My World is My Stage

So I’m continuing (at a painstakingly slow pace) my quest to read more in 2012. I’m still trying to finish Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. 

She has a real brief essay (3 pages) where she reviews a movie entitled Countdown at Kusini (later changed to Cool Red). The movie, co-written/directed/starring Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Greg Morris, “explores the themes of revolution, guerrilla warfare, and the relation of Afro-Americans to the African struggle against foreign domination.” Has anyone ever heard of/seen this movie?! I’ve never seen this movie, but I have to now!

In this essay, “Making the Moves and the Movies We Want”, she reports that this movie is the first major motion picture ever produced by an organization of black women. Guess who that organization was? DELTA SIGMA THETA!

Walker writes:

With a history of political activism that includes participation in the feminist and suffragist demonstrations of 1913, the eighty-five thousand members of American-based Delta Sigma Theta, the largest black sorority in the world, decided they would no longer accept the degraded images of black people- and especially black women- being foisted on them from the movie screen. Instead they would raise the money themselves, from among themselves, to make the kind of movie they wanted: one that reflected contemporary values and concerns of black people, and the ungilded magnificence and political activism of black women.

How fucking amazing is that! Not only is it amazing that a Black Greek-Letter Organization (BLGO), in 1976 (the year in which Walker wrote this essay) was truly actualizing their organization’s mission and principles in profound ways, but they were producing art, the art they wanted to see. They weren’t passive and didn’t just blindly accept the negative images of Black life they were presented. They went out and did something!

Oh how I wish there were more stories like this! Oh how I wish the generally ineffective National Pan-Hellenic Council (NPHC), or my beloved Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Incorporated, would band together, as service organizations, and take the lead of our Delta sisters and produce art we want to see. Let’s not wait for a George Lucas to encourage us to support his film but rather go out and find the artists and stories we want to support and produce their work. Oh what a happy day that would be.

I can say that when I approached my home chapter, Alexandria-Fairfax (VA) Alumni Chapter, about producing a play, there was a general level of support but it never materialized. I will continue to push my chapters and organizations to actualize our motto and objectives in new and exciting ways, I do hope that other BGLOs and culturally-specific organizations take the lead from the amazing women of DST and go out and be the change they would like to see. We could all benefit from that. Isn’t that what our organizations were founded for anyway?

See what I did there? lol.

Anyway, I saw The Help over the weekend and it evoked a lot of thought out of me. It’s really hard to talk about it. I have a menagerie of feelings. I’m proud to know that we, as a people, have endured the life of the home servant. It makes me SO sad to know that after that, we still have so far to come. It pains me that the movie was more about the white women and their lives than it was of the Black women. I know that the movie didn’t focus on the Black men of the day but I wanted to hear from them. I am both happy and pissed the fuck off at some of the relationships the maids developed with the kids and women they were paid to take care of. I’m saddened that Hollywood will turn anything into a fucking love story! THE ACTING (by some) WAS FUCKING AMAZING! There weren’t that many moments that I realized that I was, in fact, watching a movie, so the production value was good. I don’t love the movie but would add it to my personal collection.

If you know me you know I don’t go to the movies. Before I give you more detailed reasons know that my NUMBER 1 reason is that it costs too much for me. I don’t get paid a lot and I’d rather spend my little bucks on other shit. My other reasons is that I’m just overall dissapointed in what the movies offer. I got so mad while watching the previews (I tweeted, twice! and three times about it and will talk more about that experience later on) that it carried over to the first 20 minutes of the movie. Granted, the first 20 minutes also pissed me off. Those images of Black women having to acquiesce to every whim of these white women irked the shit out of me. It made me uncomfortable, in a good way. I was forced to face my history and I wasn’t able to turn away.

At my new job, I’m working on this play Neighbors that does a similar thing, only with blackface. It makes audiences confront our own complicity and doesn’t let us just shrug it off but makes us sit in it, like a baby who has to stay in their soiled diaper for hours.

Theatre, and art in general, should challenge us, make us think, make us feel, make us talk, inspire us to make change (in ourselves and in the world around us) and entertain. While I disagree, in some sorts with a lot of the plot pieces in the movie, I overall felt like it satisfied my aforementioned criteria.

If you are on the fence on whether to go see this movie or not, please do. If not only to give Viola Davis, Cicely Tyson, Octavia Spencer, Aunjanue Ellis and others credit for their hard word, but to have the experience of confronting your understanding of self in relationship to others, in the context of the experience of Black women working in the domestic service.

I have to do more research on the origins of the movie and the book and will come back on how I feel like the movie did in comparison to the book. I’ll also give my review of the movie. Look out for my post about the previews before the movie and why that adds to the reasons I don’t go to the cinema. Busy week. I hope to write it all…(current history says I won’t…)

If you’ve seen the movie (or read the book) what do you think about the movie?