I am saddened by the news that broke Sunday night, post-
Grammys, of Chris Brown's arrest for assault and that his alleged victim is his girlfriend, pop chart-reigning diva
Rihanna, who was just identified this morning on
NBC's Today Show in what was characterized as a "Horrific" incident of domestic violence.
But what really saddens (and disgusts) me is the way some have already commented on various black-focused gossip blogs, as well as mainstream ones like
TMZ, in ways that either stereotype Chris Brown as this raging "black brute" or
Rihanna as some "attention-grabbing, money-hungry (
uhm, doesn't
she make her own money?)" fill-in-the-blank derogatory names often thrown at women and (my favorite part) the ultimate "traitor" for turning in a brother to the "
po po." Of course, depending on whose side you're on, you can resort to either stereotype.
As the story develops, we are learning that
Rihanna wasn't even the one to call 911; in fact, it was a bystander reporting the assault.
As someone who teaches at a university where women of color have internalized the attitude that our men are victims of racism, and therefore, even when they become rape victims, they don't press charges on the grounds that they don't want to give their perpetrators a criminal record (yes, one such victim of gang rape actually said this!), and as someone who lives in a culture where a black couple - should their violent relationship ever be exposed to the public (think Whitney and Bobby Brown) - are immediately cast as "deviant" and "pathological" (as in: what else can you expect from
those people?)
- as if domestic and sexual violence wasn't a widespread pandemic that affects every community, every socioeconomic bracket, and every race, ethnicity, and nationality - I want to dig into history and highlight key literary texts by black women who dared to break the silence and talk about domestic and sexual violence.
Many African American literary scholars would identify Harriet Jacobs'
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as the beginning of a black feminist literary tradition. This 1861 slave narrative is all about public disclosure on the subject of slave rape (which, in antebellum Victorian culture, this is a topic that no one dared speak its name). As a house slave, Jacobs revealed the state of domestic violence, as it existed in an antebellum,
slaveholding household, and managed to argue for her own moral virtues, despite being a victim of sexual assault. Such narratives set the tone for later creative works by black women, who would find the necessary language to "testify" to their experiences of
racialized gender violence. As evidenced by the performances by Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday in my Sunday
Soundies post, the blues woman took this public disclosure to the next level. However, in blues and jazz music traditions, their suffering is mere public spectacle.
Zora Neale
Hurston documented domestic violence in her celebrated 1937 novel,
Their Eyes Were Watching God, while also uncovering the unspoken history of a Hurricane-Katrina like disaster affecting poor segregated black communities in the 1928 Lake
Okeechobee hurricane in Florida, which resulted in the loss of nearly 3,000 lives. Here,
Hurston brilliantly intersects how race, class, and gender contribute to the tragedy of a black couple. However,
Hurston was not taken as seriously as other Harlem Renaissance writers and artists during her era, precisely because she focused on the "folk" and on what were presumed to be stereotypical renditions of the black experience.
Fast forward to the 1970s, when the black liberation and women's liberation movements empowered black women to talk about any and all taboo subjects. In 1976,
Ntozake Shange debuted on Broadway her
choreopoem,
For colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enough. It was a force to be reckoned with, as it not only gave voice to the marginal "colored girl," it also dared to touch on subjects like abortion, acquaintance rape, and domestic violence (notoriously represented in the poem "a
nite with beau willie brown"), which many a brother cried foul for
Shange's negative portrayal of black men without recognizing the brilliance of a poem that discussed among many things, besides the brutal
DV situation - which resulted in beau willie brown killing his children - post-war
PTSD, resulting from his return from Vietnam, and difficulties in a veteran receiving benefits for
health care so that said perpetrator could get his mental illness treated in order to prevent his horrific domestic violence from escalating). Just in broadcasting such volatile issues,
Shange was vilified by many in black communities, and the poet was nearly suicidal as a result of the public assault on her successful play.
Fast forward still to the 1980s, and Alice Walker would face a similar public outcry and accusation that her celebrated, 1982 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel,
The Color Purple, was a "male-bashing" work of fiction. These cries of male-bashing escalated when it was turned into a Hollywood motion picture in 1985, directed by Steven
Spielberg. One could argue that the stereotypical representation of the "black brute" in the film adaptation lent credence to some of the outcry from those who thought Walker's novel recycled black stereotypes, but what of the other subjects in the novel - including lesbianism and liberation theology?
Can we as a multiracial community talk frankly about domestic and sexual violence issues without falling back on fears that such public disclosure will "land a brother in jail" or "make the black community look bad"? We already look bad, what with our alarming statistics of violence and high rates of HIV/AIDS and
STDs. You know why we've got it bad in these instances? Silence about gender and sexuality issues, exacerbated by racism in the larger society.
Incidentally, although Walker's
The Color Purple was recently made into a successful Broadway musical, courtesy of Oprah Winfrey,
Shange's For colored girls didn't fare so well, when it lost a key backer last year, even though
Whoopi Goldberg was involved in production, India.Arie (image below) was expected to headline the new show, and
Shange was expected to pen new
choreopoems to update the play - including new pieces concerning the recent HIV/AIDS pandemic and its impact on black women's lives. I'm crossing my fingers that it will
be revived eventually.
In the mean time, I urge all educators to keep these literary texts alive by including them in your
syllabi and all readers to include such texts for your book club meetings. For if we don't keep this history alive, where black women tell our stories - no matter the cost of public disclosure because, in the end, as Audre
Lorde has said, "Your silence will not protect you" - we'll just keep perpetuating these violent cycles.
And when high-profile black couples melt down in public, we will have nothing to counter-balance all the convenient stereotypes we fall back on to discuss the issue.
