes. The London city skyline towers behind her as she performs a dance for her anticipated digital audience and friends around her. Her movement and the chorus of her friends cheering energize the video recording. This is a story of a Black girl living in the city, but it begins nested high out of sight upon a roof, a space that she and her friends claim as their own. A marginal site, the rooftops visually represent how the girls collectively navigate and take temporary ownership over urban spaces that were not designed with them in mind, and pose “many challenges to their feelings of safety and comfortability” (Akel and Iyere 2023, 12). For Black girls who have lived in Britain, the material world is structured in “the wake” of colonial empire and slavery (Sharpe 2016), where “British, and more explicitly English national identity, have been worked out on the backs of the systematic material and epistemic erasure of Black women from the British body politic” (Palmer 2020, 508; see also Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe [1985] 2018; Tate 2015; Jarrett-Macauley 1996). It is also structured by the recent closure of youth centres across the city, due to a 44 percent decrease in government funding for youth services between 2011–12 and 2021–22 (Berry 2021, 2). As Akel and Iyere write, “a devastating and extremely urgent reality is that without spaces such as these, young people are forced to turn to wherever it is that they may find a semblance of safety, out of the line of danger” (2023, 14). In this opening scene, the girls practise acts of self-definition and spatial resistance as they demarcate and claim space amongst the marginal geographies of the rooftops, where they have a superior vantage point above the city, and then use their mobile phones to perform their identities.

The phone is a reoccurring motif and visual device throughout the film, used to signal the girls’ creativity, autonomy, and self-definition. In an interview with Dazed, the girl actors were asked to discuss some of the biggest issues facing their generation. Anastasia Dymitrow, who plays Sabina, and Afi Okaidja, who plays Yawa, respond by debunking and demystifying common misconceptions of teenage girls’ experiences with social media. Anastasia says: “Everyone says [the biggest issue facing our generation is] social media, but I think it’s school”, while Afi replies: “The people who say social media are adults. They haven’t even asked us!” (Bakray et al. 2020). In this interview, the girls challenge adult perceptions of social media and assert their knowledge of their identities and community. They “talk back” to an adult-oriented world that in their view operates without consideration of their knowledge, experiences, and desires (hooks 1989).

Similarly, in the film, smartphones are often used to portray Rocks in ways that she would like to be represented. She and her friends are shown recording dance videos and filming themselves as they travel and play across London. As a visual device, the phone camera is at odds with the film camera as it offers viewers an alternative optical lens through which to see Rocks and the group of girls. This lens allows audiences to see her happiness and joy, as well as her carefully crafted image as an aspiring make-up artist and entrepreneur which she platforms on her Instagram account. Through the glimpses of the girls’ phone screens, an expanded portrayal of Rocks’s identity emerges, where she takes authorship of her life and “shows that Black girls can be playful, too, thereby countering limited representations of Black girls and functioning as resistance to early adultification” (Wade 2022, 21). In these digital spaces, the girls play with and imagine their individual and collective identities as part of their practice of self-articulation and worldbuilding. The addition of smartphones as well as the filmed phone camera footage to the film’s script was a creative choice developed by the young actors who wanted to make the narrative more authentic, one that allowed them to self-define (Bakray and Ali 2021). Simultaneously, within the film’s narrative and production, the social media and digital technologies “offer the girls more creative control than media edited by adults” (Wade 2022, 21).

Rocks’s opening scenes introduce viewers to the girls’ self-constructed interior world. Dance, social media, laughter, and banter energize their sisterhood. Black women viewers have reflected on how the film captures their essence of girlhood, and how this has helped us connect with our memories of our Black girlhoods. Tobi Oredein (2020), founder of Black Ballad, wrote the following in her March 2020 “Editor’s Letter”:

Ikoko reminded me at 30, of how our first sisterhoods are formed with our teenage girlfriends through music, laughter and those cheeky winks, smiles and signs across the classroom. She reminded me that in a group of black girls, so many of us often come from different backgrounds and how we have first-hand experiences of different cultures within the black community by going to our friend’s houses to eat each other’s foods, our family weddings and trying on traditional clothes in our friends’ bedrooms. (n.p.)

