LEGACY CULTURAL WORK

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For three decades, my cultural work has centered the lived realities of sexual violence in Black communities. Through film, writing, and public scholarship, I have broken long-standing silences, created pathways for healing, and envisioned ways to address and end the widespread epidemic of sexual violence without relying on carceral systems. This work is foundational to who I am. It continues to shape my Dharma teaching, my understanding of liberation, and my commitment to collective wellbeing.

NO! The Rape Documentary

Released in 2006, my groundbreaking feature-length documentary cinematically broke the silence on sexual violence in Black communities. Funded by the Ford Foundation, subtitled in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German, and screened across five continents, NO! continues to support survivors, educators, activists, and communities in building trauma-informed, non-carceral approaches to harm and healing, more than twenty years after its world premiere.

Visit the NO! website

NO! Testimonials

  • "If the Black community in the Americas and in the world would heal itself, it must complete the work this film begins."

    Alice Walker, National Book and Pulitzer Prize–winning Author of The Color Purple and global human rights activist

  • “Thank you, my sister Aishah, for this glorious and most important film [NO!]. It should be shown in every place where there are women—and to men. You are a pioneer of discussing what has been kept quiet in this country, hidden in plain sight in our homes, schools, and churches—even within families that do not want to speak about molestation. Through your activism, you help us face what it truly means to live with what so many have been taught not to name.”

    Sonia Sanchez, Award-winning Poet, Activist, and Scholar
    (Excerpted from public remarks at the 25th anniversary screening of the making of NO! at the FromNO2Love Conference, October 31, 2019.)

  • "It is not an exaggeration to say that Aishah Shahidah Simmons's groundbreaking film NO! The Rape Documentary saved my life. The ceremony of this film, and the brave generosity of the survivors who shared their stories showed me how to love a part of myself I would have otherwise tried to throw away. The blessing of watching this film taught me that my survival is powerful and necessary, a divine imperative to transform the world. I believe that EVERYone who loves anyone, anyone who believes in change, anyone who believes a more loving world is possible should watch and study and share and gather around this crucial film."

    Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ph.D., Author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals and Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

  • "NO! is a necessary message, and how powerful it is to have these women tell it!. Then I thought, what a truly Bodhisattvic activity this is! And then, I realized how long ago Aishah made the film, and how long she worked on it and I just give thanks."

    Jan Willis, Ph.D., Author of Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist and Buddhist--One Woman's Spiritual Journey, and Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra

  • “Aishah has always demanded we take our claims of and to love seriously, aiming for a solidarity that moves us beyond catchy slogans and toward a necessary habit of thinking carefully about and working to genuinely repair the harm we do, even (arguably especially) when we have also contended with systemic and systematic oppression. NO! as a work-in-progress has been doing that for over 25-years, and as a completed film for 20-years. Whether you’re engaging it for the first time or one of many, may we all join Aishah, her powerful collaborators, and every single victim-survivor of rape and sexual assault by screaming, “NO! No more!” to all perpetrators at all times.”

    Heidi R. Lewis, Ph.D., Co-editor of In Audre's Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk, and Author of Make Rappers Rap Again!: Interrogating the Mumble Rap "Crisis”

  • "NO! The Rape Documentary serves to heal generational wounds within the Black community as well as uphold the dignity of all human beings. When we know better, we do better. Thanks, Aishah! A gift to us all."

    Ruth King, Author of Healing Rage: Women Making Inner Peace Possible, and Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out

  • "A visionary, essential, analytic, raw, and internationally acclaimed black feminist text on rape and sexual assault. As much as NO! requires we tell the truth about experiences, it implores us to explicitly call out rape and the rapists in our immediate communities. This is where restorative justice begins."

    Tamura L. Lomax, Ph.D., Author of Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion & Culture, and Freeing Black Girls: A Black Feminist Bible on Racism and Revolutionary Mothering

  • "With the eye of a poet and the rigor of a sociologist, Aishah Shahidah Simmons exposes an ugly reality of sexual violence. This is cinematic activism at its finest, as it is both a call to action and an expertly constructed documentary."

