A Relational View of Tyler Perry’s Character, Madea

Tyler Perry’s movies top the opening weekend box office statistics for highest grossing films. His book, Don’t Make a Black Woman take off her Earrings is a New York Times best seller. As of today, Perry’s message board had 1,207,673 postings.

Fans credit him with being someone they can look up to; as providing experiences in his movies that make them feel less stressed and uplifted. His work reaffirms their spirituality. His fans embrace him as a survivor like themselves who suffered deprivations and abuse at the hands of relatives.

Norma L. of Toronto, writing on Perry's board, says “as a black woman, I can see myself in Madea.” Madea is the fictional character developed based on women in his family who were strong and independent in his New Orleans’ community. These 'Mother Dears' were tough, but also were big-hearted and are idealized in Perry’s character. They have the capacity to rescue community members from a fate of ‘writhing in eternal pain’* [in the form of drug abuse, prostitution, jail, poverty, hunger and loneliness].

With critics, journalists, and academicians looking askance at his creative productions, his appeal to African Americans begs for explanation. Having attended a day long lecture given by James Fosshage, a self psychologist and NYU instructor in the American Relational Psychoanalytic track, I began to think about Madea as offering an implicit relational experience that fulfills his fan's desires for empathic connection and mirroring.

Fosshage’s model of mind presents the idea that thought first occurs in images and contains more affect and captures more meaning than does the verbal formulation and expression. Because his plays tap so many imagistic modalities: auditory (songs), very (staging and costuming), somatic (laughter, sadness, outrage as physical stimulations), he is communicating with his audience, right brain to right brain.; thereby conveying a deep sense of empathy.

Through Perry’s and the audience’s reverie, they come to agree that Madea understands. Madea mirrors African American women back to themselves as responsible, single, devout yet suspicious of religious folly. They are individuals saddled with responsibilities but no real power and an all too frequent history of abandonment and betrayal. No one is going to exploit the 6’1” Madea. It is through the imaginative joining with Madea that African American women get the revenge or justice that may elude them in real life.

For Fosshage, growth occurs through identification and through the use of idealizing selfobjet representations. In Madea, we have Perry identifying and idealizing the aunt who could aggressively intervene in his moments of abuse. The audience does the same, in turn, using Perry in this way.

In short, he is part of his fan base’s ongoing transformative process in which their existing internal relationships with their self image is being reworked toward a feeling of being effective in the world and achieving a sense of personal and spiritual justice.

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From Fosshage, October 10, 2009, presentation to the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society.

In His Site, We Are All Precious: Intersubjectivity, Unconscious Fantasy and Tyler Perry's Disclosure of His Childhood Abuse

"People are suffering unspeakable, horrific horrors and they live with those secrets that tear them up inside." Terrie Williams author of "Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We're Not Hurting," applauding Perry for publicizing his childhood history of abuse.

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Yesterday, Tyler Perry revealed that as a child he had been seduced by a male church member and also by the mother of a playmate. He was randomly and viciously beatened by his father who also berated him for his love of reading as well as his skin color which was perceived to be too dark. His paternal grandmother washed him in ammonia to cure him of his ‘germs’ in her protest over his treatment by a physician for allergies.


His revelations are part of a media campaign to publicize the film Precious, based on the novel, Push by New York poet Sapphire, herself a victim of childhood abuse. The story is about a pregnant teen who suffers unspeakable and protracted verbal, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse by her mother and her mother's boyfriend. She is barely literate and full of self-hate. But it is a story meant to inspire and like all Perry's undertakings, she is a woman who is rescued from descending into the abyss.

Raised by a seemingly sadistic adoptive mother, Perry’s father was an alcoholic and child molester in addition to being a brutal husband and father. Perry’s mother emerges as a shadow of a person in this first person narrative, appearing to blithely return to and remain with a husband who hounded her at every relentlessly.

Perry and his mother sought protection and solace from an aunt who he recalled threatening his father with a pistol after a particularly fierce beating. It is this aunt who seems to be the woman who fueled his imagination of the gun-toting, wise-cracking, matriarch, Madea. Madea rescues fallen women and children in peril in Perry's wildly successful plays and top grossing movies (e.g., Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Madea's Family Reunion, Madea Goes to Jail, and I Can Do Bad By Myself). Madea is short in New Orleans' lingo for ‘Mother Dear.’

My interest in Perry's character, Madea, lies in the area of his unconscious fantasies. He credits his childhood coping strategy of dissociation with saving him. ". . . in my mind, I left. I didn't feel it anymore, just like in PRECIOUS. How this girl would leave in her mind. I learned to use my gift, as it was my imagination that let me escape."

Where did Tyler go when he left his abuser? Did he go to his aunt's or did he image becoming his aunt? One approach to understanding an artist is to consider their creative works, products of their internal world.

In his movies, mothers are weak, evil, or absent. It is the hardy Madea who must step in to save the day for all involved.

