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Mya B’s
Silence: In Search of Black
Female Sexuality in America
Exploring Sexuality from
a Black Perspective
Review By Rudolph Lewis
I like very much what Mya B has done with
the digital camera. Her first full length documentary,
Silence:
In Search of Black Female Sexuality in America, partakes of
a full-blown movement by conscientious black artists to put the
new technology to the task of our liberation as a people. Mya B
daringly undertakes to bring to focus our American heritage of sexual
puritanism and hypocrisy, a subject that
is only undertaken casually, though sexuality is such a strong undercurrent
to the stability of all our lives as Americans.
Mya B’s major point is that silence rules
black sexuality, particularly, black female sexuality. It
was Dr. Hilda Hutcherson (I believe), one of the featured authorities,
who said
her mother gave her this sexual prescription and nothing more:
“Keep your pants up, your dress down, and your legs closed.”
Dr. Hutcherson is a woman quite educated and middle-class, a
professional. So in her
case, sexual repression may have in a Freudian way transferred
energies into a certain kind of discipline, focus, and drive for
success. But Hutcherson concludes that her puritanism decimated
the intimacy between her husband (whom she loves) and her, and
they divorced. The relationship could not be reconciled.
Mya B interviews a good cross-section of
Black women, beautiful and often luscious, old as well as young
adult women in their 20s and 30s. That this silence
occurred for
this age group, children of my generation, suggests that the
sexual
revolution of the 70s and 80s did not run very deep in matters of
sex as it plays out in black life. So the black Baptist
preachers seem to have the last word on black sexual ethics,
these days. And their ambivalence toward sexuality is legendary,
witness Jesse Jackson.
Mya B puts forth the argument that black female sexuality is
governed more by the inadequacies of black Protestantism,
puritanical to the core, and unable to confront matters of sex and
sexuality beyond the proscriptions in the Bible. The attitude
is, Don’t ask, don’t tell. Be silent. Thus the general response of these young women is that their mothers told
them wait until marriage before sex, and nothing more. They all thought it
was good motherly advice. Few however followed it.
There was an Afrocentrist also who
spiritualized black sexuality into Maat, again a return
to ancient texts as a means of resolving post-modern realities. He says he and his mate
pray before they have sex. He thought that was light years
beyond the stereotypical structures in which the West has placed
black sexuality and particularly black female sexuality.
In the Manichaean world of black sexuality
in America, Mya B points out that there are two stops for the
black female: Jemima and Jezebel, one undersexed, the other
oversexed.
Both females have biblical correlates, and
both command in their own manner. Jemina is always rotund with a
scarf tie to the front. Her breasts are ample, and that was
necessary for she had to nurse not only her own children but
also those of her mistress. And in her affections she was thrown
into an emotional dilemma, the black baby (boy) at her breast is her
love and her blood; but she knows her realistic hope lies in the
affections of the white child (boy) on the other tit.
Opposite of Jemima, Jezebel does not give
way to the airy hypocrisy of Virginia patriarchy. These black
women know American white men, their need for slave cabins,
Harlems, and gangster honeys. And the dark of night. These
Jezebels know sexuality stark naked
stripped of romance and the Church as a field for power, for
struggle, or the
submission to power. It provides advantages and opportunities.
The few strippers interviewed said they loved to be sexy, naked,
dancing before an audience, and I assume, an audience that has
dollar bills to spend, the more the better. A female acquaintance concluded that
the whore was lying about her liking her job. I’m not quite so willing as she to abuse
what now is called “sex workers.” I’m a union man.
One of the most enlightening pieces of
Silence:
In Search of Black Female Sexuality in America is a rape
scene, repeated like a leitmotif. I’m uncertain about the source of the dramatization.
The scene has its sexual ambiguity on one level, and its shocking
revelatory aspect on the other. It takes place in a barn (or a
horse stable) on the hay, a beautiful, well-limbed chocolate
woman drenched in sweat and horror fights off the advances, the attack of a
white man, her master, presumably, or maybe an Irish
"nigger trainer." One senses, on one hand, why such a possession
(such a woman) is desirable; the other, is that the camera pans to
five or six black children watching the rape, and back to the
rape.
One comes to the radical conclusion: we are
the children of that rape, that we blacks of America are bastards. And that
America has been indeed SILENT on that issue of rape. Where all
these yellow babies come from, one is afraid to ask. We should
ask Nathaniel Turner's mama; she'll tell how it works, how it
happens, off the slave ship and in the homes of good Christian
white men..
