I don’t know what to say other than, thank you so much for being transparent and for sharing your experience here. Rape is far more prevalent than most people realize, and I hope your willingness to share (here and perhaps in other settings) will help another survivor.

Thanks for reading my occasional rants and thoughts.

Mariam

Shades drawn to provide coolness from the heat,
A weird touch interupted me as I tired to sleep.
Loud music playing, but death was coming.
Or am I dreaming?

Drunkened heaviness, hard heart pounding,
Crushing, ripping, pushing, shoveling;
Fighting, trying to stop this evilness, hips, legs,
like being torn from the sockets.
Or am I dreaming?

The music,Not apprepo for this monment
Entering, and tearing at my youth,
breaking my senses..Instant womanhood!
Or am I dreaming?

I wake up.Or is this room heaven
with open arms for protection.
Or am I dreaming?

Sore and in disbelief
His looks confirm the threat of killing.
This is surely death
Or am I dreaming?

Water running, warm currents
eases my pain. As he washes,
Kind, still face, but with no smiles.
Or am I dreaming?

Flinching, and fighting as he drys,
my body with attention given a baby.
Lifting to carry me, for I cannot walk
Or am I dreaming?

Freah,crisp, sweet smelling linens await.
Covers me with softness,
of Mother’s handmade quilts.
The look of evil confirms the threat again.
Or am I dreaming?

I lay, aching, crying, praying, rocking,
I wasn’t dreaming

I think most critics’ problem with The Help, Mississippi Burning, Driving Miss Daisy, and countless other films I haven’t seen is that someone who looks like the oppressor and who benefits from the oppressor’s privilege every day tells the story from the perspective of the oppressed person. I don’t think the movie is as much from that perspective as the book is. Kathryn Stockett was worried about writing in the voice of a black maid, and she did research to find out what she couldn’t have experienced herself. Not having experienced being a maid or an enslaved person, I would do the same thing if I were to write period fiction. but I digress from the point, which is in the paragraph above.

Here’s something getting plenty of monetary support: http://www.firstshowing.net/2011/jamie-foxx-the-latest-rumored-for-tarantinos-django-unchained/

I’m missing how the MLK Memorial illustrates your point. While I don’t believe the Black aesthetic is lacking–I know enough artists and visionaries, including you, to know that it isn’t–I do agree that there is a lack of a “support system to allow the space …” I see this all the time in Louisville, and I know it’s not unique to here because, hey, look at Hollywood. I have a cousin who is an immensely talented and experienced theater professional. He’s put up hundreds of productions all over the world. Since he’s been here the past few years, his entertainment company has put up only a few shows each year (to my knowledge), and that includes at least one major production produced annually for our church. I can’t compare that to Actors Theatre, as Actors has a budget of several million dollars. But Louisville has about 30 community theaters, and most do four or five shows each year/season. Some of those small companies have been runnng for a long time and have built a good fan and donor base. Still, even for long-standing arts institutions, competition is fierce, and the public isn’t really all that into art. Now add on top of that the fact that black stories rarely make it into “The Cannon,” and you have another obstacle. There are not enough black people period, let alone blacks with money, to give black storytellers the kind of funding they need to share their own stories in grand fashion. Hence, we have blogs that are accessible to everyone.

There’s a lot behind the above observation: Who teaches what’s good and what isn’t? Who evaluates what’s good and what’s not? Who publicizes it? One of the (unintentional?) effects of integration is that we don’t have a lot of control over our own stuff anymore. And because “diversity” encompasses much more than race or gender nowadays, I don’t see more blacks in decision-making roles in institutions that are largely white as a realistic solution. And with that, we also have to recognize that Brooks, Wilson, DuBois, Hurston, etc. ARE in The Cannon.

Moving on … “well made and accurate?” First, what defines well-made? I thought Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls” was a train wreck, but most people I talked to loved it (I think for reasons they couldn’t understand or articulate, but I’ve written about that already.) Second, what constitutes accurate? History? See Miles Grier’s comment for a response to that. Furthermore, what is history but a bunch of people’s memories gathered together and summed up? How accurate is memory? How accurate is perspective?

If you’re defining well-made and accurate as written, directed, produced, and performed by the people who lived the experience or their survivors or people of the same racial background as they are–and even if that’s not your definition–I can’t answer how many would go support it. No one can. We’re discussing a subjective business. Kathryn Stockett’s manuscript was rejected by 60 agents before she found one who would take her. Had Toni Morrison written the book, it would not have been such a problem. The Help was a bestselling book first, so you can bet a good portion of the people seeing the movie are people who read the book, and that many of that portion also love Toni Morrison. Attach an unknown author’s name to the same concept and don’t put the marketing machines of Disney and a major book publishing house behind it, and it may go straight to DVD. Happens all the time.

I’ll take your recommendation. Doesn’t really matter to me if you read The Help.

What the movie “The Help” and the MLK Memorial illustrates well is that there is a perception out there that Blacks are not qualified to tell their own stories and that there is a lack of a true Black aesthetic and support system to allow the space for Blacks to become the creator, the narrator and the lead in their own stories and destinies…

It is moments like these that I thank the universe for folks like Oscar Micheaux, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, August Wilson, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, George Schuyler, James Weldon Johnson, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Langston Hughes and Harold Cruse among a plethora of others…

If a well made and accurate movie about Fannie Lou Hamer, Birdia Keglar (???) and the Mississippi Freedom Movement came out today, how many folks who went to see “The Help” would support this movie? “The United States Of Amnesia” indeed…

If you want me to read “The Help” then let me recommend to you that you should read “David Walker’s Appeal To The Colored Citizens Of The World”…One ♥!