One of my favorite movies is Sweet Home Alabama – the bulky twang of the southern accent dripping heavy from every colloquial exchange is comforting and vaguely reminiscent of my childhood living in Florida. Indeed, the scenes illuminating the sticky warmth of a typical summer’s night, thick with fireflies and Spanish moss, breathe life into an otherwise stale plot of unrequited love and a crisis of identity. But what really puts a smile on my face are the sultry beginnings of the thinned guitar notes of Lynrd Skynrd’s signature anthem “Sweet Home Alabama,” and the subsequent automatic shuffling of feet and rhythmic bodily jerks belonging to white faces, as if responding to a tacit battle cry. That portrayal of collective togetherness and understanding is both enviable and alluring. And I find myself looking on and feeling a sense of wanting to belong, but realizing quickly that I am still an outsider to the culture being portrayed – a culture ascribed to the collective majority in the movie.

I am an immigrant, transplanted to Tallahassee, Florida from an under-developed country. And although I lived in Tallahassee from the age of 8, well before my formative years, I still had to learn and eventually appreciate the “culture” of the south, as opposed to having this process occur naturally. But one of the things I learned was that there were parallel historical narratives that provided the contextual flavor of the “southern experience” – one written by blacks and the other written by whites. And although it is believed that history has a tendency to be re-written by its victors, there is nowhere else, than in the South, where visually these parallel narratives exist, unobstructed by one another, polarized and in plain sight for the world to see. Imposing pillars of antebellum architecture that stand tall as if in competition with the freed masses of blacks now armed with self-worth, identity, and direction – these homes remain scattered across large fields in the Deep South as a reminder of a spotted past. A past that spelled doom for countless many that look like me.

But when I watch movies like Sweet Home Alabama, that proudly portray the south from the perspective of a collective white majority – rich with waving confederate flags, re-written battle re-enactments that herald deeply rooted beliefs in the supremacy of the Confederacy and its legacy – I feel torn and wonder how I could simultaneously love and identify with such a movie with the majority of white characters. The portrayal of the cheeriness of life in general, the whimsical nature of falling in and out of love, the search for and realization of self-identity and self-worth against the backdrop of a strong family/community unit are elements that are portrayed as the collective reality for many white families during that time – as though black families did not similarly experience these elements as well. These elements provide an enriched version of life – one that is fully-lived, fully-experienced and highly sought after. And perhaps, what I find enviable is that these elements are depicted as though we didn’t all share and buy into this narrative; as if this were not our collective (both black and white) experiences, when indeed they are. There are many times I have watched movies and/or musicals – cue in Grease – where I have sung every song with enthusiasm and joy, spawned from a place of disillusioned familiarity; only because during the 1950s we lived in a pre-Civil Rights, separate and unequal society, where black communities remained insular, yet provided a similarly rich and fulfilling life experience to its members that we do not see portrayed in film. The same human emotions of love, regret, guilt, and pain are equally experienced across both black and white communities, but their representation in film is disproportionate; instead relegating black communities to realities of experiencing more loss and guilt, while white communities command the stage of a wider range of human experience and emotion.

Art plays a role in humanizing the experiences of communities. And in the black community, by humanizing and normalizing our experiences, a ripple effect is set in motion that simultaneously humanizes members of our community. Against a backdrop of acts of police brutality, it seems that this overarching goal remains paramount to ensuring a balanced representation of the narrative of our varied cultural experiences.

lolatardive

Writing since December 2017 · 1 story contributed