It is something we
black folk should just get over, recommends the suburban soccer
mom. That’s what counseling and psychoanalysts are for. "Get a
hold of yourself, get over it!" This callous attitude toward the
profundity of black suffering, of course, is derived from the
ignorance of black life, by both blacks and whites, old and
young. We, it is not understood widely, are a people born in violence, much like America,
shaped by violence, and we have been slaughtered by outrageous
gang violence (entire villages and towns), and by torture and
lynching. There is a great measure of shame attached to this
existential reality of black life in America, this
vulnerability, this centuries long courting of death by black
men to carve out their own human reality.
Is there any psychoanalyst, guru, living
saint, or black Baptist preacher capable of healing such a chasm within
the black American psyche. We ask too much of individuals in
curing individuals of a dilemma so encompassing, so horrific. None should
expect that Mya B with her documentary
Silence:
In Search of Black Female Sexuality in America to resolve such a dilemma.
But I think Mya B’s film is a good start, despite its
shortcomings.
The major flaw in the argument of the film
is that there is an attempt to discuss black female sexuality
without a discussion of black male sexuality and white male
sexuality and the entanglement of the two. For it has always
been white men who (their cultures which) have established the
structures in which black sexuality has operated. And those
structures set black men and white men at odds, with black men
always in the weaker power position, that struggle undermines
societal accomplishments, thus decreasing their availability as
scholars, business men, family men, and respect from black women.
There is a kind of mother-child relationship
that exists too often between black men and their women. Too
much teenage love unresolved in the lives of black women. One
senses that black female sexuality has yet to really mature.
That may result because black women have not yet truly dealt
with the male sexuality issues of black men, and their
existential implications. In these days and times of evangelical
sway and republican ideologies of power at any cost, our
middle-class leaders tell us, in the name of self-reliance that
we cannot blame white people for anything, witness Bill Cosby.
Unfortunate, today we have the prevalence
of female positions that are oriented too much around the
personal (witness Oprah), outside the context of the larger struggles of black
life. Let me point out to you a statement made recently by spoken word
artist Ro Deezy, known also as "Sister Cypha":
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You
cannot change a person. Too often, women hang onto unhealthy
relationships (both intimate relationships and same-sex
friendship) for the sake of having someone around. We need to
learn to stop identifying ourselves by our relationship status.
A lot of women stay in unhealthy relationships as a result of
their assumed inability to cope with the sadness or emptiness
that they may feel if they leave.
The
truth is, if you are in a bad relationship, chances are, you
already feel sad and empty. It’s one of the oldest saying in
the book, “you can do bad by yourself.”
"Sister
Cypha," www.Femmixx.com
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Black
women sessions are filled with stories of their unhealthy
relationships with black men after the evening of pleasures has
resided. Many black women however have managed to disassociate
their sexuality from the church and even from men, though they
continue to have relationships with both. I was quite
shocked when I first heard a church-going friend speak in terms
of being "serviced." Of men making "service"
calls, or as the more hip call them, "booty calls."
Mya B’s film is not a Ken Burns
production. But I think she’s on her way to that kind of
artistry and
professionalism, and thoughtfulness. The dvd is worth any value she
places on it. I recommend it highly. Though it contains nudity
and semi-nudity (African slaves), I recommend its instructional
value for older teenagers, especially those of high school
age. It might indeed be an icebreaker for parents to use
in ethical and rational discussions about sexuality in
America with their teenage daughters and sons.
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Promotional Synopsis This
74-minute documentary explores the reasons for sexual silence in
the black community with historical facts and testimonies that
dates back to slavery and the myths that were created about black
women from slavery, the Jim Crow era, and up to now. In
this documentary, fifteen black women in Chicago from all ages,
backgrounds, and professions speak for the very first time about
their sexual wants, needs, and desires, aiming to clarify these
sexual misconceptions and reveal the truth about their sexuality
"in their own words." In the age of
misogynist hip hop, as black women are portrayed as
"freaks," Mya B sets to destroy the present sexual myths
about black women. Among those interviewed, Little X and Nzingha
Stewart, two well-known black music industry and the societal
impact of the "video hoe" images. Mixed
with melancholic music, film clips, and hard-hitting interviews
from every-day people, professors, and music video directors. This
film takes us on a journey into American history, unveiling
the hidden skeletons that lie deep in the bedrooms of many slave
owners. Mya B can be contacted at 718-398-0725 or myabrooklyn@aol.com
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updated 29 September 2007 |
