Delivering Justice on Heaven's Behalf

"This is not the typical, tragic Mulatto story..."

I just got back from seeing Lisa Marie Rollins' Ungrateful Daughter - a one woman play about transracial adoption, and it was super awesome and worth seeing if you get the chance.

She does a series of vignettes of different scenes of her life- some real, some metaphorical (like having an argument with Aunt Jemima about representation or having her life reduced to an oversimplified platitude on the Oprah show). There's a good mix of comedy and tragedy, and a lot of scenes of human vulnerability and mistakes. She plays all of the characters with great effect, and though caricatured, you see the stuff that makes them human under the extreme.

There is one scene, where she's 7 and her white mother is trying to do her hair for her first solo in choir... and her mom's frustrations with her hair and inability to deal with her blackness roll together in a heartbreaking, horrifying way that just... UGGHGGHGHGH - exemplifies white people's issues overall.

So, obviously, this is some deep shit Rollins is digging into here, and not all of this is easy to watch. There is no sexual violence, and there's no use of white people's favorite racial slur, either. So yay, but still, emotionally wretching scenes at times.

Our humanity invisible, the oppression is subliminal. We hold tight the fragments of history, language, and yes, even our tragedies - these are embers that will allow us to do more than survive as ghosts of ourselves, into humans again, no matter how much they try to take it away.