Her ways are far from conventional and give free reign to what Kohut would have called, the archaic grandiose-exhibitionistic self. While Madea can break the laws of gender and heteronomativity, she does so to corral the wayward young women back into the law of the father--to a life free of drugs, prostitution, selfishness, and ultimately to an acceptance of Christ and heterosexuality.

"I owe the little boy that I was in my life." Tyler Perry

The intersubjective approach developed by Robert Stolorow and George Atwood proposes that psychological development takes place in the interactive space of two or more subjectivities. Out of these interfaces grows the psychological structures of the unconscious: the prereflective, the dynamic, and the unvalidated.

The prereflective unconscious contains the organizing principles that form and provide a narrative theme of our experiences. The dynamic unconscious contains all those experiences that are not permitted expression in any form since they would be perceived as damaging the necessary ties between the child and the caretakers. With great difficulty, the contents of the dynamic unconscious can be made conscious.

The unvalidated unconscious, on the other hand, is the repository of the unarticulated aspects of the self because they fell prey to the experience of never having evoked affirming responses from the environment and caretakers.

The unvalidated unconscious fantasies in an intersubjective context arise when according to Stolorow and Atwood, “powerful affective experiences fail to evoke adequate validating responses from the surround. In such instances, the concrete sensorimotor images of the fantasy serve to dramatize and reify the person's emotional experience, conferring upon it a sense of validity and reality that otherwise would be absent. An analogous function may be served by certain types of enactment through which a person attempts to articulate experiences that could never be encoded symbolically.”

This is the role that Madea plays in the creative life of Tyler Perry. He has an endless stream of plays and movies that in the intersubjective frame is an archaic grandiose-exhibitionistic fantasy. I think this because as a person with a background of childhood trauma, it would be reasonable to conclude that when he strove for “excitement, expansiveness, pride, efficacy, and pleasure in himself” these were rebuffed and did not generate validating responses from the environment.

Madea can be seen as an introject, rather than a true self articulation. Madea is an incorporation of his aunt’s qualities out of a need to maintain a connection to his idealized protector. It is an effort, the intersubjectivists wouldsay, that the constant recreation of the Madea character is an attempt to sure up a weak ability for sustaining self-affirmation.

"The artist is the daydreamer for the community...." Jacob Arlow

Thousands of African Americans have stood in long lines to see Tyler Perry's morality tales. His plays easily draw tens of thousands in a single weekend. In heavily African American communities such as Detroit, his films would be shown on 12 screens in a single multiplex.

What accounts for this appeal, when journalists lambast his stereotypes and lack of depth?

Jacob Arolow's thoughts hold sway, "Out of his own daydreams and conflicts, the artist creates a work capable of evoking unconscious fantasy in members of the audience." Tyler's story evoked through Madea is a collective story of loss love, betrayal, abandonment, homeless, hopelessness, exploitation but also of imagined community, salvation, redemption and a better tomorrow.

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Stolorow, R.D. and Atwood, G.E. (1989). The Unconscious and Unconscious Fantasy: An Intersubjective-Developmental Perspective. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 9:364-374.

Vehicles of Expression

Walking is the predominant method of getting around during the New Orleans festival of “Super Sunday.” The Mardi Gras Indian tribes and a host of Mardi Gras icons such as the Skeletons, the Baby Dolls, the Second Liners, and the Jazz bands, parade through their neighborhood streets until they arrive at Taylor Park where the Indians will be admired by the waiting crowds who have been dancing, drinking, eating, and preening in front of each other for hours.

Psychoanalysts are trained to explore the motivations behind why standard practices are in fact standard, or the norm. Their training also prepares them to inquire about the practices that deviate from the norm.

On Super Sunday, I was enthralled by the opulence of the Indian costumes. But also present for admiration were the men who had turned their cars into automotive theatre. My attention was drawn, first to the flamboyantly decorated automobiles, and then to the general issue of those who were getting around by means other than walking and those at the festival who were signaling their use of vehicles either by riding on them or pulling them. These included bikes, strollers, scooters, horses, motorcycles, trucks, ‘floats,’ and even shopping carts.


By sheer force of numbers, men were far more likely to be associated with the use of alternative methods of moving about the parade route and the Park. There were men displaying their artfully designed cars; men selling Bar-B-Que from the back of their trucks; men unloading Indian headdresses from flatbeds; and men motoring down the parade route in assisted devices.

Everywhere I looked, if there were people engaged in other forms of transportation than walking, it would be men: on horses, on motorcycles, and on bicycles. It is not that women don’t do all these things; it’s that they don’t do them there, at Super Sunday festival.
Each year, The Mardi Gras Indian Council and R.E.A.L. (Recreating The Environmental Ability to Live) sponsor “Super Sunday.” It is ordinarily in March on a Sunday near St. Joseph’s feast day. The festival begins at 11:00 a.m. Taylor Park @ Washington Ave. and S. Derbigny where crowds can be entertained by the Mardi Gras Indian Tribes and artists such as Big Al Carson. The Indians begin their procession @ Washington Ave. and LaSalle St. and walk to Taylor Park.

