Is Love a Luxury? [#Feminist Friday]

I’ve been working on my script for a few years now. I recently submitted it to a contest because I wanted some feedback on it. The first time around, I didn’t get much help, so I submitted again. This time around, I actually got some useful info and found a way to get a lull out of the script. However, there was something in the comments that stuck with me.

The committee that judged the contest made a comment that the characters in my script seemed to be working class, yet they did not seem to be struggling with issues like foreclosure and other such things. The characters I portray are indeed working class, but I have portrayed them as people who live within their means and live comfortably enough to get by. I’m asking myself, why is that so hard for some people to believe.

I remember reading or hearing something Julie Dash said about people expecting to see the Peazant family in her film Daughters of the Dust toiling away on Sunday. (She also mentioned that she resented people only wanting to hear the choir sing rather than see these black women running a church in this militaristic fashion in Funny Valentines.) This makes me think: why do people always feel that the lives of the working class, especially the black working class, can only be marked by physical struggle in day to day life?

My script is essentially a love story focused on a woman unhappy in her marriage but afraid to leave it. I have to ask myself if my protagonist were wealthy and/or white, would it make it easier to swallow that she struggles with matters of the heart in her daily life. Is she supposed to put her emotions, feelings and desires on hold because she has to work for a living?

Think about this: how many stories do we see that focus on a black woman negotiating the role of a secure love in her life? I don’t mean struggling with her sexuality but everything else that comes with it. Why is it so hard to deal with a black woman who may put on a uniform for her pay in terms of personal desires and matters of the heart? If we fall into that majority of people who do not come under the category of millionaire or even wealthy, are we to be defined solely by our means of survival and divorce it from the rest of that intangible part of our humanity?

I consider myself working class because I live from month to month, barely have savings (definitely not enough to get by if I lose my job) and have no other signs of wealth. Right now, I choose to be alone because I am focusing on my work and my art. I don’t know if I’ll ever be on the lookout for companionship or a significant other. Love is hard and I don’t know if I can handle the complications right now. But what about other women like me who actively seek love to keep and honestly believe they can find a special someone to make that hand-to-mouth life just a little easier? Do they not deserve their own stories?

- Inda Lauryn, Conceding to Kismet

2 Comments to “Is Love a Luxury? [#Feminist Friday]”

Maurice Muhammad 17 February 2012 at 1:53 pm #

Peace and Blessings family

We will never be able to out grow the reality of the condition of our people. Oprah has some land that she owns and lives on, she calls it “The Promise Land” but her people has not made it to the promised land. She made but we are still struggling to make it day to day. So they deal with her as a nigger billionaire remember the property she wanted to buy but they didn’t want to sell it to her. She bought it but she paid 12X what the house was worth. Read the Report on the Negro Family done in 1965 here are some parts of it that explain our condition of which you already know. This helps bring home the point that I’m making in regards to your question.

In the decade that began with the school desegregation decision of the Supreme Court, and ended with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the demand of Negro Americans for full recognition of their civil rights was finally met.
In this new period the expectations of the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights. Being Americans, they will now expect that in the near future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups. This is not going to happen. Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made.
There are two reasons. First, the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for at least another generation. Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment have taken their toll on the Negro people. The harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing. Individually, Negro Americans reach the highest peaks of achievement. But collectively, in the spectrum of American ethnic and religious and regional groups, where some get plenty and some get none, where some send eighty percent of their children to college and others pull them out of school at the 8th grade, Negroes are among the weakest. is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post war trend is unmistakable. So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.
William Copeland 20 February 2012 at 11:10 pm #

This is a dope essay and I just wanted to leave my appreciation. I am a poet and/or writer and/or activism and/or MC. The question of which narratives are in the public eye is so crucial. And I’m from Detroit which has its own string of narratives in the United States. I was reading an article written by a colleague of Spike Lee the other day and he talks about how White people have dominated the narratives of our people, especially in filmmaking

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/movies/2012/01/sundance-2012-spike-lees-co-writer-joins-the-race-conversation.html

I say that to say when it comes to media, we often can’t even recognize ourselves. We don’t get too much media that tells the stories that resonate true to our hearts. And when we speak true, other people think it sounds false because it may not meet their expectations or assumptions.

On the other hand, people ARE struggling. But not everyone is being foreclosed, and people get good jobs although many of those jobs are under attack, being cut back, laid off, etc. My observation is to ground your script in the community that you’re familiar with. I’m sure the working class, low-income, ‘hood, etc. will be evident in a way that is deeper than the stereotypes your classmates are looking for because our community is multilayered like that. You mentioned a script, so I assume you’re talking about film. That gets into a whole layer of complexities I’m not familiar with in terms of the view points of producers etc. Film is SUCH a collective form of story telling. Peace to your journey and to your craft…

Feb201217

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