This year, the roles that won Sandra Bullock and Mo'Nique the Oscars for best actress and best supporting actress respectively shared one thing in common: both were mothers to black children whose size was a significant aspect of the children's characters. The things that differentiated the two roles, however, are disturbing.
Bullock acts as the real life Leanne Tuohy, a Southern woman who took Michael Oher under her wing and propelled him to become a football star. The movie is quite charming, especially as we watch Bullock confront prejudice and different institutional and social roadblocks in her adopted son's path. For instance, when she goes to a government office to begin the process of becoming Oher's legal guardian, she challenges a bored looking bureaucrat about the lengthy line waiting to be served as the staff behind her leisurely drink coffee. This dehumanizing face of the government is basically standard at offices which serve the poor, often weakening the already bruised spirit of the poor to make any effort to improve their lot. She also tells off a spectator at a football game when he repeatedly makes snide remarks about Oher. Later on, when she goes to look for Oher at the projects where his birth mother lives, she blasts a young black man - visibly the kingpin of the neighborhood - by citing the stereotypes of Southerners as Republicans, Bible-belt Christians and NRA members to inform him that she would make his life a living hell if he so much as touched her son.
Mo'Nique on the other hand, stars as the mother of Precious in a disturbing movie about a young girl who fantasizes about being thin and white, which is considered beautiful. Mo'Nique's character is a mean, brutalizing woman who inflicts both physical and emotional suffering on her child. Unlike Bullock's character who is an adoptive mother, Mo'Nique is the birth mother, not much different from Oher's mother who is too burdened with her own problems to care for her child. In both instances, the black birth mothers act in complete opposite of their expected role to nurture their children. There are moments when the films are sympathetic towards them, which in turn depict the women as human beings who are simply overwhelmed by life, but that is not enough to redeem them.
The underlying theme of the contrast between Mo'Nique's character and Bullock's is a fundamental one: that black women are having children whom they are unable to raise. Worse, they inflict such profound damage on their own children. We have seen this before in movies such as Losing Isaiah, in which Jessica Lange's character raises the son of a black woman played by Oscar-winning Halle Berry. Berry's character abandoned the child when she was a junkie but later fights to get the child back after she cleans up her act. It is also significant that the character which won her the first and only best actress Oscar by an African American woman also referred to her son's weight in unflattering terms and later had an intimate relationship with the man who executed the child's father. And that that movie Monster's Ball was produced by the director of Precious.
Another film is the French language Va, Vis et Deviens (Live and Become), in which an Ethiopian boy is smuggled into a program taking Ethiopian Jews to Israel in order to rescue him from starvation in his home country. He is adopted by a French-speaking Israeli family and has to confront prejudice, including participating in a debate in a synagogue in which he proves (justifies, in my view) the humanity of Africans. The only other significant black woman in the film is a prostitute in the streets of Israel, whom, when one thinks of it, is at the risk of giving birth to a child she cannot raise.
The white women in all these movies choose motherhood, unlike the black women who are thrust into motherhood. Their stamina and their benevolence are heightened by the fact that they do the unexpected, which is to cross the racial barrier to reach out to black children in distress. Meanwhile, few have heard of the movies like the one about Mary Thomas, the mother of the NBA star Isiah Thomas, who single-handedly struggled to protect her nine children from the crime and poverty that surrounded them.
The damage inflicted by the difference between the two models of motherhood might not have been so potent if it ended with the movie credits. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Precious caught the attention of the wider public thanks to the two black media and entertainment powerhouses: Oprah and Tyler Perry. The collaboration of Oprah and Perry with regards to Precious is not surprising. The abusive or mean mother is not new to Perry's films, as we see in Madea's Family Reunion and Daddy's Little Girls. Similarly, the foundation of both Oprah and Perry's success lies in stories of redemption which are preceded by such brutality, that it is unclear whether a sobbing interview on Oprah or repentance at the church altar in Perry's movies is able to redeem the perpetrator of violence, let alone the victim who has to live with the consequences of that violence. Moreover, the violence has a stronger impact on the viewer's mind because more time is devoted to watching and listening to the details of brutality while the story of redemption and recovery is squeezed into the last 5 or 10 minutes.
But portraying black and African women who are unable to raise their children is still not as bad as seeing actual African parents give up their children to white families in order to give them access to the life they don't have. The Ethiopian mother of Angelina's adopted daughter and the father of Madonna's adopted son gave their blessings to the pop stars, while the American families which adopted Haitian children without following the right channels were released when the Haitian pastor who arranged the adoptions provided proof that the parents had willingly given up their children.
