An artist goes to an artists’ retreat, or colony as they are often called, to get away from the things that typically sideline her in life: insistent phone calls, cooking, dusting, running errands, preparing lectures for class. I was not yet married and was nobody’s mother, but my work/life balance was frequently tipped in ways that hindered the artistic pursuits that both economically and emotionally sustained me. Within the retreat’s carefully constructed atmosphere of tranquillity, I was free for a month to focus on writing.
When two of my fellow colony guests began to talk over dinner about The Hours, I stayed mum. For one thing, they were talking to each other, not to me. Furthermore, I was on a retreat, and I didn’t feel like putting energy into explaining why I hadn’t seen the film or read the book. I’ll tell you now, from everything I’d seen, heard, and read, the story struck me as slightly overwrought and, well, white, and I hadn’t mustered the mood or time to care about it. But it’s hard to explain to a table full of white folks that sometimes I’m just not interested in spending time or money on films and books that focus on the melancholy of the white experience.
The lesbian writer hadn’t seen the film, either.
Let’s not call her “the lesbian writer.” The other is too frequently identified by that which sets her apart. I don’t want to follow that convention. Let’s give her a name. Let’s call her Seattle.
Seattle’s motives for not having seen the film were more carefully reasoned than mine, a fact I learned because she was pressed to justify her position to her fellow colony guests in a conversation she later referred to as “the one where I was backed into a corner like a hissing, feral beast.” This despite the fact that her initial proclamation of disinterest in the film had been made in the context of a dialogue with just one other person. We’ll call him DuPont Circle.
Opening her conversation to the table, Seattle laid out the basic reasons she had not seen the film, several of which had to do with its representations of lesbians. In a point related to her argument, Seattle asked us to name ten out lesbian actors working prominently in Hollywood. This was 2003. I want to believe that in the intervening years things have changed for the better, so I challenge you to play along at home. The party at our dinner came up with Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell. Seattle said, “I’d like to point out that neither one of those women was comfortable coming out publicly until she had solidified her career. Still, that’s two. I asked for ten names.” No one had anyone else to add. “I’ll make it easy on you, just give me three more.” People mentioned Jody Foster, but at the time she wasn’t out.
“But L.A. is totally progressive! Are you trying to suggest that Hollywood is closed to gays and lesbians?” asked a writer from Long Island.
“I’m just looking at the numbers,” said Seattle. “Tell you what. You’re a writer. Name some lesbian writers whose work gets talked about these days.”
There were six actively publishing writers at the table. The poet from the north of England knew no one, DuPont Circle named two authors, and I nodded to second Pacific Palisades’ nominee. That brought us to a total of three names.
“I haven’t heard of any of those people,” said our girl from Long Island.
“My point exactly!” Seattle pounded her fist on the table, thinking our lack of familiarity had confirmed something.
I felt vindicated in my disinterest in a film about middle- (to upper-middle-) class white women. My indifference to other people’s anxieties was not, apparently, unique. The general lack of knowledge the table betrayed about lesbian literature and film confirmed my suspicion that Americans often don’t care much about the things that concern people who aren’t like them. The difference, as Seattle’s situation made clear, is that, whereas the conscientious outsider will likely expend some thought and care justifying her reasons for not seeing a film that (mainstream) critics and audiences agree is the film of the season, the mainstream masses don’t bother with realities that don’t concern them.
Even that word—mainstream—troubles me. Who decides which stream should be the central stream, the authoritative path, for depictions of our diverse worlds?
Consider a friend of mine who, three weeks into the fall semester of his second year as a student in a prestigious creative writing graduate program, found himself so dejected he felt compelled to call me at the artists’ retreat. “Half my poetry craft class has dropped. Half! Today, I overheard one guy repeat three times that he would have dropped except the class was ‘stupid and easy’ and so he was going to stick around.”
The course was being taught by a young-appearing African American woman who boasted, among her many qualifications, several books, a Guggenheim, a faculty post at an Ivy League institution, numerous teaching awards, and a position on the Board of Governors of the Poetry Society of America. Her syllabus consisted primarily of books by black women writers. My friend was relatively certain that the people who had dropped the class, all white, and predominantly male, had done so because they just couldn’t stand to be, as he termed it, “decentered.” A sister was teaching a class about writing by black women. Clearly, the content would be “stupid and easy,” if not downright unworthy of the time. What could black women possibly teach about the craft of poetry?
