How Generations of Black Women Artists Are Lost to Institutional Racism
Kathleen Collins never subscribed to the over-wrought myth of the starving artist . . . For her, suffering did not beget great art.
For Collins, the production process was exhausting as so little support was available to finance the film. “It was a terribly hard film. It was awful doing a movie for $5,000. It was like going down a terribly long tunnel,” she said to Nicholson, referencing her collaboration with friend and cinematographer, Ronald K. Gray. “But we did it.” The film was a success because Collins so deeply believed in her creative vision, even as the absence of financial backers and large-scale cinematic interest raised some internal doubts regarding her artistic merits and the legitimacy of her storytelling voice.
The precariousness of wellness as a Black female creative has hardly changed since Collins released her debut. Conversations between me and my friends, along with snatches heard during transit and notes of frustration posted online, highlight that so many of us work while balancing on the precipice of illness. During stretches where stability is not guaranteed—whether because publications have either tightened their freelance budgets or because my mind just can’t foster enough inspiration worthy to document—I feel my body change. It moves slower, is less inclined to respond to things that normally bring joy. It feels not like my own. I feel out of sorts, harboring an illness that’s both episodic and deep-seated.
The destabilizing shifts within my own personal life—when I grieve in private, but my work lives in the public sphere—means existing in two places as two beings: one who is living while writing, and another trying to write while struggling to live. Writing has always been the litmus test for my well-being. When it is balanced and free-flowing, so am I. “I’ll be alright once I get a few more commissions” and “things will pick up in the summer” are things I have found myself repeating when I feel most unlike myself.
There is an often-used quote tossed around by self-help “gurus” who peddle self-care with the same sincerity as megachurch pastors hawking redemption: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” Superficiality aside, to be made to feel inferior isn’t merely about consent; it’s about power. And for those who have so little of it, the daily battles with inferiority can literally make you ill.
During quarantine, it’s become increasingly difficult to tune out the calls for increased action and unmatched hustling. This perverse need to constantly be aiming for productivity, especially as artists, is one I’m actively fighting against. Pauses feel like wasted time, and who wants to do that when everything seemingly moves at break-neck speed, even during a pandemic.
Like Collins, to be an artist making their own way is a lesson in self-interrogation and stamina. The mental depletion that comes from always needing to churn out work while struggling to garner interest in what you’ve already completed, and the fear that we might die from working so hard, is a limitless load. The cycle is a slow kind of devastation and a breeding ground for illness. Health becomes a privilege and illness an unwanted, but seemingly inevitable, occurrence.
Collins saw this most clearly in the life of Lorraine Hansberry, a creator whom she admired and whose illness Collins believed came from living and trying so hard. “The thing that interests me about [Hansberry], probably more than anyone else, is her illness,” Collins told the Black Film Review. “She died very young, and she died basically eaten up. My theory is that she was not only way ahead of her time, but that success came at a time when she was not able to absorb it without its destructive elements eating her body up.”
Collins’s life was directly in line with a history of Black women artists being worked, literally, until their death. Hansberry contracted pancreatic cancer, and Audre Lorde died from cancer of the liver; both women also contracted breast cancer at various points in their lives. It was this to which Collins would later succumb.
During stretches where stability is not guaranteed, I feel my body change. It moves slower, is less inclined to respond to things that normally bring joy. It feels not like my own.
Tari is a journalist and photographer from Zimbabwe, based in Brasil. Her work has appeared in Vice, The Globe and Mail, Rookie Mag, Noisey, SYFY, Broadly, The Fader, New York Magazine, Flare Magazine and Hazlitt. You can find more of her on Twitter @FungaiSJ.
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