For many Black women viewers, Rocks’s authenticity is a reminder of the interiority of Black (British) girlhood; where friendships are cultivated and the variety of Black cultures is explored. Black girls being represented on screen in a way that captures their self-defined girlhoods creates a space for Black women, such as Oredein and myself, to connect with our Black girlhoods. In her review, she engages with the film in a reminiscent practice. Oredein’s reflections demonstrate how “Black girlhood becomes a space of healing, a space of fugitivity, or a space of deep reflection in an effort to interlock, reattach, and mould together their past, present, and future lives” (Smith 2019, 37). It demonstrates how Black girlhood is intergenerational and affective, and that film can capture and convey those intimate memories and emotions for its viewers.

Who cares for Black girls?

The question of who cares for Black girls is an urgent one, and one made increasingly more urgent today as our community mourns the tragic loss of 15-year-old Elianne Andam who, while trying to protect her friend from being harassed, was stabbed in the neck on their way to school by a 17-year-old boy. It is urgent because it has been almost five years since 12-year-old refugee Shukri Abdi suspiciously drowned in the River Irwell after over a year of racist bullying at school, despite her mother’s previously ignored reports to the school and police. It is urgent because of the treatment of 15-year-old Child Q who was wrongly accused of carrying cannabis and strip-searched at school without another adult present. It is urgent because countless Black girls across the UK are missing, and recent research has found that Black children are disproportionately more likely to remain missing for over 48 hours and up to one week longer than white children (Missing People 2023). Violent misogynoir, failed systems, and institutional racism all contribute to leaving girls vulnerable. It was having these girls in mind, and the stories of others, that led me to write this article. It is with these girls in mind that I continue to ask: “Who cares for our girls?”

In most of Rocks’s interactions with adults she is routinely failed, policed, discouraged, and disempowered. It begins with her absent parents. Cumulatively, her unnamed father, who, she says, passed away, her mother’s poor mental health which led to her disappearance, the economic pressure of life in London, and her distant grandma who lives in Lagos, Nigeria, all contribute to the conditions that leave Rocks isolated and overly responsible. Rocks’s story gives voice to children who are given adult responsibilities because of social, medical, geographical, and economic circumstances. It explores how, in the absence of adults, children take care of one another. Rachel Rosen (2020) writes that the film “pierces the assumption that children’s care for each other is not worthy of recognition” (n.p.). However, while Rosen encourages us to be attentive to the importance of the girls’ care for one another, she does not consider the role that race and ethnicity plays in Rocks’s access to institutional care.

In lieu of her absent parents, Rocks takes on the mothering role for her brother. Despite people in her immediate community expressing their concern, Rocks decides to conceal the truth for as long as possible, only confiding in her best friend Sumaya, played by Kosar Ali. Upon learning about Rocks’s situation, Sumaya tries to share some of her friend’s responsibilities. In an interview with Vice, Ikoko shares how the narrative arc centred around the girls’ friendship, and support for one another was inspired by the relationship she had with her sister in childhood:

Yes, the initial inspiration for the story of Rocks came from my sister who, I tell all the time, while she doesn’t always agree, gave me my childhood. Girls like her and Rocks and so many other Black and Brown girls, through society and circumstance, are adultised and they often sacrifice their own childhood and softness to put on this hardening armour in order to preserve family, community and childhood in ways that are often not seen by outsiders. (Gavron et al. 2020, n.p.)

Ikoko demonstrates the parallels between Black girls’ experiences across generations. Importantly, she recognizes that the responsibilities that “adultified” girls take on are “often not seen by outsiders” and adults, and instead are shared within intimate relationships between girls who see, care for, and appreciate one another. Ikoko uses her screenwriting and lived Black girl experience to reveal the interior lives of these girls, their challenges, and the specific forms of oppression that they navigate in isolation and together during childhood. She captures their “softness” through their intimate, caring friendships with one another, and although Rocks tries to hide behind her “hardening armour”, Sumaya, who is guided by her love for her friend, sees through this.

