‘Solace’ Courageously Examines A Quiet Black Girl’s Eating Disorder

Solace film poster.

Tchaiko Omawale’s candid feature-length debut Solace strikes home hard. It focuses on Sole, a seventeen-year-old Black girl, who uses food and art as a coping mechanism after her father’s death. Instead of staying in New York City with a teacher who truly cares about her well-being, Sole is sent to live with her judgmental maternal grandmother Irene in Los Angeles. 

Sole (Hope Olaide Wilson) in her new bedroom in Los Angeles. 

Solace resonates with a personal history that still carries through my daily life. Sole reminds me of many weekends spent in my bedroom not eating in hopes of maintaining an extremely underweight frame. This mindset was a mixture of admiring the frail girls on the WB network and the hope to not have the same body types as my maternal side of the family. Still, I binged on snacks primarily candy like a high junky craving munchies whilst dreaming of flattened breasts and flattened stomach. Several scenes have Sole’s fingers blindly reaching inside snack bags and robotically stuffing chips, crackers, etc. into her mouth, eating and eating out of pain, out of boredom no matter the hour. Despite this constant snacking, Sole is obsessed with her figure and the figure of her thinner neighbor, Jasmine. 

Sole has trouble seeing eye to eye with Irene (Lynn Whitfield). 

Irene wants Sole to go out more— especially with the local church girls— although Irene herself is not the typical Christian values woman. 

As Sole often scrummages the cabinets for midnight cravings, the rough tension escalates between her and Irene. A headstrong, determined Sole anxiously yearns to return home and false church lady Irene desperately wants to build a relationship with her granddaughter. Sole sees right through Irene’s phoniness right down to the strange relationship between Irene and her special friend, Pastor Clay. It also doesn’t help that Irene makes negative comments on Sole’s eerie eating habits and labels her “fat.” 

Guedado (Luke Rampersad) and Jasmine (Chelsea Tavares) are two broken spirits that draw Sole into their world of drugs, alcohol, clubbing culture, and kissing experimentation. 

Jasmine falls asleep in Sole’s arms. 

Positioned between Sole’s story is an abstracted nude Black woman wrapped in clear plastic, trying to break free from the barrier. This avant-garde break may metaphorically imply the mental trappings that overwhelm the physical self so much that it interferes in the way of daily existence. This body cries out in despair, in agony. Most importantly, she is fighting to escape alone. 

“If you’re silent about your pain, they will say you enjoyed it,” Zora Neale Hurston said in How It Feels To Be Colored Me, a quote that highlighted my personal struggles, that extends towards Sole’s quiet pain. 

Meanwhile, Sole prefers becoming intimately close with her neighbors Jasmine and Guedado instead of Irene’s church friends’ daughters (which includes Martha played by Pariah’s Sahra Melllesse aka Alike’s accepting younger sister, Sharonda). Sole needs their help for winning an art project that would fund her return to New York. Eventually, however, the trio are an inseparable triangle with a curious Sole attracted to both Jasmine and Guedado— both affecting her in different ways. Yet between the jarring opposite magnets pulling the lost, vulnerable Sole in deeper and deeper, her eating disorder overwhelms any possible high or munchy craving. 

At the same time, the chain smoking Irene—pissed at her granddaughter for choosing the eccentric neighbors over her own family— is getting in good with her friend Pastor Davis. The film does not stray away from the notion of older people having sex, lingering on every curve of hypocritical Irene’s body and every indented line of Clay’s. Whilst in the throes of passion, Irene giggles, hoping Sole doesn’t hear them. 

The trio successfully shoot in front of Pastor Clay’s church— that is until he comes down and threatens to call the cops. 

Winner of the Best Ensemble Cast Award at the Los Angeles Film Festival and Narrative Feature Audience Award at the New Orleans Film Festival, Solace deserves more praise and attention for responding to the quiet underbelly of Black girls suffering from constant body criticism. Ours is much different than that of others. 

When Sole reaches a startling breaking point, Irene is there to pick up the shattered pieces. 

Solace made me feel seen and understood. This powerful film addressed an inner battle to make a resolution to my past body issues. Black girls and women much like Sole have to be encouraged to break through this glaring cycle of hatred, of not valuing what is before us. Although societal standards still vouch for European ideals, Omawale’s important film instructs Black women to embrace the distinctive shape of their bodies, to accept their appearances in all its facets. Haven’t we been punished enough already in this world? 

Furthermore, Solace is an experimental expression that not only discusses the Black female body, it blends together grief in a coming of age narrative, sexuality/sexual politics, and art form.