While women, men, transvestites, queer people, masked people, politicians, social activists, tourists, and locals all mingle with the performers, Super Sunday is an event of masculine prowess, creativity, sexuality, transcendence and dominance. No where is this better illustrated than in the comparison between “men’s wheels” and “women’s wheels.”


In his article "Emotional Aspects of Motoring," psychoanalyst Gerald Grumet (1989) suggests that when we are driving, "obsolete childhood struggles are revived and displaced onto our cars, streets, and highways and can involve the “full range of human interactions and emotions." People transfer their emotions about others unto vehicles because of "symbolic resemblances" and can direct aggression of fear to dominating 'parental' rivals such as trucks and buses. Vehicles he conjectures, enable us to use motoring as a way to address our needs for power, control, dominance, in addition, to defense of our territory, opposition to those who oppose us, and even feelings of escape, freedom and release.

It might be said that the desire to standout through a creative product have propelled mostly men to flamboyantly alter their cars. As they stand by their cars and meet the steady stream of admirers, it is not hard to speculate that some feelings may be derived of having gained "love and admiration," satisfaction of having successfully competed, or relief or momentary release from feelings of inferiority. Pleasure can be derived when we are able to signal that we can "confront high speeds, and danger and in doing so," we feel a sense of being released, or of having escaped and that we are freed; are able to achieve. We can also express our sexual or aggressive urges" (Grumet, 1989).

Recent writings on the psychoanalytic theory of masculine identity development include the role of the mother, in addition to the father as a catalyst for the construction a boy's gender role identity. In the past, it was the boy’s identification with his father and his dis-identification with his mother that analysts believed would put the boy on the path to the development of an acceptable masculinity.

As analysts have turned to feminist theory to widen the scope of their understanding of gender formation, gender expression, gender fluidity and disavowal, they have begun to see that the boy’s relationship to his mother creates a life-long yearning to either be with her or be with what she provides (Grumet, 1989): nurturance, affirmation, and adoration.

On Super Sunday, men are able to express a range of subjectivities and are given carte blanche on what affect, desire, or boundary crossing they display.

Women on the other hand are "walkers" or "strollers." Baby carriages and women’s bodies are literally collapsed into the maternal. Hypersexualized women, following an aesthetic that is strongly regional, push strollers as their voluptuous bodies reek of archetypal fertility and availability.

The women with their strollers are ambulatory memorials to bygone days when the men were babies and moved by what Grumet (1989) has described as "mother-powered transportation." Moving without propelling one's induces a sense of euphoria. The contradiction of the "forward movement without effortless motion releases thrill and excitement."

Boys are coerced throughout their childhoods to separate from their mothers least they be known as "momma’s boys," or as a "pussy, sissy or faggot." Psychoanalyst, Michael Diamond (2006) writes that in acquiescing to social pressure to disindentify with the mother, boys lose "a large part of their dyadic connection and pressured to repudiate what he has loss. So, not only is he forced to cut his ties with his mother and lose access to those emotional and physical ministrations and nurturing she provided, but he must devalue what she offered him" and what he has now lost access to in his quest to become a man who is socially approved of.

Throughout their lives, men mourn the “trauma” of being separated from their mother and the security, protection, and adulation she provided. Diamond writes that “he may feel emotionally abandoned without being aware of it . . ., while experiencing his identification with his mother as shameful. This is often manifested in defensive efforts against neediness . . . . and men come to behave like “impenetrable citadels.”
As men allow themselves to slip back in time and slip across bounded identities to become Indians, Skeletons, drivers of hot rods, masters of horses, conductors of motorized vehicles-- they become creators. They create the world of the mother and infant through an abundance of food, the extravagance of costuming/layering, the communal rituals of having a trusted other help dress them; by producing the soothing rhythms of the music, by facilitating a profusion of entertainment choices, and through a glut of readily available intimacy and sex.

From a consideration of vehicles on display on Super Sunday, I would suggest that it is a male dominated space in which men’s unconscious desires for dominance, freedom, and an expanded sense of self (i.e., to be more than an ordinary man) are given full sway.

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References

Diamond, M. J. (2006). Masculinity Unraveled: The Roots of Male Gender Identity and Shifting Male Ego Ideals Throughout Life. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 54,1099-1130.

Grumet, G.W. (1989). Emotional Aspects of Motoring. Psychoanalytic Review, 76,19-36.

MacCash, Doug, Art Critique of the Times-Picayune "Art in the Fast Lane".

The copyright of the article Vechicles of Expression in City of Spirits: Psychoanalysis and South Culture on the T-BIPS blog is owned by Kim Vaz. Permission to republish Vechicles of Expression in print or online must be granted by the author in writing. Contact Kim Vaz at kimmvaz@gmail.com.

