By shelz.
When I was old enough to understand the world wasn’t all pixie sticks and pink unicorns my parents started building my literacy and my knowledge of the African-American experience by force feeding me books on everything from the transatlantic slave trade to Bessie Smith to the Tuskegee Experiment. The very first book they gave me that I read without the threat of solitary confinement was Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.
Raw, honest, brutal, beautiful, maddening, saddening… there aren’t enough adjectives. The poems are about our lives, our love or lack thereof for ourselves and the necessary bonds we share as black women. Then the choreopoem was turned into a play in 1977 and 33 years later that play has been adapted to the big screen…sigh… by Tyler Perry.
I heard that news months ago and wanted to cry. Tyler Perry makes movies that celebrate our stereotypes, not our triumphs. His self-editing eye is weak at best. He’s responsible for Meet the Browns. For the love of all that is breathing on God’s green earth, someone needs to fix this! I still felt that way this morning, until I saw the trailer.
I don’t know if it’s the warm fuzzies from being re-introduced to something so important from my childhood or just seeing all these beautiful black women in a film together that isn’t about hair or female prisons, but it gave me the chills.
The dialogue in the trailer is lifted directly from Shange’s collection of poems, so it appears Tyler hangs close to his blueprint. I don’t know many black women who haven’t read this book, so the relationship the cast has formed with Shange’s words over the years should have helped Perry in steering his ship and just from watching this snippet it appears Perry brought his visual A-game or at least some talented help in that area.
There are a lot of folks who aren’t going to give this film a chance because it’s Perry’s work. However, this cast deserves our support and this buried treasure of a book deserves a new audience. I still won’t be a Madea fan, but if he respects Shange’s piece, I’ll be happy he was able to add something positive to its legacy, a legacy that book really doesn’t have right now. And that saddens me more that Perry helming this project does.
[pro-player width=’455′ height=’344′ type=’video’]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLnJt_KVsJY[/pro-player]
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