Antwone Fisher was rather calm when he spoke about the time he was sexually assaulted. He was in a basement, she was an older woman.

He ran out of the house shirtless, in tears.

Thursday night, as part of Black Solidarity Week, author and film producer Antwone Fisher told his story, which was also made into a Twentieth Century Fox movie, for an audience of students in Maxwell Auditorium.

Black Solidarity Week is supposed to facilitate the discussion of societal problems that blacks have overcome and still face. The week’s previous events were a blood drive, a chill session and a screening of the movie ‘Antwone Fisher’ before he came to speak.

Although Fisher was invited to speak because of Black Solidarity Week, he did not dwell on racial problems that added to his identity. But Fisher mostly told his story, and didn’t explain how society played a role. During the Q&A session, peoples’ questions were not about the big picture. Instead, they focused on specific problems that Fisher faced.

Antwone began to answer questions from the audience. A curious student asked Antwone if he ever gets tired of telling his story to people. Antwone smiled and looked off to the side.

‘If every brick in this building represents a memory, you can’t just take out the bad ones, because the building would just fall down,’ he said. ‘This is my life and this is my story.’

Before Fisher took the stage, Student African-American Society president Coreina White read aloud some background information on Fisher, then proceeded to show an abridged version of the film.

The film shows the intricacies of his life – his father was shot by his crazed girlfriend, leaving his mother a pregnant widow. His mother gave birth to him while imprisoned for murder, and Antwone was passed around to a few foster families, where he experienced the evils of humanity, he said.

A family preacher continually raped his foster sister. She was then impregnated by him and had an unsafe abortion, which prevented her from having children.

After witnessing so much for his age, Fisher’s foster mother kicked him out and he was sent to a reform school in Pennsylvania from the time he was 13 until he graduated high school.

The lights came back on and SAS secretary Nyuma Njie introduced Fisher, who had been secretly sitting in the front row. Fisher rose from his seat and walked to the stage, glancing around the auditorium as he spoke.

He began his lecture by talking about the mystery that surrounded his teenage years.

At the age of 17, social services informed him that he was now an emancipated minor. It was then that he went to live at a men’s shelter in Cleveland. Tired of ducking from pedophiles and working with prostitutes and pimps, Fisher decided to give homelessness a try. He slept in a park outside Carnegie Hall in Cleveland.

‘Being alone was the worst part of it all,’ said Fisher.

With nothing left to lose, Fisher decided to enlist in the Navy. When he was stationed in Pearl Harbor, his anger reached an all-time high. He engaged in fight after fight and held the record for most restrictions. At this time, he implored the guidance of the ship’s psychiatrist.

Talking about his problems to his psychiatrist, Fisher was able to tell his darkest stories.

‘When we finished a session, I could barely look the commander in the eyes,’ he recalled. Commander Williams was the first person to suggest that Fisher look for his past.

Antwone later met his estranged aunt, Annette Elinks, his cousins and his uncle. His uncle took him to meet his mother, who didn’t even recognize him. ‘She was looking at me weirdly, and I realized it’s because she hadn’t seen me since the day I was born,’ he said.

For the past 17 years he has written movies, books and poems and has taught part-time at UCLA Film School.

[email protected]

Published on November 5, 2008 at 12:00 pm