How do you represent black women's pain? I mean, really represent it? How do you represent it as something that someone else can empathize with (not just non-blacks and men but black women ourselves)? You see, for so long our "pain," our abuse, has been so distorted, so stereotyped, that any representation becomes problematic.
I'm thinking of Rhianna's recent sit-down interview on 20/20 last night with Diane Sawyer. She was so self-conscious, very much on the defensive (from the Sharon Stonesque Basic Instinct posture to the furrowed brow that indicated she was ready to mask herself. It was self exposure but a very guarded one. And who can blame her?
Perhaps her most "authentic" moment was when she described the humiliation of seeing the photo of her battered face, first released by the trashy gossip site, TMZ, all over the Internet and on TV. It was evident, actually, that this moment - even more than what Chris Brown subjected her to - is the one thing she's still traumatized over.
And we wonder why her more recent images incorporate so much darkness and S&M spectacle. Tell me if those images (the cover for her single "Russion Roulette" and her "Rated R" album) are not a performative attempt to reclaim her image and flip the script of the "abused black woman" as one who gains power through the spectacle of violence?
"I am strong," she insisted to an incredulous Diane Sawyer, who had the audacity to treat Rhianna as some pathological freak and not the very typical woman who represents yet another statistic crossing all races, ethnicities,
nationalities, and socio-economic levels when it comes to domestic violence. No. Being black means to not be representative, to in fact be a contrasting mirror that we safely hold up to and say triumphantly, "At least that's not me!"
And that black women ourselves do this suggests that we too have forgotten what we look like. Beneath the barbed wire and eye patch is yet another black woman learning to wear the "mask." It's for our own protection. We must be "strong women," lest our scars and bruises get magnified and turned into a "lesson" for the rest of the world to treat as some sociological tract on why it is black people are so screwed up when compared to the rest of the world. At least that's what the "representation" wants to tells us.
It is with this reality of the problem of our representation, or rather, the "impossibility" of our representation, that I'm reading various reviews of the independent film, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Sadly, this film is not yet released in my area, so I can only go by reviews so far, and I'm getting some interesting news on this end. There are those calling it "poverty porn," another accusing it of reinforced stereotype - especially concerning the mother - and I believe Armond White (who's always negative and who I don't pay much attention to since he likes Norbit) actually called it "Up from Incest, Child Abuse, Teenage Pregnancy, Poverty, and AIDS." Or more specifically, "Flashbacks to Precious' rape contain a curious montage of grease, sweat, bacon, and Vaseline. Later, (the director Lee Daniels, he of Monster's Ball fame) intercuts a shot of pig's feet cooking on a stove with Precious being humped while her mother watches from a corner." Of course, I will have to see the movie for myself, but the idea that an obese black woman's sexual and physical abuse could be reduced to this iconography of urban black ghetto paraphernalia is disturbing. (But then, I found Sapphire's novel Push equally disturbing, considering the ways she clumsily tried to recreate Alice Walker's The Color Purple or Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and instead came up with some horrendous book version of one of Kara Walker's grotesque silhouettes; curious too that both Push and Kara Walker are beloved by progressive whites who are fascinated by the "black experience").
Unlike Armond White, I'm not disturbed about the subject matter. We don't get enough of these stories to begin with. What I'm disturbed by is the spectacle of the Abused Black Woman who is reduced to spectacle and nothing more. Where is the compassion for her pain? If her representation can do that, then I won't be complaining about one-dimensional or overly prescribed images of our pain and suffering.
It's a fine line. For example, I'm constantly debating with a good friend the merits of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. I love that novel, and it's perhaps Morrison's greatest writing outside of Beloved. But, my friend hates that novel with a passion (and Morrison by extension) because, when attending predominately white schools, the teaching of The Bluest Eye was always in the context of using this work of fiction as some sort of sociological thesis on the modern black family. I would argue back that it's not the author's fault if certain audiences want to take from our fictional works some kind of "authentic" interpretation of black women's lives. It's simply a response to their own "white guilt" for having never lived in integrated neighborhoods and communities where their own encounters with black folk could help figure out the difference between "fantasy" and "reality" of the black experience.
Either way, once my friend revealed the problem of treating black representations through the veneer of "authenticity," I began to realize what Toni Morrison started doing in the wake of her first novel. After The Bluest Eye, her subsequent novels began to get more and more fantastical, incorporating elements of magical realism, with characters who were so extraordinary, sublime and out-of-this-world (literally in the case of Beloved) that I realized, Of course! She's trying to make sure some ignorant non-black reader doesn't read her novel and think this is some "authentic" depiction of black life in America. I mean, once you start reading about black women born with no navels, and black men who can literally fly like birds, and talking trees and demented rivers, you really need to give up on the idea of reading fiction to learn the sociology of the black experience!
The same applies to cinema, and already, I'm reading online various debates in response to Precious about whether or not this is an "authentic" portrayal of urban ghetto life. Why are we invested in "authenticity" when it comes to the representation of black women's pain and suffering? Why do we need to know if this is "real" or not? It's just a movie. It's just a novel. Or is it?
See, when we have real life occurrences of black women abuse victims, we either ignore them or we immediately assume they're lying. So what exactly are we looking for when we insist that certain representations of black women's victimization are "real"?
The way I see it, our society has yet to fully embrace us as human beings. Somehow, our blackness, our gender differences get in the way. And until our full humanity can be recognized, it will continue to be "impossible" to represent our stories and our lives. Until then, we will have to treat every new image that comes out in cinema or music or literature as suspect, no matter how well meaning they are.
Moreover, maybe we should all go grab our Rhianna eye patches to cover up what we don't want to see or to remind everyone else that we'll continue to wear our masks until you're ready to look at our faces underneath.
