It is love. Love invades you and this is not the end: Malcolm&Marie (Netflix, 2021), loving, fantasies, life and belonging
We lack maturity in understanding interdependence as strength, not weakness. We lack a commitment to accept feelings, distortions, complexities, and ambivalence in literalness.
This text is evidently influenced by the reading of Tudo sobre o amor: novas perspectivas (Editora Elefante, 2021) (All about love: new perspectives), bell hooks. So I thought. Still is, actually, but nuances are not being promised here. I chose to weave brief (that is, in fact, a pipe, remember the last column?) words about Malcolm&Marie (Netflix, 2021), production starring Zendaya and John David Washington (Black KKKlansman; Tenet) on streaming. I reply Maria Bethânia in supplication, and I will no longer speak of Brazil. No unchallengeable ethical crisis can be expected over the normalization of massacres and historical crimes (Five Hundred to Eight Hundred’s slavery and Nineteen Hundred dictatorships) faced by continued Black and Indigenous genocide during Covid-19 pandemic (Lélia Gonzalez said something once about it). On a daily basis, I am fiercely trying to mitigate its material and emotional effects and politically organize anger, as macro politics commands me. 2022 is happening.
Brief tour completed, I may return to the feature film. I surrendered myself to doubts, desires and reality for ceasing your own fantasies from yourself, as Sartre once told. We need to end fantasies, or we will never allow ourselves to anything. At first, the space of intellectualized criticism, generally white, of Black knowledge forged and conditioned to or by the experience of racism and its psychic effects finds satire, or better, caricature in response to the colonial reinterpretation for elite university academic’s racist paternalism in cultural field — Malcolm (John David Washington) is a Black film director at his premiere night — . Discomfort thrown whoever rightfully belongs, the narrative follows a course perhaps unexpected. The debate with Marie (Zendaya), Malcolm’s companion, then followed by aggressions, especially emotional/psychological, similar abuses, negligence, and bitter to the perception of her partner’s silence in face of that night’s achievements highlighted more weaknesses and discoveries than uncertainties about the quality of relationships we have, men, women, utter people in the West world. Mobilizations like that seen as a triumph in a latent discussion are unveiling all insecurity generated by our lack of availability to understand our own needs and chosen partnership’s, because still undefined to ourselves limits, degree/intensity of donation and openness to learning one another/change remain. Neglect, I say. Carelessness.
If, according to hooks, love does not flourish facing constraint and violence, despite coexistent care and affection, making disappointment true by not being recognized as part or valued in equality in the relationship, denied or not assessed as relevant by several factors (insert from sexism to other stressors), and charging for it, is an act of self-love and an attempt to refound (under love?) a romantic partnership considered promising — or important. The request for reciprocity, and recognition, because the amount of admiration and respect still mutually fed is not charitable, but defining the next steps. We will continue like this, or it won’t. Without us, together, equal, there will be no us.
Let us acknowledge contributions and responsibilities applicable to all, and be proud of this. There is no demerit, just honesty. We lack maturity in understanding interdependence as strength, not weakness. We lack a commitment to accept feelings, distortions, complexities, and ambivalence in literalness.
Let us stop operating in scarcity. Time is here, and we need to keep it to the best of our abilities — I would say available, but availability is not pre-existing. I was certainly wordy. If something said above made sense to you, welcome it, elaborate it, improve it and adapt it. If not, Audre Lorde (1934–1992) would say, never mind. In the face of banalized and imminent avoidable death, like pandemic revealed, living the existence granted now makes sense, as its legacy. Seek it, then love. Transform yourself. Be unapologetically. Love yourself. Love is healing.
