This Will Be My Undoing

by Morgan Jerkins

  Sciamma is right in that a film involving black female actors is not the same as a film about black women, but the rest of her reasoning falls short. Marieme and her friends were not black women, but black girls. White people readily conflate black girlhood with womanhood because black females are so sexualized that black girls can never be innocent. She also believes that she can relate to these poor, young black girls because like them, she, too, has lived on the margins, despite her being white and middle-class. To believe that, within her middle-class, white female body, Sciamma understands what it means to live on the outskirts of society grates on my nerves. And why does she assume a responsibility to “give a face to the French youth” when she does not even recognize that her understanding of it is framed through her white gaze? Granted, Sciamma has made films with white female protagonists, such as Water Lilies and Tomboy, but Girlhood cannot be analyzed through the same lens. The most obvious reason is because black female representation on screen is so scarce. It is illegal for the French state to gather data about ethnicity and race, but publications such as the New York Times have made estimates, and black Parisians only make up perhaps 4 percent of the French population; as such, they are automatically cast as Other. Yet black French girls already have faces and voices. For Sciamma to assert that she can give “a face” to poor black French girls speaks of appropriation, a kind of control that reinforces her role as a white benefactor, and that of her subjects as helpless beings whose stories are not theirs to tell. By providing “a face” to them, she is implying that they themselves are invisible, unworthy of being named, and unable to be named without her assistance.

  Girlhood got many media critics arguing whether nonblack women should write about black women. My criticism of Sciamma doesn’t eradicate my feeling that Girlhood is one of the best films I’ve seen in years. I spent hours with one of my former roommates analyzing what black girlhood, femininity, and the juxtaposition of kinky hair versus weaves meant within the narrative, and if I were to watch it again I would find even more symbols and themes to unpack. Karidja Touré, the lead, was spotted on the street (i.e., “street casting”) in order to create “alchemy” and “energy.”1 However, the majority of the actresses have not been cast in a high-profile film since. If someone were to ask me if I thought Sciamma did a good job with the story, I would say no: I think that she did a great job. But I also believe that a black woman, especially one from a poor Parisian suburb, could have done an even better job because she would be able to fully engage in the story without being a spectator. I could say the same about the fourth season of the drama series Orange Is the New Black, which focused on racism within the prison system and prison brutality towards black women. I found myself enthralled by the storytelling—and annoyed when I found out that no one in the writers’ room was a black woman. Issues that concern black women like me were being exploited for profit and consumption by a white mainstream society.

  At the 2015 César Awards, Sciamma was nominated for Best Director, and Karidja Touré was nominated for Most Promising Actress. No black woman has won Best Director in the César Awards’ history. (Euzhan Palcy, a black Martinican woman and director, was the first black person to win a César Award, for Best First Feature Film, for Sugar Cane Alley, back in 1984.) No black woman has ever won a César Award for Best Actress. The first black woman to be nominated in any acting category was Aïssa Maïga, for her performance in Bamako, in 2007. In 2016, Déborah Lukumuena became the first black woman and youngest person to win Best Supporting Actress for her role in Divines. I want more black, female-centered stories to be written and directed by black women across the diaspora. Women like Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Amma Asante are making great strides, yet I want more and more and more. But would a black French female director have had the opportunity to direct Girlhood? Could I, or anyone else, be comfortable with the fact that if it weren’t for Sciamma, already a respected art house director, Girlhood might never have received the acclaim that it deserved? The OITNB series came from a white, middle-class woman’s memoir. Would a black woman’s prison memoir have received the same attention and acclaim? Would it have even been published? Given the reality of the systemic barriers, should I resign myself to the fact that at least these stories are being told, even if by nonblack women?

  Why is the film titled Girlhood (the French title being Bande de filles, or “Gang of Girls”) and not Black Girlhood, or even Marieme? The truth of the matter is that Girlhood is not a “universal” story, despite Sciamma’s efforts to make these black girls’ experiences collapse into the lie of universality and color blindness. She does not seem to realize that any premise of universality is only facilitated by her white lens, which always assumes whiteness is at the center of any experience. When she declares, “I’m making this universal,” “I decide my character,” “I just want to give a face to the French youth I’m looking at,” she’s forcing herself into a narrative that has nothing to do with her. These statements demonstrate how much she wants to have control over a story that was never hers to begin with. This signals to me, as a viewer and a black woman, that Sciamma did not observe these black girls’ bodies; she confiscated them in order to reproduce the white fallacy that social progress can only be achieved when racial identities are forgotten altogether. To divorce race and racism from Girlhood is to ignore the immense, often invisible forces that restrict the story and the characters. That black girls can simply be girls—that somehow we can share in the deliciousness of being unraced—is a fantasy. It also ejects black girls from being at the center of the narrative, a position in which they have never been privileged to reside.