Early in the film, the phrase “Real queens fix each other’s crowns” is affixed to the Omotoso’s kitchen wall and this serves as a prompt for the film’s message. The young girls learn to take care of one another because of the failures of the adult world, but also because it is joyful for them, and though this is primarily explored through the friendship between Rocks and Sumaya, it is extended to all the group. However, the film stresses that they are still young and not always entirely sure how to adequately practise care as they fumble around, argue, and learn that this might look different based on their social class, race, and family dynamics. While this leads to arguments and tension arising, it is ultimately their care and love for one another that guides them back to each other.

Ikoko uses the term “adultised” to describe how children are thrust into more adult-like roles (Gavron et al. 2020, n.p.). “Adultification” is also used to describe a form of racial, gendered, and age-oriented bias in cases where Black girls are perceived by adults as similarly adult-like, more knowledgeable about adult topics, more emotionally and intellectually mature, and less in need of protection than their white girl counterparts (Epstein, Blake, and González 2017). Adultification bias speaks to a form of oppression experienced by Black children where their innocence and vulnerability is rejected by adults and institutions who hold power over them (Davis and Marsh 2020). Rocks’s experience of adultification bias reveals the dichotomy between what is and is not seen by outsiders, as well as outsiders’ perceptions of Black girls, and this is primarily revealed through the school scenes. Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe ([1985] 2018) write that the treatment of Black children in the British education systems exposes “the true nature of our relationship with the State” (58; see also Akel and Iyere 2023; Mirza [1997] 2017). In Rocks, the school scenes expose the reality of how microaggressions, lack of institutional support, and adultification bias make school unsafe for Black girls (Brinkhurst-Cuff 2023; During 2020).

A few days into Rocks’s story, she answers a phone call during class as she is desperate to hear about her mother’s whereabouts. The teacher immediately perceives this as disruptive, deviant behaviour, and punishes her by expelling her from the classroom and isolating her from her peers. This scene mirrors reality as Agenda Alliance (2021) has reported that discrimination towards Black girls’ disproportionality manifests as both punitive and a failure to centre their welfare. Furthermore, the tense dynamic between student and teacher was not only present in the script but also during the film’s production, as Ikoko noticed that in the schools there “were some teachers who were very heavy handed with the Black and Brown girls” (Gavron et al. 2020, n.p). Fifteen-year-old Faith Robinson-Cox’s (2022) essay, “Not Your Loud Black Girl”, speaks to the ways that negative perceptions of Black girls mean that their vulnerability and innocence are overlooked:

At first glance you would think I’m your average, loud, annoying, arrogant, Black girl, but if you take the time to look deeper, which barely anyone does, you would see I’m just a teenager. A hurt one. A confused one. Struggling to handle all my emotions. (43)

Robinson-Cox insists that those who take time to consider Black girls will have a deeper understanding of their vulnerabilities and struggles. The film takes us beyond this “first glance” at Black girls as we see a nuanced portrayal of Rocks’s life as she attempts to handle all her emotions. As the film “take[s] the time to look deeper” into Rocks’s life, it is not concerned with representing binary depictions such as “good” or “bad” Black girl, with right or wrong actions; instead, it offers a fuller picture of her life, her identity, and a challenge to misconceptions about Black girls.

Against this background the film explores how girls take care of each other and also how they utilize interracial solidarities in school environments to challenge microaggressions. In another scene, the girls are in a class focused on career paths when a white woman teacher walks over to the group and asks Khadijah, a South Asian Muslim girl, what career she would like. The following dialogue ensues:

Teacher:

Khadijah, tell me, what do you want to do?

Khadijah:

I wanna be a lawyer.

Teacher:

A lawyer!? *Rocks glances over and listens attentively*

Khadijah:

Yeah.

Teacher:

And you know you need to have very high levels to be a lawyer?

Rocks:

She does have high levels though.

