“How is it done ??? / remolding body into / image of body,” writes Samiya Bashir in the poem “Topographic Shifts,” from her latest book, Gospel (Redbone Press, 2009).
The poem describes an amputation performed on a baby girl born with twelve fingers and toes, but these lines make me think, of course, about the pressure so many women feel to alter our bodies: how the “image of [the idealized] body” worries, haunts, maims.
What I love about Bashir’s work is how her poems work against this enforced correcting. Many of her poems thrum with the erotic joy of queer black bodies, and her work celebrates the lived experiences of bodies that resist “remolding.”
You see, ever since I watched the movie Avatar, I’ve been on a search for poems by queer women of color that gives us back our bodies.
(Some spoilers after the jump.)
Much good ink has been spilled (good pixels darkened?) about the problematic racial dynamics of Avatar. (This is one of my favorites on the subject.) So I won’t belabor the point here, but will simply say that during the entire two hours and forty minutes of the movie, the part of my brain that processes the politics of pop culture wouldn’t shut up, and the slight nausea I felt afterward was not only due to the 3-D glasses.
One thing that really got me, and which I haven’t yet seen much mention elsewhere, was how Michelle Rodriguez’s character, Trudy, is slotted into the role of the strong, brave woman of color who ultimately sacrifices herself for the greater cause. Really? Again?
But what if ??? I started thinking ??? what if Trudy were the main character?
As a Latina, her joining forces with the Na’vi would be an exciting act of solidarity. She would come to see that those who would colonize Pandora are the same as those who had colonized her ancestors. And she would hop on Toruk, the wild and ferocious dragon-like creature, and fly off to defeat the colonizers once and for all.
And why assume heterosexuality on Pandora? Any society as advanced as the Na’vi would clearly recognize and honor all sexualities. Let’s have Trudy and Neytiri fall in love ??? we can keep the same plot developments with of the jealous warrior/boyfriend, and the magical night under the luminescent Tree of Voices.
I won’t indulge in speculating here about whether or not Rodriguez is actually queer, but she could certainly play one in 3-D. Hear that? That’s the sound of swooning dykes “
What an fun movie this would be: a queer woman of color as the hero of a Christmas blockbuster!
But reality descends. Yesterday, my sweetheart sent me a link to this story about how Danny Glover can’t get funding for his movie about Toussaint L’Ouverture and the revolution that freed Haiti ??? because it doesn’t have a white hero.
Hollywood’s not about to give us the heroes ??? those transgressive, transformative bodies and spirits ??? that we queers of color might want to see on the big screen.
O.K.. If not to the movies, then to poetry I go.
What poems? Which heroes? Tune in next week to find out!
I wanted to leave an intelligent, insightful comment but I think I’m still swooning at the visuals and, alas, doomed to bring the level of discourse down a bit.
There is no point trying to ‘fix’ the Pocahontas story line but it is the movies and stories that have so much potential that drive us the most crazy; that make us think “Oh, if only…” Bad movies are just bad. You say ‘meh’ and walk away.
Oh no, slipped back into Michelle Rodriquez again. I also recommend watching Wanted replacing Edward Norton and most of the male characters with women. It’s a much more interesting version.
@ Alexis,
Michelle Rodriguez’s parents are from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico – while we can’t say for certain without the results of genetic testing it is likely that she has some Indigenous and or West African ancestry and if that is the case, then yes, her ancestors (from those regions) would have been colonized. Just because she looks similar to Southern Europeans does not mean that she has the same racial or ethnic make up as someone from that area.
Colonized her ancestors? Aren’t you presuming that Michelle Rodriguez is of indigenous American ancestry?
Rodriguez has the same phenotype as Penelope Cruz and many other Southern Europeans. For all we know, she can be 99.5% European.
Alicia Kester asks:
“Was it revolutionary of James Cameron to make the Marine Combat pilot a woman in this future world (particularly because I don\’t believe that women toady can be combat pilots, correct me if I\’m wrong)?”
