Towards The Human: On Loving&Killing Black Women
What doesnât kill her
maims her, makes her superwoâ
         man (!) to be studied.
from A Swarm Of Bees in High Court by Tonya M Foster
Black women receive the kind of compliments that end up with maimed souls, depleted bodies, and a mind that might as well no longer be their own; and still, thatâs called love. What Black women are loved for is what kills them, precisely because it was never about them as much as it was about what they represent.Â
Worship does not matter much when all that is left is exhaustion, and it matters even less when what they adore is the corpse they sucked dry to make the altar. It is a bold (and controversial) proposition to call those effusive public love letters deadly; it can even be called crass ingratitude. Though the question remains: what does it mean to only love the mother/daughter/sister/nursemaid/sex provider/lifeline, that is, a role, and not the bare, real, flawed, flesh bearing humanity of Black women?
Black women draw the superhuman-ess they are so praised for from the unnecessary but continuous pain that surrounds their existence: itâs not that all they do is suffer, itâs that all they are deemed to be worthy of by the world at large (and that world is large) is suffering. A certain dose of inhumanity accompanies Godliness, and in the case of Black womanhood, there is more than enough inhumanity to go around. What resides at the core of much of the love that is doled out to Black women (expressive, even loud love) is awe at how bravely, how deeply they endure. Which doesnât mean much without the complete eradication of the conditions that create their suffering
This where we arrive at what Trudy (the creator, curator, and writer of Gradient Lair) terms a love that is really violence; a love whose mealy mouthed flatness disguises the fact that it ends up much the same way as with outright hatred, with the kind of living death that can only be described in those words (again!):
What doesnât kill her
maims her, makes her superwoâ
         man (!) to be studied.
from A Swarm Of Bees in High Court by Tonya M Foster
