Arséma Thomas joked that the reason she hadn’t fixed her late father’s watch is because she feared what could be inside of it. (She knew from watching James Bond movies with her dad that the secret service agent’s timepieces could be explosive.)
“We always used to think that he was in the C.I.A.,” said Ms. Thomas, who stars in Hulu’s “She Taught Love” and co-stars on “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story,” of her father. He in fact worked at the United Nations, spoke seven languages and was also a professor.
Ms. Thomas’s father was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the neurodegenerative disease known as A.L.S., when he passed down his favorite watch to her as she prepared to graduate high school.
Four years later, Ms. Thomas wore that watch while graduating from Carnegie Mellon University.
Ms. Thomas talked about the watch and the confidence she feels every time she wears it. This interview has been condensed and edited.
Talk to me about this piece of jewelry that means so much to you.
So the piece of jewelry is a watch that my dad gave me. It’s silver with a leather band. It’s a piece of art. It has the three little other small watches at the bottom that tell seconds, milliseconds. And I think, because it’s broken, you can hear the minute and hand watch dangle as you swing your hand. So it feels almost musical as well. Especially moments when I’m nervous, I can center in on that.
When did he give the watch to you? What was the occasion?
He gave it to me right after I graduated high school. And he usually never trusts me with expensive pieces, because I am the most careless individual. But it’s his favorite watch. And it’s so strange, because I think the reason I love it so much is the fact that he gave it to me, and then we did this cross-country road trip while he drove me from my high school in Pennsylvania. We drove from the eastern side of Pennsylvania all the way to the western side. I felt like he had trusted me in that moment to be like, “I’ve done everything, and you can now go off.” And it was when he started to get sick with A.L.S.
What does it feel like when you wear this watch?
It feels like armor, which then allows me to be comfortable and confident. Whenever I wear it, I think about the fact that that was where his wrist would have touched. I think about the wrist being such a vulnerable place; it’s where you take your pulse. And it’s heavy too, so you can’t forget that you’re wearing it. Every time I wear it, even when it doesn’t even match the outfits, it just feels like this, I don’t know — a big middle finger to the patriarchy in a weird way.
What was it about your dad that gives you that specific feeling?
My dad, to me, was a feminist in all ways. A lot of the work that he did, specifically for the U.N., was engaging with women and children on the African continent and how to leverage them to bring all of Africa out of poverty.
His whole entire mind-set was the fact that specifically women were completely untapped potential in Africa. There is a very patriarchal influence because of post-colonialism, imperialism. A lot of his life work was about that and gender equality. We would always watch “James Bond” together. But he would always tell me when we watched it, “You are not the Bond girls. You are James. That is how you should see yourself.”
My mother was the breadwinner for a majority of my life. He was so OK sitting in the back and letting her shine. That was the kind of household that I grew up in, where they were considered partners, and that’s the way that they wanted to raise me and my sister as well. I also have half brothers, and he could have given the watch to my brothers. But the idea of gender not even being part of how he treats his children, and how he wants his children to walk into the world, I think was a big part of it. This is a Nigerian man who came from borderline destitution in the city of Lagos.
What happened when you wore it to your college graduation?
My dad wasn’t there, but he was watching it from his hospital room. I remember being scared [because] it has a loose clasp. So I can’t fling my arms with it, or else it slides right off. In Ethiopian culture, when you celebrate somebody, you ululate. And I had begged my mom, “Please, please don’t do it. No one will understand it.” She’d come with my aunts and my cousins. They start to do that. I remember spinning, and the watch flying across the stage, and trying to scurry across and get the watch.
I remember my dad messaging me, being like, “At least I know you wore the watch.”
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