Teacher:

*points to Khadijah’s worksheet* Well, your levels aren’t as high as they might need to be to be a lawyer. *Rocks looks over at the worksheet* It’s always a good idea to have a back-up plan, a plan B. *Khadijah looks down, sullen*

Rocks:

*leans towards Khadijah* You don’t need no back up. (Gavron 2019, 0:07:56 to 0:08:16)

During the exchange, Khadijah becomes visibly deflated and Rocks interjects to extend support and reassurance to her friend. The scene captures how racial bias and low expectations impact racially marginalized teenagers’ access to support and verbal encouragement in school (Demie and McLean 2017; Mirza [1997] 2017). It also exposes similar experiences of racist stereotyping and discrimination that Black and Asian girls share in British schools (Agenda Alliance 2021). Through an unspoken but shared distrust of the education system, the girls rely on one another for recognition and reinforcement.

Shortly afterwards, Ms. Booker, a Black woman teacher, walks over to the group and mentors, guides, and challenges Rocks, who aspires to “make a mil before [she’s] thirty” through her make-up business (Gavron 2019, 0:08:24). Although Rocks had not completed the task correctly, Ms. Booker helps her articulate her ideas before she compares her to singer and entrepreneur Rihanna. Afterwards, Ms. Booker tells Rocks that she is impressed with her make-up skills. In the following scene in the school’s courtyard, Rocks applies her friend’s make-up. In the contrasting dialogues with teachers, we see how Black and Brown girls are offered different degrees of support by teachers in the education system as it prepares them for adult life. Black women in Britain have spoken out about how the environment of, and ideologies circulated within, publicly-funded state schools have negatively impacted their well-being as girls, because of a lack of support and educational care, and they advocate that more attention be paid to young Black girls’ experiences in school (Akpan 2019). Bryan, Dadzie, and Scafe contextualize this by positioning Black women’s educational resistance as political work: for Black women,

challenging the education system has been part of a wider struggle to defend the rights and interests of the Black community as a whole. For this reason, education struggles have been central to our political development. Caring for children has always been seen as ‘women’s work’, and since we bear and rear the children, overseeing the institutionalised care provided by the schools – an extension of child-rearing – has also been seen as our responsibility. ([1985] 2018, 59)

Ms. Booker comes to symbolize this supportive and nurturing relationship between Black women and girls in education. She guides and cares for the girls in ways that are strikingly different to other teachers’ interactions with them. The film conveys that it takes a Black woman to see and advocate for Black girls, and this scene rings true to my similar experiences of navigating the education system throughout my childhood and teenage years.

Later, Ms. Booker returns to lead the girls’ dance class and she calls Rocks to the front and encourages her to take the lead. As Rocks’s body moves, a smile slowly emerges as she frees herself from her stress and pain. In “Freedom to Dance”, 15-year-old essayist Deanna Atkinson-Lloyd (2022) writes about how dancing allows her to release her feelings and connect to her community of friends and family. She writes: “The way a Black girl moves is always a problem”, but “when I dance, I feel free, like a bee, as if a heavyweight has just been lifted off me. I just feel chirpy, it makes me express myself in a way I can’t verbally” (82). As Atkinson-Lloyd notes, dance is a creative practice that allows Black girls to self-define and release complex emotions (see also Cox 2015). Unaware of Rocks’s circumstances, and without needing to ask, Ms. Booker creates a safe environment for her to express joy and be uplifted by her peers. She then joins in the dance, and the girls cheer and chant her name harmonically. By letting loose with her students, Ms. Booker creates a space within the punitive education system that allows the girls to be girls and creatively thrive in their bodies. However, this capacity for freedom in school is dependent on the presence of Ms. Booker and the gendered labour of her singular Black woman body.

Black girls’ storytelling in British film

In an interview with Black Ballad, Ikoko shares that “as much as I wrote the film, the story belongs to Kosar as much as it belongs to me. I think sharing ownership and sharing that responsibility – it enriched the film” (Ikoko, Bakray, and Ali 2020, n.p.). Although the girls’ contributions helped flesh out the authenticity of their world in Rocks, such a statement invites the questions: to what extent did the girls influence the films’ overarching narrative?