Someone to Watch Over Me*: The Practice of Altar-Making in the Mississippi Gulfcoast: The Koerner Family's 40 year Tradition

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It is was 1968 and Pasty and Clyde Koerner watched as their only son, Clyde Jr. set off to fight in Vietnam as a new Marine. Patsy prayed for his protection and turned to that protector of families, St. Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus and husband of Mary. The Koerners are an Italian-German family residing in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi and have constructed altars to the Catholic saint, St. Joseph, annually since 1968. Patsy’s granddaughter Renee, jokingly told me that in the Bay, the Koerner family is known for two things: its’ “bad boys” and their annual altars!

Each year, the family begins its extensive food preparations in February and then opens the altar for public viewing on the annual feast day of St. Joseph which is March 19. By advertising in the local newspaper, they invite the public to submit petitions, view the altar, give a donation to charity, and leave with the important fava (i.e., “lucky”) bean that symbolizes protection against bare cupboards. Attendees also receive a piece of blessed bread which was used in the past by Gulf Coast families for protection from storms.

Situated in Hancock County, in the Gulfport-Biloxi, Mississippi Metropolitan Statistical Area, Bay St. Louis, a city on the Gulf coast, was at the epi-center of Hurricane Katrina in August, 2005. In 2000, the population of the city approximated 8000. Katrina destroyed the majority of the town’s homes and the city infrastructure, resulting in the displacement of over 3000 residents.

For centuries, the city’s residents, like the Koerner’s depended on the sea for their livelihood. Catholic residents mediated the annual threats from the terrible storms through their religious practices. For the Italian Catholics of Sicilian descent, appealing to St. Joseph stems from the legend that their ancestors were delivered from famine through his intervention. In gratitude their Italian ancestors began setting the “table” or “altar” to St. Joseph, consisting of “food,” their ancestors’ most important possession. Overtime, the table setting ritual in churches and in private homes continued and expanded to include thanksgiving for deliverance from job loss, health crises, survival and recovery from natural disasters, and for the granting of various favors.

The field of trauma research supports the use of ritual for healing and recovery from disaster-situations that can lead to posttraumatic stress disorder by creating a separate space away from normal everyday life to mark the traumatic event; by providing an experiential opportunity to elicit memories and feelings that may be inaccessible to consciousness, and by assisting the process through which personal and collective relationships to the changed life-conditions after the disaster are transformed and normalized.

Though conducted within the homes or specific Churches, the public is invited to attend the altar viewings and meals through advertisements in the local newspapers. The occasion then is shared with the extant community, and as such provides a means to experience the presence of some “shared communal protection” from harm.
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Tell me where's the shepherd for this lost lamb

There's a somebody I'm longing to see
I hope that he turns out to be
Someone to watch over me

I'm a little lamb who's lost in a wood
I know I could always be good

To one who'll watch over me

*George Gershwin - Someone To Watch Over Me Lyrics Album: Gershwin Jazz 'Round Midnight

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ST. JOSEPH CATHOLIC CHURCH, Moss Point, MS

Click on the image below to see one of the most beautiful altars imaginable!

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The copyright of the article Someone to Watch Over Me: The Practice of Altar-Making in the Mississippi Gulfcoast: The Koerner Family's 40 year Tradition in “City of Spirits:” Psychoanalysis and South Culture on the T-BIPS blog is owned by Kim Vaz. Permission to republish Someone to Watch Over Me: The Practice of Altar-Making in the Mississippi Gulfcoast: The Koerner Family's 40 year Tradition in print or online must be granted by the author in writing. Contact Kim Vaz at kimmvaz@gmail.com.

FEMA: We All Ask'd For You!* Mardi Gras Revelers vs. FEMA: Public Protest During Carnival after Hurricane Katrina

The act of transgression upon which humour is based, casts doubt upon every preconceived and sacred idea. Moreover, it challenges every idea, and thus brings in a new point of view which debunks and gives the situation a more human dimension. Gabriele Pasquali

Michael Parsons, speaking broadly of the definition of the role of levity in analysis, believes that humor, jokes, games, and ‘play’ allow us to explore our hostile impulses to eradicate wrongs we experience and to mediate our desire to simultaneously ‘know’ and ‘not know’ our painful and traumatic reality. He conjectures that this mediation process occurs through the mechanisms of the comic, the romantic, the tragic, and the ironic.

The comic is expressed by a wish for a happy ending. The romantic involves a quest like journey that ends in the achievement of some objective. Harder to metabolize are the tragic and the ironic. The tragic, says Parsons addresses the trauma, frightening realities of life. The ironic highlights life's paradoxes, ambiguities, and contradictions, offering us some objectivity from the traumatic. Whereas, the tragic shocks us into the recognition of the seriousness of life with its stark deprivations and suffering; the ironic enables us to bear the tragic, not by denying it, but by ‘playing’ with it imaginatively.

