“For Colored Girls” like “Beloved” was Best Left to the Readers Imagination

Amazing, Brilliant, Inspiring, Magnificent, and Powerful, are the adjectives being used to describe the movie For Colored Girls; Tyler Perry’s adaptation of the 1974 collection of poems by Ntozake Shange originally titled For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf. I have tried my best to see the sunshine (and the pot of gold) at the end of this dismal rainbow but it has eluded me, thus far. The movie is jammed pack with accomplished actresses and actors. And Perry did a pretty good job himself in bringing the movie to life; but like Oprah Winfrey with Toni Morrison’s, Beloved; at the end of the day, what was captured in the imagination of this reader was somehow lost in translation, in route to the big screen.

Each actor played his or her role with passion and zeal. You won’t get any complaints on that end, especially, Kimberly Elise and Thandie Newton, two actresses I love no matter what. Tyler Perry gets kudos for his efforts, even if I couldn’t figure out why Kimberly Elise couldn’t have just reprinted the missing page from Janet’s report, instead of having to go all the way back home to retrieve her copy. I mean seriously, the movie was set in current times, right? But I digress.

So what is my issue? Simply put, as a colored, black, African-American, (woman) I am so over seeing us depicted in these negative, depressing roles and movies. It has been made perfectly clear to the world that awful things have and do happen in our communities, but they also happen in other communities, yet we are the only ones who seem to want to hold on to the misery. Rape, incest, molestation, and abuse are all horrible acts and I cannot begin to understand what it must feel like to live with those experiences, so I am by no means downplaying what many women (and men) have gone through. I just don?t see how these movies help.

People have said, If you read the book or seen the stage play, you would have known what to expect. I disagree, as a teenager, reading the book for the first time in the late 70s, I felt the poems were liberating, and showed women as strong and resilient. In my late 30s, watching the young girls of the Pinellas Youth Arts Corp. perform the poems on stage, I was proud that our kids were being exposed to great literature. But as a woman in my 40s, I am over the oppressed black woman syndrome. We are so much more than movies like this portray us to be. I am tired of black women being seen as victims, whores and co-dependent upon men who do nothing but use them as sex objects and/or punching bags.

A status post on Facebook asked the question, Which character was the most powerful? Powerful, there was that word again. There is no power in staying in an abusive relationship or trying to reason with insanity–an insanity that leads to the death of your children. Power, surely isn’t in being a nosey busybody, eavesdropping into the lives of your neighbors through paper thin walls. Being a doormat for a man who takes more than he gives is actually giving your power away. Sorry ladies, they don’t steal our stuff, we hand it to them freely, price-tag still attached in case, after trying it out he decides he wants to exchange it for something else. Powerless describes what it must feel like to be raped or molested, but to allow that act to dim your light, gives the aggressor your power. Maybe success to some makes a woman powerful; however, if she has everything on the outside but on the inside she’s cold and lonely, just can’t see the power in that either.

Amazing, okay, on second thought, maybe there was something amazing about the movie. It was amazing that every male character in the movie, with the exception of one, was depicted as a detriment to the woman in his life. We had the abuser turned murderer, the rapist, the whoremonger, and the down-low brother, you know, your everyday stereotype of the black man. Even the dead black man had his role as the incestuous child molester. Thank God for Hill Harper, who played the sensitive, caring, husband, who loved his wife so much that when she shared how she got the STD that would prevent them from having children, he didn’t even flinch, just took her into his arms and let her know everything would be okay. Some women probably missed that because we aren’t supposed to be loved, and what black woman could appreciate this type of man anyway. Hey, I’m just following the black woman’s script.

Today I watched Love & Basketball for the umpteenth time. I love this movie and movies like it. Love Jones, The Best Man, and Brown Sugar, to name a few. Movies that demonstrate black men loving them some black women. Is it too much to ask for? Is it true that no one wants to go to the movies and watch black people being happy, being successful and happy, and celebrating each other, in love with each other? Is it not possible for a black woman to be received as Katherine Heigl and Jennifer Aniston, in all those silly, boy meets girl, movies? Can we not be taken as serious as Angelina Jolie in action movies? I simply refuse to believe that our only real value to Hollywood is as the downtrodden, used and abused, whoa is me, just another sad story, black woman. Or maybe, just maybe, being colored is a metaphysical dilemma that we simply cannot conquer.

Much Love,

Tracy

Tracy L. Darity is the author of two novels, He Loves Me He Loves Me Not! and Love… Like Snow In Florida On A Hot Summer Day.  For more information visit www.TracyLDarity.com