The Mind of Angela Nevy
What’s on your mind, Angela?
Angela’s thinking of a lot of things, and she’s not afraid of sharing those thoughts either.
“If you have noticed, I am very talkative,” Angela told me.
Being talkative is a double-edged sword. It’s up to the sword’s wielder to determine whether the sword would be used for the benefit of filling empty and awkward silence or be mishandled and eventually make several gaffes along the way.
Unfortunately for Angela, she may have wielded the double-edged sword in a way that previously put her at a dramatic detriment, as Angela realized. “I’m very opinionated too,” Angela said. “So I just say things and people would just be like, ‘Ohhh, Angela said this’ and stuff like that. I need to be like, ‘Oh, I need to shut my mouth.’”
Angela’s opinions sometimes created an uproar among her friends, which led to the typical high school spectacle that usually starts when Person A tells what they don’t like about Person B to Person C. Such petty commotions that were strongly present in her Grade 8 and 9 years taught her one important lesson:
“Do not get into drama because drama is gonna bring you more stress.”
Angela continued with her words of wisdom, “If there’s an issue you have with a friend, tell your friend your issue. Don’t hold it because it’s gonna create bigger problems over some small thing.”
The concept of drama, however, is not foreign to Angela, but it’s not the annoying and juvenile type that has recently plagued the media landscape...I’m looking at you, Riverdale. Rather, she embraces the drama that’s portrayed through the glitzy sets, eccentric choreography and emotional torch songs of theatre. “I love musicals because it’s just magical to watch,” Angela said. “Like, either it’s on-screen or a live performance, there’s something magical that draws me in.”
A self-professed “theatre kid” since her elementary school days at Lochdale Elementary School, Angela acted on her passions for this performing art by taking to the stage and immersing herself as the character she was tasked to play. When she was in Grade 8, she had the honour of playing “a fork, a tree, and a villager'' in Burnaby North Secondary School’s production of Beauty and The Beast. The size of her role, however, is not her concern. It didn’t matter whether she was a fork in a Disney musical adaptation or as the lead of the school’s iteration of the Broadway hit Hairspray (which sadly had to be cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic). What mattered to Angela was the idea of experiencing the thrill of being on an acting platform.
It’s unfortunate that the dog didn’t show its face…It’s a travesty!
Her passion for theatre, she discovered, doesn’t always have to be embodied through acting. It would actually be better to assume that Angela’s passions are best expressed through the creative process of conjuring up stories for the stage. During our hour-long conversation outside our Creative Writing class, she was generous enough to share glimpses of her concepts that were either brewing in her mind or shelved inside her phone. One of those ideas was about a court case that pitted God and the LGBTQIA+ community against each other, which was inspired by the anger she felt when she watched the ever-so-present disease called homophobia in the Netflix version of The Prom.
It was unclear to me whether the court case idea would flourish in dramatic acting or was destined to be a comedic commentary on religion and the LGBTQIA+ community. All I could draw from it, along with the other concepts Angela thought, was that she did not (and will not) shy away from treacherous, sensitive topics.
One idea she had was about violent gangs in the suburbs. The protagonist’s brother gets involved in a seedy group and gets killed by gun violence, which becomes the character’s impetus to fight for gun reform. Another idea was based on the Kindertransport rescue operation that shipped Jewish children from Central and Eastern Europe to the United Kingdom months before the outbreak of the Second World War. The story revolved around a little Jewish girl who is adjusting to her new life with her adopted family in London.
Angela is hesitant, however, to pursue the two latter ideas she mentioned to me. The idea of researching how gun violence correlates to gang activity, or reading through the history of the Jews during the interwar period, or understanding the perspectives of those she is writing about would be daunting and difficult for her. Angela would be the first to say that, I’m sure.
The main stopgap for her though is the feeling of being undeserving to write about lives she has never experienced. “This is a story for them,” she said when contemplating whether she should write the story of the Jewish girl, “and I would really love to interview someone who’s gone through that instead of just being like ‘I’m gonna write a story because I think it’s cool!’ I find that so insensitive.” To her, that specific story is “for those kids who went on this [train] and never saw their parents again.”
