“When I learned how to turn my pain into art, I became in tune with my emotions”
-Frankhavemercy
Going into my eleventh article posting here on Odyssey, I find myself reflecting on everything that I have written. The subjects, though they seem varied to me, all predicate themselves on the depths of human emotion and struggle.
Each of the articles I have posted has dealt with the uglier side of life, with poverty, emotional pain, murder, survival, struggle, and ultimately, with what Siddhartha Gautama—the Buddha for those who don’t know—would call dukkha or human suffering. I have, will, and will continue to write about suffering because it draws me.
Suffering seems to be what pulls me from the humdrum of everyday life to sit in front of my keyboard or my journal. Suffering seems to whisper my name as I walk across campus and as I sit in class. Suffering caresses my ear as I read of the horrors that comprise my people’s history.
Suffering sits with me as I attend BSA (Black Student Alliance) meetings and hear the pain in one of my sisters’ voices when they express feelings of abandonment caused by one of my brothers. Suffering moves both my fingers and my pen as I chronicle the realities which construct the ramshackle amalgamation that is Rankine’s “Historical-Self” and that molds the splintered but beautiful “self-self.”
Suffering, it seems, I cannot escape. But then, I don’t want to.
You see, my suffering and the suffering of my friends, family, and community are achingly beautiful in their own way. In the same manner that dark, foreboding storm clouds and torrents of rain precluded by flashes of lightning are both incredibly threatening and breathtakingly stunning, the suffering we experience and the suffering that we cause is both incredibly biting and breathtakingly gentle. That suffering creates us and it allows us to feel the sweetness of pleasure even more potently than if we had never suffered at all.
It seems to me that I have gone off on a tangent to explain to you the importance of suffering for my writing. Ultimately, my writing—to answer my “Art of the Essay” professor’s question—is better for every bit of suffering I have experienced. My Suffering is more bearable with every bit of writing I create.
“A strike to the heart causes art.”
-Me at Eleven Years Old
I am far from unique in the fact that tragedy—pain really—is what fuels my craft. People from the beginning of time have used their pain as a catalyst for art. However, I am here to ask why it seems that such pain is the predominant source of art for people of color—black people in particular.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is completely composed of the pain she and others have experienced throughout their lives. J. Cole’s albums—For Your Eyes Only in particular—are comprised entirely of his personal pain and the pain of the black community. The same can be said of Kendrick Lamar’s and many other individuals’ music.
As I was discussing with my roommate, movies like Twelve Years a Slaveand The Birth of a Nation are also built on backs of black pain. Fences, Moonlight, Fruitvale Station, Selma, Dear White People(both the film and the series), Malcom X, hell even Madea explore the depths of the black psyche and the negative impacts that men, women, and children experience as a result of their social positions in this great U.S.A—in the Black States of America. One of the most lauded black films ever—Get Out—explores the founded mass hysteria which permeates the black community as a result of our shared history.
The much beloved—at least by black people everywhere—Marvel character Black Panther’s introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe was also the result of black pain. It was the result of many people of color losing their lives as collateral damage to the Avengers’ exploits. T’Challa’s introduction is further steeped in tragedy following the assassination of his father at the United Nations.
It seems no matter the medium, nor the genre, black artists everywhere are under the thrall of centuries worth of pain. It seems that we are, all of us, writing while black. Though I would sometimes like to get away from such a thing, I can’t. I can’t abandon my history, for it has made me. I can’t seriously consider writing on something else because this—what many people call a fixation on antiquated struggles that aren’t even mine, but my ancestors (I have heard that personally)—has sparked more important conversations in my past three semesters than any other topic I could think of.
I can’t turn away from the pain that assails me because to do so would be to let the realities of my people’s past and present disappear forever. I can’t turn away from this pain because staring it in the face and writing—talking—dancing—singing—acting—running—orating—teaching—litigating—living—learning—fighting through it is how I honor those millions whose lives and deaths our own are built upon.
This article is, in no way, arguing that black people are the only ones who suffer. Nor is it arguing that minorities are the only ones who suffer—that would be categorically false. This article is merely exploring my observations of black art and it's origins.
I don’t do this to torture myself and I don’t do this to inspire guilt in others. I write about what I do because it is my life and to write about anything else would be to betray myself.
That, I refuse to do.