Gabriele Pasquali writes that humor “lowers the anxiety to a bearable level” through facing our pain and suffering and working out its causes. Humor transforms us from the sense that we are being devoured “by an unmanageable panic" into a feeling capability and mastery.

Nowhere cane we find a better example of the use of comedy, tragedy and irony than in the expression of disapproval and discontent with public officials and public policy in Carnival spectacles in New Orleans. With its endless ability to adapt to changing conditions, New Orleans Mardi Gras celebrants used Carnival season after Hurricane Katrina struck to mount a collective expression of outrage at failed leaders, failed leadership, corporate greed, and the massive betrayal of public trust targeted directly at the mishandling of Katrina relief efforts.

In the Mardi Gras periods after Hurricane Katrina, floats, tee-shirts, costumes, placards and signs have emerged with characteristic ostentatiousness of past Carnivals protesting the relief efforts.

Leigh C. wrote in her blog about the Krewe of Chaos’s 2006 parade that ‘Hades - A Dream of Chaos,’ was a “masterpiece of spoofs on everything from failed leadership to nasty refrigerators to a ‘Chocolate Divinity’ float whose riders tossed out special cups with the float drawn on them.” She continues, “homemade Carnival costumes included some more blue tarp suits, folks wearing large 45s of the top ten Katrina hits (among them "Up On the Roof" and "When the Levee Breaks"), …, people dressed as MREs (Meals Ready to Eat, given out by the federal authorities to the earliest returning residents), and people in cleanup gear with small graffitied refrigerators, pushing a Katrina Deli cart serving up some nasty treats.”

The Krew of Levee-te, appeared in 2006 steering a faux food cart called “Katrina Deli” which offered a ‘limited menu’ with starters such as ‘Levee Leak Soup’ or ‘Oysters Hepatitis-B ienville,’ entrees such as ‘Bush Baloney Sandwhiches,’ and concluded with selections such as ‘Furniture Upside Down Cake.’

New Orleans Times Picayune reporter, Steve Ritea, commented on the “hurricane humor” from the French Quarters to the suburbs. In the Quarters he interviewed “Mitchell Gaudet, whose costume not-so-subtly suggested the city's getting screwed." Quoting Gaudet, Ritea noted, ‘Look at me. I'm in a giant . . . foam fleur-de-lis with a screw through it, and people are embracing me.’ In the suburbs, during the “the Covington Lions Club and Mystic Krewe of Covington parades, a couple parading vehicles included banners reading ‘1-800-4NO Help’ and ‘Got Insurance -- Sorry That Ain't Covered.’”

PrariePundit, Merv Benson, explained that the Krewe du Vieux “has used its parade to mock corporations and politicians every year for the last two decades.” “The 2006 parade, theme ‘C’est Levee,’ is a pun on the French phrase ‘C’est la vie,’ meaning ‘that’s life.’ He reported that “floats and props built for the Saturday evening parade in the French Quarter included hand-pulled carts elaborately decorated with blue tarps, fake broken levees, cardboard travel trailers and effigies of Mayor Ray Nagin and Gov. Kathleen Blanco. One display asked France to buy Louisiana back, suggesting the state might get better treatment than it has from the American government. And in place of a parade map, the Krewe du Vieux had a ‘projected path’ adorned with a swirly hurricane symbol.”

From a psychoanalytic perspective, humor can be said to have enabled parade goers to become aware that they were surviving the sadistic attacks by government and corporate authorities that came to be experienced as controlling, dominating, and humiliating them. Humorous spectacles were used to subvert authority and to point out its’ absurdities, its’ capriciousness; its’ deviousness; its’self-interestedness; its’ indifference and ultimately, its’ inhumanity.

In turbulent times, humor helps us contain contradictory emotions of the desire for revenge, the desire for justice with the feelings of helplessness and uncertainty that can threaten to overwhelm the psyche. Ribald parody offers revelers the satisfaction of a communal affirmation of their reality and experiential validation of the absurdity of the shared material burdens imposed on them by the officials who have broken the public trust.

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*“They All Ask'd For You,” popular carnival song by The Meters

I wennon down to dee Audubon Zoo

An day all axt fuh you

day all axt fuh you, (fuh who?)

Well day even inquired about chuh'
I wennon down to dee Audubon Zoo

And day all axt fuh you

Duh mounkeys ast,

duh tiguhs ast

And duh elephant axt me too

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References

Benson, M. Saturday, February 11, 2006, C'este Levee Marid Grau parade,
http://prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2006/02/ceste-levee-marid-grau-parade.html

liprap. Tuesday, February 28, 2006 http://liprapslament-theline.blogspot.com/2006/02/happy-mardi-gras-all-this-is-time-when.html

P.j. Huffstutter (March 01, 2006). The Joke is on Katrina, Los Angeles Times
http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/01/nation/na-humor1

Pasquali, G. (1987). Some Notes on Humour in Psychoanalysis. International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 14:231-236.

Parsons, M. (1999). The Logic of Play in Psychoanalysis. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 80:871-884.