Back in the colony’s dining room, our friend from Long Island added perspective. “Maybe no one’s talking about these writers because they’re not any good.” She was certain this explained her (give it a name) ignorance. If a thing hadn’t crossed her threshold of experience it must not be worth noticing. She took a large bite of pie and smiled through pink lipstick.
I uttered my first words of the evening, which were something like, “Christ Almighty!” and left the table under the guise of returning my plates to the kitchen.
When I came back, the seventh member of our company, a composer from Williamsburg, was beginning to understand Seattle’s point. “This is sort of like blacks in Hollywood. For so long there were so few and the only roles they could play were maids.”
“No black woman has played a maid in a movie for, like, twenty years,” said Mrs. Long Island.
In my normal life as a professor I give lectures on the representation of black women in American film. I had numbers and films to dispute her claim. But I was at an artists’ retreat, not in the classroom. I was supposed to be able to get away from my normal life. Why should I have to be the expert tonight?
“Maybe not maids exactly,” said Williamsburg, “but the point is that there was a limited opportunity for many years and that limited opportunity meant that there was a limited scope of representation for blacks. Isn’t that right?” He turned to me.
Williamsburg was on the path Seattle had tried to pave, but things could turn against her again at any moment. “Help me out here,” Seattle pleaded.
There’s no way around it. When you are the only one at the table, eventually they will always turn to you. “Right,” I said.
It had been barely five days since I’d completed the twenty-eight hours of travel that returned me from my first extended trip to Ghana. I was still jet-lagged. I was feeling a little queasy even before the conversation began. I wanted to make as short work of my involvement as possible. “Sure,” I continued.
“What are you talking about?” Long Island was incredulous. “There is a load of opportunity available to black people in Hollywood today! Didn’t Halle Berry just win an Oscar?”
In the history of the prize, only Halle Berry, as a highly sexualized conduit for the redemption of a white man, has won an Oscar for best leading actress. At the time of our conversation at the artists’ colony, the other two Oscars, for best actress in a supporting role, had been awarded to black women for roles in which they were conduits for the redemption of white people (Hattie McDaniel—as a maid—and Whoopi Goldberg—as a medium). This was before Jennifer Hudson, who had the opportunity to serve as a conduit for the love life and redemption of light and lovely Beyoncé Knowles; before Octavia Spencer, who, in 2011, played a maid; and before Lupita Nyong’o, who played a slave. Of the seven black women who have won an Academy Award for acting, the only exception to this pattern has been Mo’Nique. One entertainment news outlet reported that, as Mary Jane in Precious, Mo’Nique “wore no makeup and even grew hair under her arms” so she could play the role of an abusive mother who was ugly outside and in. That night at the artists’ colony in New York, I told the table what I knew about the poor odds of a black actress winning the favor of the academy if she didn’t play the help.
“But black people are the mainstay of popular American culture. The movies, hip-hop, everything. Everybody wants to be a part of black culture. Everybody loves it. Both my sons are dying to be black.”
There was too much in Long Island’s statement for me to tackle at once. Speechless, I sat with what I thought was a blank face.
“Why are you blinking your eyes at me that way?” She was a mother. She was used to identifying faces like mine: contempt in the guise of indifference.
“Give them two days as a black person,” I suggested. “See what they think after that.”
I was full of fear for these boys from Long Island. They had no idea what they were hoping to get into. And how could they? When and how and why did they embrace black as something they wanted to be? Did the black people they so admired come from staid middle- (to upper-middle-) class families like the one in which I was raised? Likely no. Likely, there was some other experience they were after. When did they first start noticing black people, and when they noticed us, what was it they thought they discovered?
At the end of my first three weeks in Ghana, I found myself in a house with a satellite television system tuned to CNN. I watched the U.S. news for over an hour, then I flipped to a local station and caught the end of a Ghanaian commercial wherein a big-boned black woman walked into a room and every man whistled in admiration. At this point I realized what had been odd about watching the U.S. network after several weeks of not watching American TV. Hitherto, the only television I had watched in Ghana had been either the news broadcast each evening by Ghana TV or Big Brother Africa. (There were eight contestants left when I started watching, only one of whom was white.) The images I saw in television programs, commercials, billboards, and magazines were almost exclusively black, and I could wander around the city for several days without seeing a white face. Outside of the historical context that can’t be ignored in a former Portuguese, Dutch, and British colony, it got so I hardly thought about white people. I loved it when people spoke to me in Twi, assuming I would understand the local language. What a relief it was to see people like me at every turn, not to be the obvious outsider, for a change. But, when I’d watched CNN, I had only seen white people.