    Gerald Horne, Ph.D., Author of Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois among many titles

  • “Filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons dares to ‘speak truth to power’ with emphatic power that very exclamation NO! is intended to convey.”

    Mark Anthony Neal, Ph.D., Author of New Black Man, and Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive

  • “[NO!] helps raise awareness about sexual assault and violence. Especially useful for counselors working with high-school and college students facing similar pressures and situations.”

    Booklist

Book titled Love With Accountability, edited by Aishah Shahidah Simmons, with a decorative cover featuring a tree with colorful heart-shaped leaves, placed on a surface with additional copies stacked beside it.

love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse

My Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology brings together diasporic Black child sexual abuse survivors and advocates who, through first person transformative storytelling, explore child sexual abuse within Black families and communities. The collection continues to invite intergenerational honesty, accountability, and envisioning a world that ends child sexual abuse without relying on criminal justice systems.

Visit the love WITH accountability website

love WITH accountability Testimonials

  • "With this brave and healing anthology of truth-telling about sexual abuse within Black families, Aishah Shahidah Simmons sets an example for all families. If we could all raise just one generation of children without violence or the threat of violence, who knows what might be possible?"

    Gloria Steinem, Feminist Writer, Social-Political Activist, and Organizer

  • "Aishah Shahidah Simmons is always on time. Her film NO! helped me understand myself as a survivor. Now she offers us Love WITH Accountability, a book that guides readers through a new terrain of healing from childhood sexual abuse. We are not alone, and we don't have to abandon love in order to live in justice. We have each other, and we are claiming our lives and our families, our transformation, and our healing, together. Thank you for this sharp, tender, reshaping of a text."

    adrienne maree brown, Author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, and Loving Corrections (Emergent Strategy Series)

  • "To say that this anthology is long overdue doesn’t even begin to cover it. For decades, and lifetimes, LGBTQIAA survivors of color have been the backbone of the anti-violence movement and frequently their voices have been pushed into the cracks of the mainstream. A fierce offering of complex, powerful, necessary narratives and critique, Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse dreams a new future into being: one where survivors are centered, and where we can dare to believe that accountability and true justice is possible. This is a gift of a book and the ripples of its impact will be with us for decades to come."

    Jennifer Patterson, Editor of Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement, and Authors of The Power of Breathwork: Simple Practices to Promote Wellbeing

  • “Aishah Shahidah Simmons has assembled an insightful group of truth-tellers, survivors and supporters who challenge us to love more deeply and courageously, more protectively and purposefully. Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse is about articulating versions of love and caring with a radically inspired sense of personal and political possibility, of truly anti-racist and anti-sexist child advocacy. This is a book to read closely and to heed with an open and urgent heart.”

    John L. Jackson, Jr., Ph.D., Provost, University of Pennsylvania; Filmmaker and Author

  • "Love WITH Accountability is an honoring of our ancestors who dared to struggle, a gift to our movements fighting to create thriving communities and a guide for future generations to continue this work. Through Simmons’ self-work and community of activists, leaders and scholars, they have produced a collection of writings to expose painful truths, while also providing a roadmap for accountability that is based on love, not more false solutions. This book is for anyone who is willing to do the difficult, yet necessary work to end the global epidemic of child sexual abuse."

    Charlene A. Carruthers, Author of Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

  • "Aishah Shahidah Simmons's Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse is a book that is wonderfully and sadly timeless. Simmons and the courageously skilled authors she's assembled write their bodies, memories and imaginations into calcified cracks and bleeding silences. Each piece opens up the absolute terror and consequence of sexual abuse of children, but somehow the entire book is as interested in looking back as it is at looking forward. Love With Accountability reminds me that willful people make liberation happen and willful people and willful art can obliterate terror."

    Kiese Laymon, Author of Heavy: An American Memoir

  • "Not only have the contributors to this anthology found the bravery to share their survival stories, they have also developed practical and urgent solutions to one of the of most pervasive forms of violence impacting our communities at this time in history. . . . This is a book that should be taught in all classes that address gender, violence, family structure, parenting, race, sexuality, disability and equality and read in organizations that address any of those issues as well. Thank you Aishah [Shahidah] Simmons for once again revealing an urgent paradigm of healing, a new and necessary definition of love."

    Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ph.D., Author of Undrowned: Lessons from Marine Mammals, and Survival Is A Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

  • “Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse is an interweaving of injustices and radical visions for change into a shawl of trauma and healing that cascades around the shoulders of the survivors, advocates, and witnesses. This important collection of writings drapes over the body enveloping the common threads of each story that pushes us to envision and work to create a world where accountability is the norm. Love WITH Accountability, and compassion frees survivors from guilt, shame and blame, places the onus for change on the harm-doers and the bystanders, and transforms the shawl into a cloak of liberation for us all.”

    Quentin Walcott, Co-Executive Director, CONNECT

  • "As a society, we’ve gravitated toward solutions to end sexual violence and child sexual abuse that are more about shortcut and hiding and less about compassion and truth. Through their own suffering, healing, thriving, and deep wisdom, Aishah Shahidah Simmons and her contributors to the Love With Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse anthology offer us a path forward that is real, compassionate, and true. This work fills me with hope!"

    Terri Poore, Policy Director, Raliance (National Alliance to End Sexual Violence)

Salamishah Tillet presents the inaugural Courage Fund Award to Aishah Shahidah Simmons at the Ford Foundation

This excerpt features Salamishah Tillet, Ph.D., co-founder of A Long Walk Home, Inc, and co-founder of The Courage Fund presenting the inaugural Courage Fund Award to Aishah Shahidah Simmons for her long-term Black survivor-centered cultural work, specifically in breaking the silence about sexual violence, providing healing paths for trauma, & advocating for humane responses to inhumane actions (NO! The Rape Documentary and love WITH accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse).

The Courage Fund: Inaugural Awardees Stephanie "Sparkle" Edwards and Aishah Shahidah Simmons in conversation with journalist Charles Blow at the Ford Foundation

The Courage Fund’s inaugural awardees, Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards and Aishah Shahidah Simmons, join award-winning journalist and host Charles Blow to discuss standing up in the face of adversity for the benefit of women and girls everywhere. The Courage Fund is an initiative led by National Book Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates, Apollo Theater executive director Kamilah Forbes, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Salamishah Tillet, Ph.D., and artist Scheherazade Tillet, co-founders of A Long Walk Home, along with activists Ted Bunch and Tony Porter of A Call to Men. It works to empower women and girls to speak out against violence.

Early Shorts: The Lineage of Cultural Work

Silence...Broken (1993)

Written in 1992 in a Toni Cade Bambara scriptwriting workshop at Scribe Video Center, Silence...Broken is my first video — an experimental short about a Black lesbian's refusal to be silent about racism, sexism, and homophobia. Featuring the poetry of award-winning poet Jourdan Keith, this video is dedicated to the memory of Audre Lorde, self-defined Black Lesbian Feminist Mother Warrior Poet.

In My Father's House (1996)

Produced and directed by me and edited by Joan Brannon, In My Father's House is a documentary short about my Black feminist lesbian coming out process, told through self-reflection and candid conversations with my father Michael Simmons, my younger brother Tyree Cinque Simmons (DJ Drama), and my close friend Yvonne Marie Jones. The film documents my coming out journey, which includes my rape on a study abroad program, subsequent pregnancy, and safe and legal abortion in my sophomore year of college.

Why These Projects Live Here

These projects do not live here as artifacts of a former life. They live here because they are the roots of this one.

Silence...Broken, In My Father's House, NO! The Rape Documentary, and love WITH accountability were never separate from the path that led to this Dharma teaching. They were the path, a decades-long practice of turning toward suffering with honesty, bearing witness without flinching, and insisting that healing and transformation are possible without punishment or erasure.

That is still what I do. The form has deepened and widened. The commitment has not changed.

These works are offered here not as a greatest hits collection but as living roots, evidence of a life devoted to liberation in all its forms. They belong alongside the Dharma teaching, not behind it.

The Aishah Shahidah Simmons Papers are held at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, within the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture, and the Archive of Documentary Arts.

The Aishah Shahidah Simmons Papers