While one can understand that poverty is so debilitating to parents that they cannot raise their children, there is also good reason to wonder whether there has been a shift in the way African peoples consider and face today's challenges. After all, black and African parents in previous generations endured worse conditions with determination to raise their families. Under slavery, some black women did all they could to escape with their children from the brutal social conditions. Sojourner Truth extended her role of liberation from motherhood to rescuing her people from slavery. Under colonialism, African women and men fought against their oppression and the dispossession of the future of their children. In independence, rural mothers with little education put up a strong challenge to the Moi government when they insisted that the government should release their sons who were in jail without trial. But in recent years it seems that we are offering our children to people from the very communities who oppressed and continue to exploit us. In other words, we seem to have given up.
If such is the case, it is easy to understand why. Every disaster faced by African peoples worldwide, as the case of Haiti demonstrates, evokes such outpouring from the world and aid to the victims of the catastrophe. While one cannot fault the aid from the states that have exploited African peoples in the first place, the enduring result of this aid is not love that transcends racial boundaries but the broken spirit of Africans, emptied of their determination to make it on their own, and increasingly addicted to dependence on the West.
From there, we accept and are subjected to insults in the name of aid. A few years ago a New Zealand woman offered to help Kenya's starving population by sending supplies of dog biscuits. And recently, a friend of mine was told by a British philanthropist in Uganda who, believing the myth that girls were not going to school because they did not have sanitary towels, provided the commodity only for the girls to tell him that they still wouldn't go because they did not have panties. Assuming that this story is true, my friend argued, something is surely amiss when girls stoop so low as to make their personal hygiene the concern of a man, let alone a European one. And, she rightly asked, if women of our mother's generation went to school under even more dire conditions, how is it that today's girls are so crippled by a natural phenomenon which every woman faces?
The answer lies in a phenomenon that is becoming common in many places that have been corrupted by NGO's. People are now requesting payment for doing things which are designed to benefit them, cynically imitating the NGO workers that beg for money to provide services which they should be demanding of their own governments.
Naturally, there are layers of dominance and exploitation, from the Western governments which hold African countries at ransom to the African elite who take loans in the citizens' names but pocket the money to maintain themselves in power. And then there's the average charity giver in the American suburb or European village who has been convinced that they can accomplish the maximum change in Africa with the minimum effort of sending a few cents per day or a few dollars per month. Not surprisingly, they don't realize that while they are flooded with images of self-congratulatory white philanthropists in the midst of broken black people, they never see broken white bodies on their screens. All we saw after 911 were the dust-covered firefighter heroes, and Al Jazeera faced the brunt of US wrath when they screened images of dead US soldiers and personnel in Iraq.
The effect of all this theatrical outpouring of sympathy is that the spirit of the average African is broken. Increasingly more Africans begin to act like or believe that they are poor because they are Africans and not because they are impoverished as Africans. They realize that the best shot at providing their children with a better life is by handing them over to a European, as did the Ethiopian parent whom Bono claims gave over his child, telling Bono' "You take it, because if this is your child, it won't die." The determination that led Africans to fight slavery and colonialism, and which should help us hold our governments responsible for providing services to the people, has been smothered partly by the proliferation of images of black people as requiring help rather than struggling to overcome the obstacles in their path.
Granted, one can argue that the movies which portray struggling black mothers do not portray the reality of the majority of black women who battle great odds to raise their children. Or that for every Sojourner Truth were many more black women who were unable to overcome their conditions. Or that the extended families and communal solidarity which cushioned children and parents from the effects of dysfunctional families has now been replaced by the dispersion of Africana families across state, national and international borders and overwhelms us in a way that slavery and colonialism did not. But that does not change the fact that the images of distressed black mothers are now accepted, excused or even promoted by Africans themselves. The heroes in popular culture are not the black and African women and men who overcame adversity to protect and raise their children, but the rich donors who pour money into delivering children from those parents and into effortlessly raising those children. And so Oprah is a hero for joining the ranks of the Jolies and Madonnas, despite the fact that she doesn't have to deal with the daily drudgery of taking care of the South African students in her school whom she refers to as her daughters.
Telling stories of African women who overcome their adversities thanks to the dollar an American kid gave out of his allowance, rather than to the work they did in turning that dollar into an income for their families, is inherently demeaning. It equates the gesture of a European child to that of an African adult. If we cannot change the conditions that make Africana women struggle to raise their children or give up on raising them at all, which we should, the least we can do is extol those who manage to raise their children despite adverse conditions. Such fictional or real life heroines are needed to provide strength, resolve and determination to the people who refer to Africa with the maternal metaphor of the Motherland.