Ritea, S. March 1, 2006 Rolling with the punches: Battered and bruised, New Orleans puts on a show for the world, Times Picayune

Photos

Photos of Menu People

Skooksie Photostream
Blindranger http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattewalt/166634355/

Photos of Katrina Deli were taken by me at the Southern Museum of Food and Culture, New Orleans, LA 3/17/09

The copyright of the article FEMA: We All Ask'd For You!* Mardi Gras Revelers vs. FEMA: Public Protest During Carnival after Hurricane Katrina in “City of Spirits:” Psychoanalysis and South Culture on the T-BIPS blog is owned by Kim Vaz. Permission to republish FEMA: We All Ask'd For You!* Mardi Gras Revelers vs. FEMA: Public Protest During Carnival after Hurricane Katrina in print or online must be granted by the author in writing. Contact Kim Vaz at kimmvaz@gmail.com.

The Trope of Revealation: The little Black Girl as Truth-teller in Black Women’s Fiction about Family Sexual Secrets

Eve: Mama keeps stabbing herself in the kitchen! Show her your hands, Mama. Roz Batiste: I think you'd better hush...
Eve: And where Daddy? He's never home. He's supposed to be home sometimes!
Roz Batiste: Listen, you little ingrate. Your father works hard so we can have a house with four bathrooms!
Eve: Not every night he's working, I know he's not!

From Kissi Lemons' film Eve's Bayou

Black women writers have used with great effect, the trope of the little black girl as truth teller of family sexual secrets. In her book, Longing to Tell, Tricia Rose of Brown University’s Africana Studies Department, writes that “black women's distinctive sexual concerns are often obscured under a feminism that defines the experiences of middle-class white women as those of all women. Even heartfelt white feminist narratives about the strength and resilience of black women praise them for their superwoman-like capacity to carry overwhelming burdens.”

Black women have a decidedly different sexual experience than white women in the United States. Dating back from the time of slavery, black women were stripped naked and rapped not only during the middle passage and on the auction block, but also at the whim of their male masters and male overseers. Both black men and black women were forced to have intercourse with one another to produce children that would be sold for profit by their white owners. At the same time, stereotypes of black female desire as hypersexual would serve to justify their sexual exploitation by white men for those who worked in the fields as laborers and in their homes as domestics. The American legal system did not recognize that it was possible to rape black women so; white men could exploit black women’s sexuality with impunity.

As late as 1971, Tricia Rose notes that a judge admonished a jury to not apply the ordinary presumption of chastity to black women. In 1998 a Black female US custom’s official blew the whistle on the unjustifiable and excessive search and detention of black women female travelers at US airports. Black women were nine times more likely than white women to be x-rayed after already having undergone pat-downs and strip searches.

Due to the stereotypes of black women’s sexuality and the blatant inequality in treatment of black women in comparison to white women, White supremacist patriarchal culture has resulted in a silencing of black women around speaking out about the truth of their sexual lives. The cost for any individual woman is just too high. Rose notes that it is black women writers who stepped in to disclose and map out the landscape and subjectivities of sexually exploited black women. Kissi Lemons continues this tradition in her first film, Eve’s Bayou, through her character, Eve, a girl who defies her father, sister, mother, and community moreways to make visible the deleterious effects of the father’s philandering on the family and the price of the family’s denial, i.e. their pathological accommodation to soul murdering social customs.

Psychoanalyst, Bernard Brandschaft writes that “our adaptation to the world is dependent on both the learning acquired in the transmission of culture from one generation to the next, and our ability to challenge the limits of accepted wisdom….In order to self-correct and grow, we must oppose pathological accommodations to retrograde social systems in which some truths remain absolute.” By ensuring pathological accommodation, he asserts, “entrenched systems, preserve their own interests by imprisoning us in archaic bonds.”

Black feminist thinkers such as Alice Walker, gave us an academic way to bring in black theoretical notions of womanism. Womanism stems from the black colloquialism of womanish, which means to act like a woman, to act like an agent, to claim a subjectivity, to tell their own truths, to risk the consequences and weather rejection. The goal of womanish behavior is to create access for others to tell their own stories of marganizaltion and challenge social institutions to move away from its hegemonic regressive trendings. The womanish girl is often an outcast in her own community. No where is there more true of than of Eve, who is the favorite child of either her mother, who prefers her brother or her father whose preference is for his eldest daughter.

Who really want to risk being censure, gossiped about, retaliated against and ostracized which is the normal fate of anyone standing on the margins of society: any ‘othered’ person who dares to make the simple observation that “the emperor is naked.”* It is not every black girl child who can contain the explosive mix of thoughts and feelings that involve getting clear and confident about what she sees happening right before her eyes and then developing the capacity for boldness through weathering the effects of social disapproval for her womanish vocalizations.

