battle scars

I almost didn’t put this blog up.  It didn’t come to a neat end, and I didn’t want to be misunderstood, but watching this clip  created a complex set of feelings for me that had to be expressed however imperfectly.  The following clip came from a Blaxploitation film called Sister Emma’s Revenge.  Though relegated and marginalized, these films were more than art, they were a form of resistance.  In this particular scene, we are privy to resistance as well--Emma standing up to Jesse, the lover who has betrayed her after all her sacrifice for him.

At face value, as the confrontation of an unfaithful lover, this scene is excruciating to watch.   Much of the reason it is a hard watch for me is because Emma looks and sounds like all the women I've ever known, women who smile, dance, and work with a sadness lurking in their eyes, women who love with dedication and without any expectation but pain, women who always fought to stay strong.

So first off, the scene struck me as reflective of  black female/male relationships.  (While I do understand race as a faulty, stereotype-driven, social construct, for the purpose of this essay, black=the descendants of African slaves in the U.S.  In addition, I regard that there is no such thing as monolithic blackness, but there are things common to all citizens perceived as black in this culture.  I also speak on black female/male relationship as the traditional, not sole, unit of family.)   The turbulence of black male/female relationships has its roots in the Triangle Trade.  All of the fears of the world boiled down to the fear of the black man’s dick but the need for his strength to build the new world.  White women “feared” the dick.  White men feared the dick and that white women would get aholt of it and never come back.  Black women’s fear was not of the dick but of not getting the dick.  It boiled down to a power that had to be controlled, and so began the attrition of blackness.  The breaking started with violence, which of course has saturated our existence in this country.  A black man became power but no outlet, an entity large enough to incite perpetual fear but  stripped of his  ability to protect those he lovedfrom being sold, raped, or beaten.  Powerlessness in close quarters leads to resentment, and after generations of this same deal, the bonds of familiarity break.  Some find their way back to wholeness; some wait generations more for the awareness of what was lost. 

When the world opened and black men were dazzled by the exotic, they became less interested in loving what was most familiar to them.  Black women were adaptable, though, and in it for the long run, they were willing to morph into the most unbeweavable, painted forms to more appeal to black men.  As we remember, while all others feared the dick; black women feared being without it.  Whether it is wayward sons or husbands or daddies, black women forgive black men at the rate of 7x7x7x7x7.   For some reason, however, the relationship between black men and women is almost always portrayed as contentious.  If any of this is so, it's not on the sister's part.  I have heard countless times from black men who don't date black women because they are too this, or too that, or not enough this or that.  Even still, black women are least likely to marry outside of race.   In this scene, although no lick is passed, I feel violence.   I see a beaten down male inflict hurt on the  only thing he sees as weaker than him, the body that was more expendable than his.  

Another way I see the scene is how the U.S. speaks to black culture.  

            Jesse says, "Me, love you?  You must be crazy.  You a toy, bitch—a freak.  I used you.”  

The words feels like appropriation manifest.  Like all those expressions of blackness that were first disdained, then hijacked, repackaged poorly, and price-tagged for consumer consumption in order to make the patriarchy richer.  In the meantime, the descendants of those that created said expressions are being systematically exterminated by the system it fed with the blood of our ancestors and feeds with the sweat of our days..  Jesse (the system) isn’t just trying to break Emma; he’s trying to destroy her. 

Still another way I saw this clip is as a reflection of our brutality to ourselves.  Often our inner dialogue is the most destructive force of all.  When I do something stupid, I have a tendency to be very hard on me.   I recognize here that I can't neglect to put myself in check.

Maybe I'm thinking too hard or reading too much, but it goes back to this: at some point in my life, upon the realization that I was black and a woman and the awareness of what that meant to others in the larger arena, I  knew that sorrow came with the title.  I guess in all these things, this scene lets me know that there is a need to stand up to the things that brutalize us.  At some point, the trickery of others becomes us tricking ourselves.  After that point of confrontation has to come the advent of healing.