Blogpost #6
This weeks we discusses two devastating black horror stories, "The Devil in America" by Kai Ashanti Wilson and "Please, Momma" by Chesya Burke . The Devil in America is a ruthless story that left me with a feeling of fear. It was difficult to follow with its non-linear structure that resembled the random and irrational essence of the racial violence it portrays. The literal devil incarnate that arrives as a Confederate soldier is not the only horror of the story, but the vicious circle of hatred that he is the embodiment of. It is even more painful than the reality that the horror is associated with real historical atrocities, such as the Tulsa Massacre or the tale of Emmett Till. The saddest of all scenes is the one that changed the point of view during the epilogue when the main character, Easter, and her brother transformed into dogs that are always being hunted. The latter image is a wild metaphor of the truth that the lives of the black people have been dehumanized and erased in history, their lives have turned into a mere unclear and painful legend.
In contrast, "Please, Momma" turns inwards to the horror of unresolved grief. The disembodied, argumentative voices in the car create a feeling of mystery, and later tells us the ugly reality that one of the sisters is a ghost and the grief of her mother is a literal parasite eating her. This monster connects itself to the hopeless, suffering individuals and so it is the reason a mother would mistreat her living daughter. In the state of unprocessed trauma, it is not a passive experience since it is an aggressive force that feeds on an individual and hurts all people surrounding them.
This week I have learned that Black horror provides structure to the pain that has no shape. whether it is the massive, historical evil of the Devil in America or the personal, parasitic grief of the Please, Momma, but in any case, the genre is an expression of these abstract traumas which is makes the real and, above all, visible. This is not a monster under the bed, but the grief and the pain that we are not ready to let go.