Nevertheless, the womanish girl child is one who is sensitive to and identifies with the powerful person in her immediate surroundings. It could be the outspoken, pillar of the community, librarian or organizer or the father who is a preacher who models forthrightness and courage in standing up for his beliefs. She is the one who then imitates her idealized role model and practices speaking to adults in her community. Because of her charm, resoluteness, and intelligence, she is usually given the floor and the affirmation for what she says. That reinforcement leads her to become more informed about topics of interest to the adults in her world and thus she engages them more. Unlike her sister who shies away from making trouble, who takes the abuse on herself to in an often failed attempt to protect her other siblings, who internalizes her own anger rather than talk about it, the little girl who reveals is also willingly to risk the consequences of speaking and disrupting the family and community status-quo.

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This is a synopsis of a paper I presented as part of a A Faculty Panel at the EGSA Conference, “Anything But Safe” at USF on March 8, 2009 along with Adriana Novoa, Ph.D. USF Humanities and Cultural Studies Department who presented, “Are We Truly Enchanted? The Representation of Women in Crisis in Recent Film” and Lycia Alexander-Guerra, MD, Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society who presented “Film Portrayals, Psychoanalysis, and Girls into Women: the Role of Mothers."

References:

Brandchaft, B. (2007). Systems of Pathological Accommodation and Change in Analysis. Psychoanal. Psychol., 24:667-687.

Rose, T. (2004). Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy, McMillian.

Photos are from: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119080/mediaindex

*The Emperor's New Clothes http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html

The copyright of the article The Trope of Revealation: The little Black Girl as Truth-teller in Black Women’s Fiction about Family Sexual Secrets in “City of Spirits:” Psychoanalysis and South Culture on the T-BIPS blog is owned by Kim Vaz. Permission to republish The Trope of Revealation: The little Black Girl as Truth-teller in Black Women’s Fiction about Family Sexual Secrets in print or online must be granted by the author in writing. Contact Kim Vaz at kimmvaz@gmail.com.

What Popular Education Performances such as Cemetery Tours can Teach Us about Mourning

The 15th Annual Halloween Tour of the Cedar Rest Cemetery in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi,” an annual event of the Hancock County Historical Society.

The origins of cemetery tours are steeped in the community’s response to the need to prevent vandalism and raise money to maintain the headstones of gravesites and this is especially so for small towns with historic cemeteries.

Sixteen years, ago Hancock County Historical Society’s Executive Director, Charles Gray, noticed that some of the graves had been defaced with spray paint the previous Halloween. Mr. Gray took it upon himself to stand guard during the next Halloween night. A few society members joined him and they passed the time playing card games.

From this activity evolved the idea of the Halloween tour. According to Eddie Coleman, the editor of the society’s newsletter, The Historian of Hancock County, the tour has three objectives; to “preserve and teach the history of the area, to serve as the October function of the society, and to accept donations to finance the restoration of graves and headstones in the Cedar Rest Cemetery.”

The tour begins at the main entrance of the Cedar Rest Cemetery. Each visitor passes by the seat of the “Keeper of the Gate,” a society member that collects donations.

Once a group of 10 forms, they are led along dimly-lit paths of sand-filled bags with candles to see portrayals of the citizens who are buried there.

Each year, the Society features Kate Lobrano, whose tomb is at the entrance of the Cemetery and whose house the Society officially calls home, and about nine other citizens.

Wherever possible, the Society asks a family-member to portray their relative; if none is available, a society member will play the part. In either case, the actor has wide-latitude on how to portray the citizen as long as the information is factually correct.

Audience members are invited to ask questions and to add their own information to the growing body of knowledge about that local personality.

The Role of Cemetery Tours in Coping with Loss

Psychoanalyst George Pollock writes that creative acts are often associated with adapting to loss. Music, literature, and visual art are ways of expressing grief and memorializing those we love. Pollock explored how many musicians consoled themselves and immortalized their mentors, parents, spouses, children, and friends through the creation of exceptionally complex musical compositions. For example, he notes that the Latin Requiem Mass “had its origins in the prayers found in the catacombs, the underground cemeteries of the early Christians in Rome.” In addition, many musicians composed mourning music as their last acts of creative productions. Mozart for example wrote a Requiem as he was dying. Pollock suggests that creative practices at the end of life could be a way that the dying persons begins to come to terms with their own mortality. In a sense, the person begins to mourn the loss of the ‘self’ before death takes place. At the same time, the creative product ensures that something of the self will remain with its own ‘vitality.’

Creative products then are the sublimated elements of the course of mourning in which a loved one may be honored, one’s feelings about the life and death of a friend can be expressed, and a wish to reunite with one’s mentor can be imagined, and so on.

Mourning is an intrapsychic event, because it puts us in an emotional place of having to come to terms with changes in who we were and with what might have been. Mourning becomes an explicitly interpersonal event during public memorials. Today, Pollock concludes that elegiac works of art are not as common as they once were. Now in our fast-paced world, mourning is a rushed process where attempts are made by external forces (e.g., work and friends) to accelerate our processing of ‘loss, change, and transition’. Thus, the cemetery tour offers an important, yet neglected space and opportunity for helping people adjust to loss.

