Kindred and Black Trauma Art?
Recently, I finished reading Octavia Butler’s time traveling and neo-slave narrative thriller Kindred. It focuses on a Black woman, Dana, who lives in 1976 Los Angeles, California where she goes back in time to pre-Civil War Maryland to prevent her white ancestor Rufus Weylin, from raping and enslaving Alice, a free Black woman, who Rufus is obsessed with.
Kindred, written in 1979, is reminiscent of Hollywood’s modern push for similar stories where Black people’s historical struggles are put on display for entertainment and educational values. Black people’s new footing in cinema have shifted from side characters like Hattie Mcdaniel’s “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind to making a splash in the movie industry in the 1990s with Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and Forest Whitaker’s adaptation of Terry McMillan’s novel Waiting to Exhale.
The stories were diverse even into the 2000s with Love and Basketball to Akeelah and the Bee. Recently, though, the focus has shifted from these variations of Black life to a focus on the grim fears that plague Black communities. The rise of Black Lives Matter in 2013 where police brutality took over the news and uprisings from Ferguson to Baltimore occured. In this span Ryan Coogler cinematic debut Fruitvale Station debuted in 2013 which offered a glimpse in the life and story of Oscar Grant who was killed by police in Oakland, California. The increase of movies like this from The Hate You Give, to Ava Duvernay’s documentary 13th on mass incarceration, and Detroit shows where the industry's focal point lies.
Witnessing this stretch of movie released is concerning as it doesn’t give room for more imaginative Black storytelling. Stories from the 1990s and 2000s had more than the gangster movies but the dramas and comedies that showed the extent of Black life. Everytime a Menace II Society (1993) or Dead Presidents (1995) dropped a Poetic Justice (1993) or Friday (1995) was right around the corner.
On social media and in larger discourses the fatigue of what Black people are calling the “trauma porn” genre can be tiresome. The constant viewing of Black death, struggle, pain,
hopelessness, and misery can be overwhelming.
It doesn’t make it any better when new projects such as the upcoming Netflix short movie called Two Distant Strangers , releasing April 9th, which stars rapper Joey Badass as Carter James is teased. In the short, James tries to leave his home and is confronted by a police officer who ends up killing him and the same circumstance repeats as he awakes and relives the day again. The movie can be summed up as a Groundhogs Day influence but instead of repeated comedic reliefs it will be replaced with grief and death.
Even before the release of Two Distant Strangers, Amazon Prime released a trailer for their upcoming anthology series Them. The synopsis is that it “centers around a Black family who move from North Carolina to an all-white Los Angeles neighborhood during the period known as The Great Migration. The family's idyllic home becomes ground zero where malevolent forces, next door and otherworldly, threaten to taunt, ravage and destroy them.” A story that almost resonates with Jordan Peele’s Us but instead of clones terrorizing a family it will be white people.
There have been complaints about the supposed rise of neo-slave movies such as 12 years a slave, Harriet, Birth of a Nation (2016), and Antebellum. Each of them repeating the stories of former slaves or its own narrative of the cruelty of slavery. This genre tries to explain the atmosphere and fear of Black people bounded by the cruelty of a rising American country and does so by showing the barbaric torture that many had to endure. The stories are important but does the torture create the tangible and radical change that is needed or do they only cause casual conversation where nothing happens after viewing?
I do believe in telling these stories from slavery, to Jim Crow to modern police brutality. These events and periods can not stop because of how uncomfortable it makes not only white people but Black people feel. Where we see some of the darkest and inhumane acts directed towards the bodies of Black people. The problem I see from all of this is that there is not enough balance in Black storytelling. There should not be a continuous series of police movies like Queen and Slim or traumatic movies like For Colored Girls without other romantic, drama or comedy based movies to give us some joy. There have been attempts like Sorry to Bother You, The Photograph, and Dope but they are a few examples in terms of movies without gratuitous violence and abuse.
Butler’s novel became a sensation for book clubs, 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture at the Oscars in 2014, but for every slave narrative there is a Moonlight that can be made. If it takes the cruel toruture of Black people to gain empathy in the world then what happens when Black stories focus on our intimate lives. Does the story create the same emotional and sympathetic impact or is Black pain the only thing our stories are good for?