While the immersive approach through workshops at schools across London allowed forms of collaboration and training for the girls, it also invites us to consider the observations about the 1300 young girls who were seen in casting. In an interview with Sky, Bakray described that this made her feel as if the girls were “lab rats”, for want of a better phrase (Bakray and Ali 2021, n.p). Though said in jest, this statement illuminates the power dynamics that occurred in the co-creation of the film. While the girls had a degree of autonomy, they did not have full agency over the presentation of the story, and this complicates some of my previous celebratory arguments about how the film privileges Black girls’ agency, resilience, and creativity.

Nevertheless, despite the small number of girls selected for the film, they gained access to the creative and cultural industries and to careers that they might not have felt were attainable otherwise. In addition, it is undeniable that their participation in creative storytelling provided opportunities to deeply engage in critical thought about their identities. For example, Bakray recalled how the mundanity of the film was confusing for her at first, but then became empowering: “While shooting the film I didn’t understand the significance of what we were making because the story seemed so mundane to me. I remember thinking who’s actually going to watch this? It seemed so ordinary.” She continues: “stepping into Rocks’s story, which had such likeness to my own world, felt insignificant. Part of me thought its story didn’t matter. Now I see it does” (Bakray 2022, n.p.; original emphasis). Her reflections demonstrate that it matters whose stories are told, as this influences the way that young Black girls ascribe value and meaning to their own lives. Working on the film allowed Bakray to develop a critical “oppositional gaze”, where Black girls can both see themselves and challenge how they are seen (hooks [1992] 2015; Jacobs 2016).

This article has focused solely on the role of Black women and girl film-makers and actors and has intentionally avoided addressing the role of white women in the creation of the film. The reason for this has been to focus on Black (British) girlhood, and centre and celebrate those whose voices often remain unheard. However, if we take seriously the role of white women in the film’s production, it reveals that leadership roles in the UK film industry, including those marketed as diverse films, are often reserved for white people (Nwonka 2020). Without diminishing the way that this film made Black women and girl audiences and creatives feel, it is important to challenge the lack of Black women leaders in the UK film industry and the systemic erasure that maintains this (Cobb, Williams, and Wreyford 2019). Although Bakray has been able to maintain a career in the industry, hundreds of girls have not had access to the same opportunities, and without more Black women and girls being supported in the industry, there is little capacity for long-term sustainability.

Conclusion: Centring Black British girlhood

This article has engaged with Black feminist theories and theories of Black girlhood to explore how Black girls’ worldbuilding unfolds in Rocks and the effects this has on Black girls and women creatives and audiences. I argued that by centring Black (British) girlhood we can better platform the expertise of girls, learn from their experiences, and take seriously their contributions to creative cultures. This reveals how Black girls practise resistance in the forms of community care, interracial solidarity, and agency against narratives of adultification, which are critical conversations in the current context of Black girls going missing and experiencing misogynoir and abuse in schools and beyond.

It was important to acknowledge, albeit briefly, the current state of the UK film industry and its diversity policies as these initiate discussions of why so few Black girls and women are given support in British screen media, the implications this has for Black women and girl audiences, and the conditions upon which Black women and girls’ creativity is funded and supported. To reiterate, for Black girls to see the creative sector as an attainable career, then they need to be able to see themselves and their stories within it.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keisha Bruce

Keisha Bruce was a postdoctoral research fellow at University College London and is now an independent, unaffiliated researcher. Their research explores the intersections of race, gender, and the media, with a focus on intimacy and affect. Their work has been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly and Feminist Media Studies.

Notes

1. In Black women collectives, “girl” is often used colloquially to symbolize sisterhood and community. For examples, see the celebratory hashtag #BlackGirlMagic, the networking organization “Black Girls in Media”, and Adegoke and Uviebinené (2020) .

2. The synopsis of the film is available on Altitude film’s website: http://www.altitudefilment.com/film/sales/61/rocks.