I am shaken. By beauty; by truth.
I have just read this piece by Carvell Wallace in the New York Times Magazine about the film out now, ‘Queen & Slim’.
I have pulled out only a few bits, but I am going to see it tonight, based on this meditation alone.
I say meditation because that is exactly what it is; a meditation on love; on life; on death; on being fully alive even as you are hurtling toward death.
From Wallace:
Lately I have come to the conclusion, and you may disagree, that pretty much every experience we have moves us either toward life or away from it. There are some things that suck the life out of you, that make you feel smaller and less human, that alienate you from yourself; they calcify your fear and carve a monument out of your emptiness. Then there are those that bring you closer to life, that grow in you the desire to create, to nurture, to see beautiful things and become them. This is the love that increases your attachment to people and animals, makes you smile at children or go outside to see the moon. Every experience is either life-affirming or life-denying.
Those who know me well know I don’t watch violent movies, and this movie promises violence. Yet, as I read Wallace’s meditation I was reminded that I swim in violence; my refusal to look at kool aid blood on a screen when I am drenched in the real thing in my psyche and my soul is, in this case, a dodge. I am already sprayed with bullets; my irises are red, so one of the few holdovers of my self imposed rigidity is no longer needed; no longer valid. Wallace said this, “There is just one trick. It sometimes happens that to move toward love — true, active, life-affirming love — means to move toward death”.
There is just one trick. It sometimes happens that to move toward love — true, active, life-affirming love — means to move toward death.
We are talking about this, this, this—this considered disintegration in the current On Being Series post with angel Kyodo Williams. We are talking about this being an intentional act, to clear the detritus that does not spark justice–another way of saying what does not spark love–so there can be room for what we say we want.
We must remember though, that we are all, all of us, saying this from a place of deep privilege; to be able to have the choice of what to clear and what to keep, rather than being evicted from your beloved and cherished scaffolding, the artifacts of your life spread around you on hard concrete at a tenement stoop, as it is when one is evicted; one’s schemas and constructs and assumptions and Self carted out by dispassionate or even hostile landlords and supers.
For so many of us, that is what it is like on the daily; every day facing a three day notice to rent (buy into a society bent on our destruction) or quit (saying no and making the ‘choice’ to become an intellectual and emotional fugutive whose keys to that society no longer work, if they ever did at all)
Left then, to sort out the jumble at the bottom of the stoop; the sacred artifacts of our life from the chaff of existence, all while passerby gawk and sneer and judge, as you walk off with only the treasures you can carry in your own scarred arms, that is the truth of so many of us, left to construct something new while so much is left at the curb, to be picked through and approprated (looted) by those who stood by, the rest hosed away, but still insisting that beauty can still be found and re created despite it all–that is what those who have not the luxury of time and of storage must do.
More Wallace:
What makes this a black movie is not just that it’s about black people or that it was made by black people. It is a black movie because it is first and foremost about loving black people, loving us in every way and however we are — when we are angry, when we are frightened, when we are kind and when we are hurting. It is easy to love us when we are dead, our emotions suspended in history like a bug trapped in amber.
“It is easy to love us when we are dead”. My breath stopped for a moment, and mind went to a woman I know intimately; a woman who has longed for death for decades. She said much the same thing to me as Wallace says here; that she is not angry or even particularly depressed or sad. But that living in a world that hates her for more than half a century, and loving that world anyway but never having that love reciprocated, makes her yearn for a time when the world might finally love her a little. And the only way she can see clear for that to happen is for her to die. Because maybe, just maybe, she too might be one of the lucky ones whose humanity is finally found in her expiration. I lock eyes with her as she says this and internally rock with recognition. Yes. She might be lucky. She might be truly seen in death. I get it. I fight it. I get it.
Wallace again:
This film loves us when we are alive. And that is a love that our country denies us, seemingly compulsively. When we are making culture or sports or funny memes we are embraced, but when we are hurt or grieving, angry or frightened, we are out of line.
We see this here in Lace on Race. But not just here; we face this in the almost sure betrayals feared in the risk of relationship with those who have standards we are held to, but elide for themselves. We see it in the expectations of supplication and demands for subordination; and the schemas that white people still hold, even when they feel they’ve Kondo-ed themselves, we see the entitlement to pick through our belongings and offer them back to us–sometimes at the steepest of prices–that of relationship; of connection; of abiding, not seeing that in doing so they are then just another landlord; just another super. The distortion of Meeting, only on their terms is not love.
But what is?
Finally, again from Wallace:
This is what they are living against together, a world that wants everything from black people except our truth.
And so I ask of you all now: What if you could indeed lock eyes and hold yourself as truth was told, without looting, without running?
I will go to this movie. I know I will be changed.
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