An Open Letter to Tyler Perry

Dear Mr. Perry:

Thank you for your willingness to provide images of African Americans in our diversity and humor. Laughter is good, we forget that at times. Your contribution to film over the past 7-9 years has expanded America’s reality of who we are and provided so much needed relief during chaotic times. Your creative financing has provided many artists with an avenue for producing their craft in non-traditional avenues. The business of filmmaking by/for/about African Americans has your blueprint as a model for mass marketing. Thank you for charting that territory. In the era of social networking and the immediacy of pop culture, this is historic.
May I be as bold as to attempt to explain why there is great angst from many of my sistahs upon learning that you have required the film rights to Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf”? My mother, a griot and arts educator, is really, well, challenged would be an understatement but really struggling with the very idea of “our choreopoem” being co-opted by ANYONE, let alone a pop culture icon such as yourself. No disrespect meant. It’s probably a generational and feminist thing too. See, when Zake gave us “For Colored Girls…” in 1975, she unleashed 7 spirits on stage that reflected the multiplicity of our identity. What happened on stage every night was intense and it was … colon cleansing. I know that image ain’t sexy but the revolution ain’t sexy and the challenges of our vey colored, very female collective lives is a tonic sometimes made for soothing and other times made for stripping and flushing away all that ills us.
“For Colored Girls…” is very much a female thing, it is how we speak unedited truths about who we are and how we got to be and most times that reality does not fit into a Hollywood tale. And as talented as you are, please know that when adapting our words, you too are an outsider listening in on sacred moments. Besides, when we speak truth to ourselves, we don’t need a translator. I think part of the fear is directly connected to one more thing that African American women may have to explain what was meant when “such and such” was said. We saw the made for television version in 1982. We were glad that many lesser known African American actresses and actors were employed and we were equally tepid about America’s perception of us bare. I mean the silence that follows several lines during the choreopoem on stage is impregnable and we’re kind of wondering how you in your maleness can give birth to that kind of silence in film?
I want you to understand that there are several generations of “colored girls” that learned how to verbally channel their energy through countless renditions of FOR REAL GROWN A** COLORED WOMEN executing monologues from “For Colored Girls…”. At 13, it was my Vagina Monologues. Celebrating all of me and mine that would inform, highlight and oftentimes mirror my journey to womanhood. Not to mention, I mastered the rhythm and cadence of delivering a salty word or two.
Remember, we are the rainbow and sometimes Hollywood only sees the pot of gold at the end of it.

Your slighlty older sistah,
Deniece