  I only have to think about this in the context of Lemonade—a pure, unadulterated visual experience of black women remaining at the center, codirected by a black woman—to realize I do not want to resign myself. Your eyes could not sift through any of the scenes without seeing a black woman, or several. Beyoncé would not allow that. You had to see. You had to watch. You had to stay. You were “going through” just as she was “going through.” That is the reality that we had to witness: a black woman’s pyrrhic journey, bloodied and beautiful from start to finish, with no hint of white skin to provide momentary relief.

  I wish that, for once, a white director or screenwriter could talk about stories featuring women of color without trying to insert him- or herself into the narrative in order to make it more accessible. I do not want a white artist to have either sympathy or empathy for their characters of color. I do not want a white artist to pity a marginalized character’s fortune, as this too easily facilitates a savior complex. I also do not want a white artist to imagine him- or herself in the position of that character, because this puts the white experience at the center of a story, whitewashing it altogether. I am not even sure that such empathy for a character of color is possible.

  Lemonade asks, What is it like to be a black woman in America?, and the answer is one no nonblack director or performer could give. She is the most disrespected, unprotected, and neglected person—as quoted from Malcolm X’s 1962 speech in Lemonade—and also the most resilient. Lemonade is not simply a love story, but rather a multilayered portrait of all that the black woman experiences, all the pain that she endures, divided into eleven chapters: Intuition, Denial, Anger, Apathy, Emptiness, Accountability, Reformation, Forgiveness, Resurrection, Hope, and Redemption. One of Beyoncé’s biggest strengths is that she is able to lead, and yet also fall into formation herself. Her voice glides through Lemonade’s sumptuous visuals of black women, and is often the backdrop against which other black women can exhibit as many tumultuous emotions as she does. This stylistic choice emphasizes that although Beyoncé is a black woman, her experience is different from that of Lesley McFadden, Michael Brown’s mother; of actress Amandla Stenberg; of Leah Chase, the “Queen of Creole Cuisine,” all of whom appear in the film. Black women are not one thing. In Lemonade, healing is not achieved through the individual but through the p
lurality of community. Beyoncé is supported by a brigade of black women who assist her as she sorts through all of her feelings. They move through the water, hands linked, facing the setting sun as though they are beginning a ritual. They will uplift her not through words but rather through proximity and touch, ushering in self-love and acceptance.

  That all of this empowerment takes place within nature enhances the project. Nature is where black women can give themselves permission to indulge in their emotions, and roam around free from any outside forces that may stifle them. The massive oak trees that appear throughout Lemonade echo Sethe’s chokecherry tree scar in Beloved, which represents the horror of slavery and intergenerational trauma. At the same time, trees also symbolize “the healing and regenerative power of nature and community.”2 In Lemonade, the stoic black women sitting on top of the tree branches or standing in front of the oaks are there on purpose. Trees stand not only for eternal life but also, of course, for strength. Like the trees themselves, black women stand together, tall and unmoving. Seen together in the final chapter of Lemonade, they show that despite their anger and emptiness, they are still alive. Pain does not ravage the black woman’s experience; rather, pain embellishes it, for it is through that pain that she recognizes her own tenacity and is reaffirmed by her community, without which she could not survive.

  This idea undermining Girlhood, that saying I feel for you to a woman unlike yourself means you somehow share in her experience, is one of the pitfalls that plagues mainstream feminism. It signals to women of color that their stories are only worth telling if a white person can understand them, and therefore that a white person’s emotions and responses are of greater importance than the stories themselves. We cannot come together if we do not recognize our differences first. These differences are best articulated when women of color occupy the center of the discourse while white women remain silent, actively listen, and do not try to reinforce supremacy by inserting themselves in the middle of the discussion.

  In 2015, the rapper Nicki Minaj was snubbed for an MTV VMA nomination for her “Feeling Myself” video, which also featured Beyoncé. Taylor Swift, then America’s reigning pop queen, won a nomination for “Bad Blood.” Alluding to her “Anaconda” video, which was released the same year as “Bad Blood,” Minaj tweeted: “If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year.” Swift, whom the mainstream always seems to protect, responded by tweeting directly to Minaj: “I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot . . . If I win, please come up with me!! You’re invited to any stage I’m ever on.” Minaj was venting her frustration about being a black female artist in a white media world, yet Swift inserted herself into the conversation by positing herself as the victim. Other examples of white artists co-opting stories or spaces that are not their own include Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, and anything Miley Cyrus did in 2013. Any kind of general feminist statement also defaults to whiteness (see Lily Allen’s “Hard Out Here” video or Patricia Arquette’s historically inaccurate 2015 Oscars speech: “To every woman . . . we fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America”).

  For as long as I’ve been writing, I have struggled with this idea of universality. I would love for anyone to read my black-female-centered work and find themselves engaged. However, I do not believe that readers need to be able to see themselves in my work in order for that to transpire. I do not need a white reader to appropriate African-American vernacular, emphatic gestures, and certain experiences as she tries to figure out where in the narrative she can locate herself to feel closer to the characters. I do not want sympathy but acknowledgment, the freedom to tell an unapologetic story that is both black and female and for people to interact with my words rather than corrupting them altogether to suit their selfish desire to be at the center. I believe that the Otherness of young black girls in Paris fascinated Sciamma, but oftentimes white people’s fascination with black girls and women becomes a hotbed for exploitation. If Sciamma believed her narrative to be universal, then that is because she unconsciously placed herself within the story. How else was she going to be able to fill the gaps in her imagination if not with her white, middle-class experience, which often produces a voyeuristic quality when documenting the lives of people of color?

