Cheryl Dunye | Greetings from Africa / 1995

the mysterious date

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cheryl Dunye (screenwriter and director) Greetings from Africa / 1995 [8 minutes]

 

Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye’s work has always come out of her vision of the self or is based on individuals in the lesbian and black communities like her.

     Greetings from Africa recounts a time when Dunye, after 4 years of being in a monogamous relationship—what she describes as the wave of serial monogamy of the late 1980s—began seeking to find new forms of companionship. Now free of the intense demands of a closed relationship, she commits herself to the new lesbian wave, beginning to look for, what she describes in her humorous monologue, only women who are “productive, professional, and cute.”

     Soon she simply looks for fellow lesbians who are professional and cute, and finally winnows it down to just girls who are cute. But even the cute women were difficult to find, most of them, she quips, still in the relationships of the 1980s. She grew quite bored and lonely.

      Through a former hook-up she finds herself at a cocktail party for a “friend’s last date” who she met through another “friend’s last date.” The party was made up mostly women who appear to be too “crunchy granola” for her taste. And when they all begin to remove their shirts, she is about ready to head out the door until a beautiful woman she calls “L” for Lisa (Nora Breen) walks through the door, who shares her disinterest in going topless. And suddenly they develop a kind of chemistry: “I got turned on and she got sexy.”

     They meet up again, and Dunye begins to find herself drawn to her, as she simultaneously attempts to find out more about her from friends. One friend suggests that she has seen L at the African-American Studies Department office, which makes the woman even a bit more inscrutable since L is white, one of the many of what critics Andrew Wickliffe describes as Dunye’s “subtle disconnects.”

     Others know even less about her, L remaining quite mysterious, becoming even more so when, one day as Cheryl is bathing, her new woman friend joins her, uninvited in the bathtub, after observing that she envies Dunye for not having to wear a bra, implying that Dunye is rather flat chested.

     Dunye’s works are never primarily about sex, so in this case we are not at all titillated by any sexual goings-on. In fact, L becomes even more perplexing when Dunye is invited to her apartment where she observes a photograph of another woman featured on a table who L describes as a former roommate.

    Finally, L invites Dunye to a party of her friends, suggesting that they arrive separately. Dunye arrives much earlier than her new friend, trying to fortify herself for the evening with a few swigs of beer; suddenly she encounters the woman in the photograph (Jacqueline Woodson) and dares to speak to her, telling her that she recognizes her from a photo in L’s living room, wondering if she might tell her more about her former roommate since, she admits to the stranger, she has such a “hard on” for L, but she’s so mysterious.

     “Does she have a girlfriend?”

     “She didn’t tell you that she had a girlfriend?”

     “No. Does she?”

      “Yeah. It’s me.”

      At that very moment L enters, the girlfriend joining others greeting the popular female at the door, Lisa putting her arm around her as she speaks with others.

     With her usual slightly cynical wit, Dunye sums it up, “so that was the end of the whole “L thing.”

     Yet, a short time later Dunye receives a card from L, stating that she tried to get in touch with her, and apologizes for her sudden absence, explaining she has finally been accepted into the Peace Corps—had she even told Dunye, she muses, that she had applied for the Peace Corps?—and she is now living in the Ivory Coast. She signs off that she misses Cheryl.

     So this droll story of love lost ends, with as the title suggests, a puzzling “greeting from Africa” that makes the woman that got away even more ineffable and perhaps duplicitous than before.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).