Heavy Armor answers:
The first part of the answer is a qualified no as far as being “revolutionary.” Filmmakers and TV producers have made women as combat pilots for at least 35 years. (Although, oddly, the Star Wars movie franchise didn’t have one until the prequels).
To answer the second part of your question, I would suggest looking at the story of US Marine 1st Lieutenant Vernice Armour, and then reassessing.
Hope this helps somewhat.
It was Thompson not Johnson, stupid me.
Trudy’s lack of clear motivation is unfortunate,given that she’s the most heroic character in the film.She reminded me of reading about Hugh Johnson, the American helicopter pilot
at My Lai who rescued two helicopter loads of civilians from Calley, Medina, and the other Americans
I really did think there was going to be a moment, towards the end of the film, where we find out that Trudy is not just Latina but Aztec or Mayan and wanted to stop history repeating. Except the movie never says so – leaving me just adding it in and feeling sad. One line, Cameron, just one.
Trudy is the new Vasquez (from Aliens) — Cameron has a thing for the Latina woman who dies.
Above I wrote “it was revolutionary” but I meant “it was not revolutionary”.
What compelling insights into Michelle Rodriguez\’s character! Watching Trudy die I felt particularly jarred at the inevitable yet forced nature of it all. In a film so drenched with artificiality that it resolves itself as a contorted metatheatrical crititique of the very nature of the constructed and the natural, the sacrifice of the singular human of color is a replaying of a cliche, a quick fix, a cheat that makes the strings and wires behind the magic show more visible to the naked eye.
If militaries and corporations can rearrange nature, pulling to the surface that which is most valuable and plowing and bombing those things considered worthless; if human beings can create humanoid life in laboratories as living puppet, controlling their will as if we are gods and interacting and affecting an external world through our minds; if James Cameron can create the ultimate utopic nature within a digital imagination that holds no tangible existance but experienced in three dimensions by millions upon millions of people is now as real and specific as our own backyards; and yet why is it that within the context of all of these layers of distance between what is \"real\" and what is constructed, created by filmmakers with good intentions, that the transformation of our histories and representations from what is possible and thought-provoking to mythical cliches that are as much back-handed insults as they are praise is still disturbing.
Though this observation certainly holds true for the Na\’vi, it holds true for Trudy as well. Was it revolutionary of James Cameron to make the Marine Combat pilot a woman in this future world (particularly because I don\’t believe that women toady can be combat pilots, correct me if I\’m wrong)? Was he subvert normative paradigms of privilege by taking the phallic metaphors of masculine power being used for good and resting them in the hands of a woman? Particularly because the only other human soldier hero is paralyzed, and can no longer hold that power. I think yes and no. I think it challenged conventional thinking but I think it was revolutionary. Moreover I think in all of the good that is done the film ultimately begs a mea culpa by resorting back to well-worn film storytelling mechanisms for resolving the problem of a corrupted hero (in this case heroine). For all of her proven capability, Trudy\’s path is polluted because she is a woman and even more so because she is a woman of color who may have less of an emotional journey relating to a colonized people. Her own capacity, when put into the body of a woman of color, becomes a doomed fate. Not only can she not be the hero of the story, much like queer characters in films in the first half of the 20th century, she must die because putting that much power, privilege, and ammunition into her hands and letting her live like the Norm, the other scientist really would disrupt too much the status quo.
Which leads me to my biggest question. Why not go all the way? Why put so much work into something the ultimately ends up just being subterfuge, sleight of hand designed to make you think you are seeing something amazing when there it is only a projection with no real substance. Why make us think that maybe the cliche\’s of women may be challenged. In the end of the film, Jake Sully regains his mobility by transferring his consciousness into a Na\’vi. That is an ultimate perspective shift. But in the end, this film use follows boiler plate storytelling never stepping outside of the box in terms of the story. What he has shown us is how easy it is to collapse the distance between reality and construct, intimate and foreign. White men still rule the world even if they can now do it from a place that feels so personal that it\’s within our own skin.