Although Angela has no fear of crossing into unmarked territory, she may find a bit of solace when she explicates themes she can relate to. One of her more personal ideas is loosely based on her struggles with her mental health. She “kind of knew that something was going on” with herself mentally, but she questioned what she was dealing with. “At one point in time, I thought that I had ADHD and bipolar disorder,” she guessed at first, “and I was like, ‘Hmmm, we should get that checked.’” Her assumptions were wrong. Angela discovered that she had depression and anxiety, which she lightly joked with as “not anything better.”
To make sense of her predicament, Angela sought guidance and learning from therapy, becoming the starting post of getting and feeling better. “I feel like a therapist kind of takes what you tell them and breaks it down and [tries] to ask questions on how you could solve your issues.”
In her path towards true reform of her mental health, Angela was able to appreciate the value of asking for help. It’s one thing to help someone, which is something society advertises as one of the best actions one can take. With such an expectation, most of us want to be the lifeguards in the pool called life. Being the lifeguards makes us look strong and feel good about ourselves.
The emphasis of lending a hand, in turn, deflates the importance of crying for salvation on the occasion that you’re drowning. “If you’re struggling sis, get help,” Angela said. “If someone’s offering you help, take it. It doesn’t make you dependent on someone. Independent people also need help. You can’t just be this hardcore independent person and struggle all the time.”
Obstacles in mental health are not things someone can conquer easily, becoming imprinted into one’s identity and life instead. For some, the obstacles they have to overcome will leave irremovable scars on them. Angela may or may not be able to overcome them, and that’s for her to think about. But what she has excelled at doing in terms of her mental health is exploring the emotions that go along with the suffering. Of course, her medium of preference would be theatre and writing.
Angela pitched me one of her story ideas, which is loosely based on her depression. She was fascinated with the fact that people still have a few minutes of brain activity after death, and she wanted to use those few minutes as the backdrop for a story about a person who committed suicide reliving her memories during those few minutes of brain activity. “There’s this girl who [wakes] up in a white room, and she doesn’t know where she is. [The place] is like a labyrinth and she’s walking through this white maze.”
She wants the story to be about how people who are suicidal try to cast a shadow on the good parts of their life and only focus on the trauma they have gone through. “I want all her happy memories on a long, glowing scene, and then her bad memories are just kind of short,” Angela envisioned.
The main feeling that Angela wants to convey through this labyrinth story is ‘confusion’. “I really want to hone in that she doesn’t know why she’s there. She’s confused, and it’s to the end when she sees the memory of [her] killing herself. She’s like, ‘Oh, what have I done? I fucked up.’”
What struck me about Angela's innovative thinking was that she has no problem in bringing awareness to social injustice. Take her idea about a romantic-comedy musical she was working on during Creative Writing class before I yanked her out for the interview. The story is about two teenagers who met and fell in love at a resort.
The concept is quite simple. In fact, it’s an easy formula that Hollywood has churned out before. Angela’s spin on the cliché is what makes her story unique. Her spin? Inclusion. “I love representation,” Angela declared. “If I ever wanted to go to Broadway, I really want roles that are trying to tell stories of the people,” referring to the minority groups who aren’t usually seen on screen.
Other stereotypes Angela wants to see killed are the ones shown on the BET Network, where their line of programming consists of reality shows of hot-shot, gold chain-wearing rappers who have dozens of children then leave them. They’re “dumb,” she remarked. Her mother also criticized the typical idea of a black family portrayed in these shows and movies; the father is dark-skinned, the mother is light-skinned; the group of children tends to include at least one light-skinned, while the rest aren’t. “I understand that they’re telling someone else’s story, but it’s been so overdone to the point where it’s a stereotype.”
This is Angela, who’s hard at work to write the best musical since Hamilton.
Her advocacy and keen insistence for the right type of diversity in theatre and media is a direct response to the caucasian and heterosexual domination in the media she consumed when she was younger. “Growing up, I didn’t read a lot of books where I was represented as a child,” Angela said. “I didn’t read books where there was a black girl with kinky hair and stuff like that. I read mostly of white protagonists.” Even when Hollywood released movies that centred around black people, it was only portrayed through a historical context or in a harsh, painful light.
Although Angela noted that learning such history is important, that pain shouldn’t entirely define blackness. Blackness is not just slavery, Jim Crow, systemic segregation and other racial injustice — although it is one of the main components of it. Blackness is also about a distant, colourful and vibrant culture of African ancestors beautifully merge with the style of American hometowns.