  One of the few black female critics to write about Girlhood—and positively at that—for a mainstream American publication was Alexis Okeowo, a staff writer at The New Yorker. The other reviews and essays that I discovered were mainly favorable ones written by white (mostly male) critics—Mark Kermode in the Guardian, A. O. Scott in the New York Times, Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post, Ty Burr in the Boston Globe, Jesse Hassenger for the A.V. Club.

  There were also reviews of the film by nonblack women of color for significant, but more alternative, online sites such as Fariha Róisín on The Hairpin, Durga Chew-Bose on BuzzFeed, and Anupa Mistry for Jezebel. I did wonder if any black female writers had pitched those sites to review the film, but at the same time, I enjoyed these commentaries. Cultural criticism, particularly film reviews, is overwhelmingly white and male. I love seeing women of color getting more work in the industry, and I loved that editors had allowed some of these reviews to have titles such as “Finally, a Film about Black Girls Strengthening Each Other” or “On Brown-Girl Exclusivity and Writing Our Own Narrative.” But when a nonblack woman of color writes about black women in a way that conflates them with other minorities, particularly under the umbrella of “brown,” this label seems diluting. Anti-blackness is pervasive, even among minorities who are also burdened by historical and present-day oppression. It’s true that nonblack women of color cannot inflict violence upon black women to the degree that white women can, and have. Women of color do not have that kind of systematic power, and they also suffer in our dominant white patriarchal society. But just because their power isn’t systematic does not mean that it does not stigmatize black women and their experiences. Fanta Sylla, a black French writer, confronted this in regards to the film on her personal blog: “Why was the spectatorship of non-black women of color centered instead of that of black women? . . . It is easier to point the finger at white appropriators like the ones cited above than to call out brown cultural writers . . . because what they do is always wrapped in good intentions, always hidden behind faux-semblants of unity and solidarity.”

  Initially, I was staunchly against Sylla’s argument. She seemed to write as though she personally knew the aforementioned writers and believed they had an unhealthy obsession with black art. Not to mention, I do personally know one of them and she always seems quite aware of cultural parasitism. I loved all of the nonblack women of color’s work, and I thought it was better to have minority women’s voices than none at all. After all, they are oppressed by the same white society as I.

  It took me over two years of mental fermentation to fully process what Sylla had to say. The influences of race and gender affect all women of color, but these influences function in multitudinous ways. There are times to speak about solidarity between women of color, and times to eliminate the majority of women of color in order to address the issues of one group in particular, that being black girls and women. It’s an evergreen demand and conversation across social media channels about only black women writing about black women, and there have been moments when editors responded. For Lemonade, Doreen St. Félix wrote about the special for MTV, Brittany Spanos for Rolling Stone, Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry for Elle. According to Sylla, “the systematic use of this word [‘brown’] is how their subconscious desire to erase blackness expresses itself within their language.” What need is there to describe us as “brown” other than the deep-seated fear that if our blackness is not diluted through language then somehow we are too distant from everyone else? For a long time I advocated for women of color to
use whichever labels made them feel most comfortable, but this was a tactic to avoid conflict. Like Sylla, I eschew the label “brown.” I am black, not literally, but racially and politically. “What does this brown identity mean to a Black woman?” Sylla asks. “Brown is a euphemism . . . It feels more like a trap than an identity to me but, I can see why Black people might find this identity desirable. It temporarily relieves you from the burden of blackness.”

  Black women’s experiences are unique among women of color’s experiences. Asian women’s experiences are unique among women of color’s experiences. The list can go on and on. But when we are specifically talking about black women’s experiences, the magnifying glass need not move to any other melanin-rich subject. Black women are special. It is we who were captured and transported by the millions to the New World. It is we who needed a divergent branch of feminism to get our issues acknowledged and scrutinized. I use the term “we” because there is very little psychological disassociation between the past and the present when we talk about slavery. What happened during that period directly affects our present. The sexual exploitation during the transatlantic slave trade and the consequential epigenetics that demonstrates that trauma in our DNA is firmly rooted in black people and black female oppression.

  When black women are at the center, they are subjected to critique just like anyone else. This criticism feels and reads more bitterly coming from a nonblack female writer, but even if a writer is a black woman and the subject she’s critiquing is popular, she might be met with disdain, too. Even if we are in the room by ourselves and writing for ourselves in order to be critiqued by ourselves, if one black woman has an unpopular opinion, which reinforces that we’re not a monolith and there is no universal opinion in our group, how do we simultaneously protect the preciousness of our stories and challenge their creators when necessary?