Let Her Be Born & Handled Warmly: Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls on Seattle Minds

Tonight is a big event at the Egyptian Theater: It’s the soldout screening of Tyler Perry’s new Hollywood adaptation of Ntozake Shange’s Third World feminist classic play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf—followed by a discussion that’s bound to get heated, about representation and race and power and feminism. (For those of you who don’t have tickets, I’ll be writing about it and Tweeting if I can. Follow @jengraves, and back here on Slog.)

The question is whether Perry—the creator of the horror that is Madea—is capable of bringing any nuance to the screen at all. He specializes in ham-fisted melodrama. As Seattle artist and writer Christa Bell puts it for Ms. magazine’s blog,

It doesn’t make representations of black women any less abominable when they are brought to the screen by black people. Precious was directed by Lee Daniels and produced by media moguls Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey. Both Daniels and Perry have been accused of creating demeaning and stereotypical depictions of black women, a charge that suggests the internalization of phobic representations is a phenomenon that knows no gender or racial boundaries. As the proverb goes, when the ax came into the forest the trees said, “the handle is one of us.”

There are two other good pieces by Seattle writers on Ms.. From Seattle University scholar Mako Fitts’s essay, “Can Tyler Perry Pull Off a Black Feminist Masterpiece?”:

Black cultural critic Todd Boyd of USC argued that all of Perry’s films “demonize educated, successful African Americans,” which plays on longstanding issues of class conflict within the African American community. Many remember the infamous public feud between Spike Lee and Tyler Perry (Lee compared Perry’s films to Amos and Andy). But who are we—with our playa-hater degrees (PhDs) and elitist artistic standards—to judge what the masses find tasteful? We have to resist the temptation to form dichotomies between artists whose work runs the gamut from quality to coonery.

And C. Davida Ingram—artist, writer, and arts educator at Seattle Art Museum—provides grounding for those new to Colored Girls in her “10 Things to Know.” (Check Helena Andrews on The Root to see the view of it all on The View.)

It also turns out that one of the original cast members lives in Seattle: Poet Nashira Priester (then named Nashira Ntosha), who’ll be in the audience at the Egyptian tonight. That original performance took place in 1974 at the Bacchanal, a women’s bar outside Berkeley, after which the play traveled to Broadway and then everywhere.

In a phone conversation last night (after having dressed up as “a depraved ballerina” the night before for Halloween, because “every self-respecting ballerina needs a little depravity”), Priester said she’s got lots of questions for the movie tonight, and lots of hope for the talk afterward.

She didn’t want to deliver a judgment on Perry’s work up to now. But she did say of For Colored Girls, which is the name of the film, “He’s taken the rainbow and the suicide out of it, so that already kind of purifies it. … I’m sure he’s looking for hits. Everybody’s looking for hits.” “When it comes to class,” Priester continued, “I don’t think he gets it. I don’t know which class he’s in, and I don’t think he’s doing an authentic portrayal of either one.”

When Priester met Shange, Priester was already a successful radio broadcaster, co-founding KPOO-FM community radio in San Francisco, the first black-owned radio on the West Coast. Priester was part of the Third World Women’s Collective, and she gave the great name to Jessica Hagedorn’s West Coast Gangster Choir (the name came to Priester in a dream).

In Priester’s view, the substance has been sucked out of American political life in the years since the Vietnam War. “Everyone passionately believed we didn’t need as much war, we didn’t need as much male oppression,” she said. “You could pretty much turn to the woman next to you and find some cohesion. Now, you just sit on your hands, because you might turn around and find Christine O’Donnell.”

Priester’s description of Sarah Palin goes like this: “She is patently insane, or not a student. These people don’t read.”

Among other things Priester’s hoping for tonight is some talk between the sexes. “I hope enough men show up so some intelligent brothers will weigh in. A lot of men are dreading seeing the film because they didn’t really like the play.”

Here’s Perry’s trailer:

And here’s a poem by Priester, which ends tellingly:

Soul Bootcamp
by Nashira Priester

dare you sit alone in parish . . . . . hoodlum,
more to music than talk paints truths vivid,
wish for wealth outcomes parrot Afrique’s drum,
more to understanding than to live it.
categorize lipsync poet hymnal,
whispers conjugate of wartime’s soirée,
probing for subliminal criminal,
ev’ry day a night; ev’ry night a day.
sorghum solvency charity bootcamp,
shortcuts keep you paddling bloodstream downstream,
finds you marching sleepily to death clamp,
touch bill haplessly another man’s dream.
my scheme for you; you find battle’s glory

let your tales stand tall, tell your own story.