So when Black Panther, a superhero movie that delved into the culture of Africa, came out, Angela could only feel joy. “Watching Blank Panther in a theatre, they had the accents and it was a city that was rich and stuff. And I was so happy to see that because even though it doesn’t represent a certain place in Africa, it represents something of Africa, and a lot of African people felt touched by Black Panther.”
But sometimes, things get too hectic and painful to be ignored, as Angela noted. A few days after our interview, we had a discussion on Instagram about the guilty verdict on the policeman who murdered George Floyd.
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Mikael: I’m going through our interview audio rn, and I’m at the part where we talk about BLM
Mikael: and it makes me wonder how you felt about today’s verdict
Angela: Omg
Angela: I almost cried
Angela: I almost passed out in history
Angela: Bc I was waiting for it to be not guilty
Angela: Forward
Angela: Copy
Angela: Report
Angela: I was waiting to be angry and distraught
Angela: And hearing the guilty verdict made me so happy. Of course, this won’t bring George Floyd back, but it’s a step in holding police officers accountable for any injustices they do towards civilians
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Such sentiments of pain, inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement and the atrocities against the creed she is proudly part of, are expressed clearly in her writing. “I feel like I write the best when I’m actually angry or sad. I write the best because it’s raw emotions, ‘cause it’s not holding back.” She wants to let her readers know that she’s “pissed” when writing about things she was personally hit by. “I was really angry when the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor things happened, and I really wanted to convey how other people felt.”
Angela wanted to write “for the people.” She wanted to show the pain through her writing. Her mantra that motivates her writing comes from the movie Judas and the Black Messiah; in the movie, Chairman of the Illinois Black Panthers Fred Hampton (portrayed by Daniel Kaluuya) utters these famous words.
““I’m going to die for the people. Because I’m going to live for the people. I’m going to live for the people because I love the people.””
Angela was generous enough to share one of the pieces she wrote to, about and “for the people:”
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Anguish of Negroes
Level opinions engulf futility
as George Floyd bellows in vain.
Impersonating potency of Afro Americans
submerged in Adam’s ale,
blue panic ignited,
“I Can’t Breathe”
among the slaves.
Naivety fuels anguish,
faith fails to fortify oneself.
Generational compulsion
engenders nightmarish omens,
repugnance to numen,
Public Enemy encourages pandemonium.
Mongrels and juvenile badges
blemish jaded manus,
binding emancipation.
Negroes jive to angelic instrumentals of amalgamation,
injunctions embrace vengeance,
pumping lineage.
Vain is the bullet
rejuvenating virginal lemures,
gyrating to the babble of manginess.
In memory of those who died due to antagonism
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What Angela is advocating for is a change in the system; a change in the culture; or a change in society. Bottom line: She wants change no matter what. Through her art, life story and visuals, Angela seeks to shift the trajectory of the conversation, regardless of the topic. “Accept change,” she advised.
But even then, change is not easy to embrace. Angela and I had the conversation a few months before the end of our Grade 12 year and ultimately our last year in high school. This article was finished on June 21st, 2021 — barely over a week from when I’ll step onto the stage, take my high school diploma, shake the principal’s hand and step out of the gym to mark the end of a five-year trek. I can’t say that I’m feeling any elation or melancholy feelings. I can’t say that I am feeling anything strong at this time. I do like the shift of focus to college and being able to enjoy myself independently, but I don’t know if that’s an indirect condemnation and disregard of my time at Burnaby North Secondary School.
I suppose Angela is having a different approach, describing her emotions about ending her high school chapter in both melancholic and elated tones mixed together. “Accept change,” Angela told me. “I don’t like change and change is difficult,” she then admitted, “but I was writing in my diary yesterday and I was like, ‘You know what, I’m actually quite excited for graduation.’ It is sad [that high school’s ending] because there are people you won’t probably see again in life and it’s sad you won’t see them. But, you know, something else is coming and something great is coming. And so, instead of being sad, you could be happy.”
“So embrace change.”
Recommended Songs:
Welcome To The 60’s - Original Broadway Cast of Hairspray
A Change Is Gonna Come - Sam Cooke