For a long time, I wondered why my father and his family seemed so...determined to stamp out my more whimsical nature. If whimsical is the word I'm looking for...
They were all about practicality and work. Finding your role and sticking with it. Unusual behavior was looked down upon... However, within each relative, there was an inkling of the fantastic. An uncle who enjoyed Lord of the Rings, an aunt whose attention would drift away when she heard classical music... They were hiding something.
I think that my family was a perfect example of the truth lingering within black culture.
See, I believe that black people have stunted imaginations. This is not to say that they CAN'T imagine. It's just...they're afraid to let go. Too many decades of being forced to live in the "real world". On top of that, we've become a painfully introspective people, to the point that we can't get out of our own heads. While the entertainment world swings on its pendulum from introspective to escapism, black people remain firm on introspection, thinking that if we focus on ourselves enough, everyone else will notice.
Our fiction is usually very mundane. Our heroes are wealthy, with marital problems. Our villains are threats to family and community. Even our superheroes slug it out in the ghetto. There is no magic. There is no wonder. Not even in our churches. The wonder of Biblical stories are broken down into real world applications (this is NOT a bad thing). As such, our children grow up learning not to dream as children do, but as adults do. Not to entertain fantasies, but to buckle down, man up, and learn what role you were built to play. It's almost like the black child is...dead.
But then I look at our free spirits. Our Muses. The Musicians. Ever notice how many of them have alter egos? Fifty different names? They start off making music we can dance to. Then they start making music we should think about. And then...a select few of them fly off the known path and go for the abstract. The fantastic. And what happens? We, black folk, give them that suspicious, old church-lady look...and utter a collective, "Mm, mm, mm. Lord have mercy. Child done lost his mind."
And it is at that exact moment that white audiences truly notice them. If you hadn't noticed, most "white" entertainment is...escapist. Introspection is haaaaard for them, because they don't quite know who they are. They can't unite under one mind. They are just as lost as we are. But, man...you give them a crazy musician and they love it! And...they are the dreamers. The creators. The ambitious. In more things than just music. They have no real sense of community...but they can dream.
Black people need dreams. We have community. We focus so much on it, I fear we might break it. But we need to dream beyond wealth, fame, musical/athletic prowess. There is a whole world of pure imagination out there that the majority of us don't even entertain anymore, and honestly... That saddens me.
But we will find our way back. One myth at a time.
J
3 comments:
I hear a target audience a-bubblin'...in other news, this made me think of you
http://marshaldcarper.blogspot.com/2011/10/skip-line-how-i-beat-system-and-got.html
A few years back, I organized an online project- The Remyth Project ( http://yeloson.livejournal.com/530108.html ) which was basically about people of color writing stories, poems, ideas, myths- reclaiming what is ours and our rights to definition.
As a Chinese American, obviously my experiences and the experiences of my community isn't the same, but I have seen what I call the attenuation of imagination in many POC groups in America. I feel a lot of it comes from/with the lack of POC heroes in media.
Heroes represent hopes and ideals and it's no wonder that white folks get upset whenever POC want any kind of hero who breaks what their expected molds of us are.
Honeyhunter,
I agree. The funny thing is that most of the new POC heroes are pretty much taking positions once held by white characters. I'm talking mostly about comic books here. It's like fictional affirmative action. That sad thing about that is that it's mostly "white" companies making changes for business, not a creation of new legends or heroes.
I think each cultural group needs to re-establish its mythologies, but at the same time, I think a new American mythology needs to be made. One that celebrates the nature of our nation to absorb the best and sometimes worst attributes of the cultures it encompasses.
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