A cemetery is a particularly evocative setting stimulating a range of reactions from fear, to revulsion, to entrapment, depression, despair, excitement, intrigue and adventure.

George Barnes, a cemetery administrator in Canada, told a local reporter that parents can be skeptical about allowing their school children to take a field trip to tour a cemetery; but as the parents listen to the recitations of the local history, they become very supportive (Battye).

At another Canadian cemetery, named Woodlawn, actors dress in period costume and recount the lives of the departed. According to the same local reporter, a young black man, sits by one of the graves and tells the story of how Isaac Spencer, an enslaved African, escaped to Canada through the Underground Railroad. The local reporter wrote “Portrayals are so realistic and moving that some audience members weep.”

I took Hancock County’s Halloween tour for the first time in October 2008. My own learning during the tour began with heightened enthusiasm because I took it as an opportunity to travel to the town were my parents, grandparents and a host of other relatives are buried. Having recently lost my mother some few months before, the tour offered for me a perfect reason to visit the town of her family, where their roots extend to the mid-1800s.

I so looked forward to this trip. It was as if I would be reuniting with my ancestors even only if in theory. I arrived at the gates of the cemetery with a family friend, Yolande Bradley, who is knowledgeable about the town’s history and happenings. It took a few minutes to get oriented to the dimly-lit setting and small groups of people going from grave to grave. Yolande rounded out and added to the stories conveyed and facilitated a discussion with performers who had known my mother.

The experiential activity not only helped me as mourner connect salient pieces of the town’s history with bits of lore that had been in my family, I gained solace from the repetition of the linear narratives provided by each actor: “I was born;” “These things happened for or to me;” “I died in such and such a manner;” These are other family members who have joined me here in subsequent years; and finally, “This is what my life meant to me.”

The narrative sequencing of each life story, coupled with the actor’s obvious joy in portraying these local notables; the lighted path through the broken ground, with sticks and poles and broken pieces of granite jutting out from unexpected places; to graves and mausoleums all jarringly side by side, coupled with the steady leadership of our guide whose flashlight navigated the tight and uneven lanes, was soothing to my sense of loss and my hopes for reconnection.

I am not alone in this response. One Canadian cemetery counselor, Ceska Brennan, schedules a tour each Mother’s Day and plants a shrub in the “Mother’s Day Grove,” in what she calls a “gentle service of remembrance.” Guests may write letters to their deceased mothers and drop them in the hole along with the new plant. At Christmas time, she hosts “Blue Christmas” in which a tree is decorated with blue and white lights, guests sing Christmas Carols, and fill the tree with white hearts inscribed with messages to their deceased loved ones. Brennan sees this ritual as a way to allow bereaved guests to celebrate Christmas and address any sense of guilt they may feel in enjoying the holiday (Battye).

Witnessing powerful performances offer the transfer of knowledge in which townspeople learn of the legacy, contribution and heritage of their ancestors--instilling pride, pity, disgust, or compassion. Performances provide a pathway by which we can enter an experiential world vastly different from our own to see life’s choices and forces responded to in ways we could never imagine.

In addition, witnessing performances can be a healing balm for the grieving and the distressed by normalizing the ups and downs and inevitable ending of a human life.

Dale Miller who leads cemetery tours as a business enterprise notes that “all the stones we see” at gravesites “were erected not because somebody died, but because somebody lived” (Battye).

From a psychoanalytic perspective, cemetery tours that include historical performances can be seen as communal rituals that help us come to terms with what we have lost and what we are going to lose. Thinking about our own mortality can be threatening. The communal experience of the tour eases anxieties associated with thoughts of our physical temporality in a fun and even inspiring way. The collective participation in the question and answer periods can provide a sense of relief that death is a shared reality and not one meant for us alone. In addition, learning about people we do not know helps us connect with people in the past, stirs up our fantasies of who they were, and provides opportunities to refine our ego ideals (i.e., to make shifts in people we identify with and try to emulate because of their admired qualities). Taking the tour can also allow us to imagine the future. Attending the tour offers a forward way of dealing with our ultimate ending, but in a particularly salubrious way. While we may be “gone,” we certainly will not be “forgotten.”

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Battye, B. 1/21/2002, The lives that were, Report/Newsmagazine (Alberta Edition) Vol 29., p. 45.

Pollock, G.H. (1975). Mourning and Memorialization Through Music. The Annual of Psychoanalysis, 3:423-436.

The copyright of the article What Popular Education Performances such as Cemetery Tours can Teach Us about Mourning in “City of Spirits:” Psychoanalysis and South Culture on the T-BIPS blog is owned by Kim Vaz. Permission to republish What Popular Education Performances such as Cemetery Tours can Teach Us about Mourning in print or online must be granted by the author in writing. Contact Kim Vaz at kimmvaz@gmail.com.