Lorraine O'Grady: “Certainly if [black women’s] subjugated knowledges were to become primary, we would change the world. Imagine what would happen if we were to refuse banishment to the unnameable chaos that defines what woman is not. If we were to claim our stereotypes and make Jezebel the sign of our acceptance of our own bodies, Mammy the symbol of our ability to nurture, and Sapphire the signifier of our resilience and strength. If we could share and build on what we’ve learned about ourselves and the others from an exploitative work world. At the very least we would, as Spillers suggests, write a radically new text for female empowerment.6 But even more dismaying to “them” might be our self-involvement, the discovery that we and not they are the center of our universes. Perhaps it is because many black women novelists have made a strategic choice to describe a world without white people that so few of their works have been translated to film, despite their publishing successes. And perhaps this is also why in the two exceptions, The Color Purple and The Women of Brewster Place, the books have been tamed by directors who are not black women.” [Still from Martina Attille’s Dreaming Rivers, 1988]