When you belong, you can overlook the totality of otherness, the way that being other pervades every aspect of a person’s life. That night in the New York artists’ retreat, I wasn’t yet worried about how all this willful ignorance and erasure would affect my little black girl, as yet unconceived. I was only concerned with myself. I was thinking about how race directs the course of all my actions. My taste in films, who I befriend, the things I choose to write about, all are influenced by the particular position (or number of positions) I occupy in American culture. My otherness manifests itself in what I eat, what I watch, what I read, what lipstick I can wear, where I can walk unmolested.
Our conversation happened to take place in a privileged space—where the work requested of me was to think and to write—but I have had similar conversations at the office, the grocery store, at church, the nail salon, while washing dishes (my own and other peoples’), at the gas station, the dentist’s, a Super Bowl party, in restaurants and bars, with my daughter’s child-care providers, with supervisors who would oversee the advancement of my career, with roommates or lovers with whom I was expected to share my nights and days, during long walks on the beach, and in heated interactions over the copy machine. This is a set of exchanges you can’t get away from if you live in America in a body that looks like mine.
“Look,” I said. I was in the conversation now. I might as well try to help Seattle prove her point. “I am the only black person at this table, which means that I have become the representative of blackness here.”
“I don’t see you as a black woman. You’re just who you are.” Long Island’s nod of support suggested that Pacific Palisades had taken the words from between her pink-glossed lips.
I’ve made the readjustment almost completely now, I wrote a friend after I’d been back from Ghana awhile. I am feeling very American again. Being home means being able to predict the direction an argument will take.
I am certainly who I am (an ornery individual at the moment), though I take umbrage at the idea of limiting my scope with a word like just when it is used to suggest I am a simple person. If I may borrow a phrase from the great poet of our early democracy, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Just in this context erases various complexities and dimensions of my being. There is a danger in refusing to, or tacitly agreeing not to, recognize my black womanness. Black womanness is part of what makes me the unique individual I am. To claim you do not recognize that aspect of my personhood and insist, instead, that you see me as a “regular” person suggests that in order to see me as regular some parts of my individual identity must be nullified. Namely, the parts that aren’t like you. This argument has been made before. I made it again.
“The fact of the matter is that I am the only person of color at this table. The fewer people there are to represent a particular segment of a population, the less likely it is that accurate, or diverse, perceptions will be drawn about that population.” And the more likely, I thought but did not say, that one individual will be asked to speak for the lot. I was in this odd position of both defending and shaking my claim as spokeswoman for the race because someone singled me out. This happened, in turn, because another outsider felt compelled to justify her (hitherto private) decision not to see a film at which she took offense. Seattle was lesbian spokeswoman for the night, and as resident black girl, mouthpiece for the disenchanted masses, I was called upon to back her up.
When you are a conscientious outsider, dinner can be a dangerous and tiring affair.
When I first got back from Ghana, I was ready to turn around and go right back. I had felt a sense of comfort and freedom there that surpassed any happiness I’d known before. There is something undeniably relaxing about being phenotypically one of many (or most) rather than one of few (if any). Perhaps it would be a more stable world if everyone could experience both the sensation of oneness and that of otherness a few times in life. A person who isn’t reminded several times a day about the implications of the color of her skin has time to consider the implications of other things. Having lived a life where my outsider status is called to my attention on a regular basis, it was a noted pleasure to blend into the crowd. In Ghana, I was left free to discover the possibilities of so much unmolested psychic space.
The artists’ colony is constructed to serve a similar goal: to provide a space in which the creative mind can roam unfettered. But considering the conversations that implicated me at dinner, over ping-pong, while walking up the stairs to my bedroom, or while waiting for my breakfast egg, it was difficult to let my mind feel at ease.
There were two sources of experience for the poems I found myself writing at the colony. One set of poems was based on narratives of black people held in or self-emancipated from slavery. The other poems were about visiting the giant fortresses on the coast of Ghana, from whence slave ships left for the Americas. This work was a startling reminder of the many implications and tolls of otherness and erasure.
At breakfast one morning, several of the guests waxed delighted about how their rooms were cleaned regularly, “as if by fairies.” We were living in a mansion. So as to allow us time to create, our meals were cooked for us, our bathrooms scrubbed. We were invited, for the duration of our stay, to behave as if the mansion and its amenities were our own.
There is something about privilege that can place one in a position to erase the realities of others. Those weren’t fairies pushing the vacuum cleaner and cleaning my tub. They were women with lives and flesh and families and histories. My life and flesh and family and history demand that I recognize them where and how I can.