Aleshea Harris’s debut aims at destroying the black family.
Is it revenge or liberal approval that motivates playwright Aleshea Harris? Her directing debut Is God Is (the title is a puzzlement, not a question) synthesizes feminism, Tarantino sadism, and Black Lives Matter self-destruction. Like last year’s One Battle After Another, it shows off unpleasant confusion about the sex roles of black women. Twin sisters Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) are on a man-killing mission to avenge their mother, Ruby (Vivica A. Fox), victim of their now-estranged father (Sterling K. Brown), who set the fire that disfigured all three women physically and psychologically.
Following the orders of matriarch Ruby — “Make your daddy dead, real dead” — Racine and Anaia wrestle with the current moral and cultural precepts according to which black female identity entails forsaking Gospel faith. (A loony interlude features Erika Alexander as a berserk holy-roller Evangelist.) Racine and Anaia are contrasts — anger and meekness, nerve and vulnerability. Anaia balks, “We ain’t killers,” and Racine coldly asserts, “I am.” Their road trip is less like Queen & Slim than an In Living Color parody of In Cold Blood.
This ugly fable could have been dreamt up by the slatternly monster-mother that Mo’Nique played in Precious. It extends Harris’s 2019 stage play into post-Obama feminist hysteria that vilifies the black male as either absent or malevolent. Her “poetry” out-scandalizes the formerly favored black theatrical avant-gardist Suzan-Lori Parks (author of Spike Lee’s Girl 6), using a twisted amalgam of absurdity and complaint. Rather than explore the cultural legacy that black women inherit — as Lorraine Hansberry did with the matriarch of A Raisin in the Sun — Harris plays with contemporary black victimology fashionably called Afro-pessimism, an academic social theory grounded in gratuitous violence, natal alienation, and stigma. Of course, Hollywood and Broadway only know how to sell this pathology in generic terms. That means that the fractured narrative of Is God Is follows the Jordan Peele horror-movie pattern (Get Out, Us, Nope), but it’s less serious than a Warner Bros. cartoon.
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In the 1958 Merrie Melodies short Don’t Axe Me, directed by Robert McKimson, the chaotic imp Daffy Duck went through conniptions to prevent being served up as a roasted dinner. The toon’s frantic tale and title evoke the modern linguistic tropes of Harris’s title Is God Is (think of New York politician LaMonica McIver using the colloquial transformation of the word “ask” into “ax” in Congress).
With Is God Is, Harris employs African American Vernacular English (Ebonics) to transpose psychological issues through its twins story, giving doubled, reflexive, or reciprocal meaning to Racine and Anaia’s shared words and actions (linguists call this parallel “Metathesis”). The sisters respond to the primal nightmare of man-to-woman violence and woman-to-man revenge with overlapping confusion.
We must realize that Harris is promoting the same destructive ideology that was launched by Black Lives Matter in its 2020 charter:
We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.
Although BLM’s threat — “emphasizing communal support, queer-affirming spaces, and challenging patriarchy and heteronormative structures” — was later removed from its official site in September 2020, the temperamental excess of Is God Is perpetuates that mission, aimed at extinguishing the black family. It exaggerates the victimization some say is passed down by the welfare system that excludes the black patriarch and that’s manipulated further by cultural mountebanks through grants and foundations that intentionally switch the importance of feminism and gospel in black culture. Harris’s title recalls the rhetorical grammar and bathos of Hollywood junk like The Hate U Give (2018). (And when singer-activist Janelle Monáe shows up, you know phoniness is afoot.)
Harris’s flashy, grievance-filled film debut recalls Elvis Costello’s witty debut declaration:
The only two things that matter to me, the only motivation points for me writing all these songs, are revenge and guilt. Those are the only emotions I know about, that I know I can feel. Love? I dunno what it means, really, and it doesn’t exist in my songs.
Harris promotes revenge and guilt, not God, not love. She’s made a Hollywood version of revenge porn.
