I haven't written very much about Precious for a number of reasons. I haven't seen the movie. I haven't read the novel on which it's based (though I've put in a whole bunch of requests for it to be made available in a Kindle edition!). And on some fundamental level, I feel like the movie belongs to people other than me: to Sapphire, who created the story, to Lee Daniels, who put it on the screen, to Gabby Sidibe, who looks remarkable in the title role, to Tyler Perry and to Oprah, who have put their formidable collective promotional weight behind it, and most of all, to women of color who see their own struggles and triumphs, their own agonies and joys in the title character. I found Rose Afriyie's meditation over at Feministing on the lightening of one of the story's main characters powerful, but not about a set of emotions I have access to: I am sympathetic, and wish I could be empathetic.
This is something that I struggle with. I often think my best work for The Atlantic combines cultural criticism and social criticism. I feel comfortable inhabiting complex emotions about gender, science, war, sexuality, and yes race in my writing because those emotions are my own. But having the ability to think carefully about race doesn't mean I can see the issues I examine from my own perspective from the perspectives of others. Recognizing that makes me hesitate sometimes: I find my desire not to misread--or to speak for--others in conflict with my desire to analyze, to tinker, to unpack. And sometimes I wonder if too strong a sense of ownership can obscure as well as clarify, as I suspect it might in this blistering review of Precious by Armond White in the New York Press. And to bring my conundrum full circle, I wonder if White is entitled to view the movie through his own lens, and if that obscured lens might in fact be clearer than my own.
Of course, to say that a black man understands all facets of a dark, heavy black woman is absurd. And to say that only dark, heavy, female critics can write about Precious is even more absurd, and crippling to criticism. We need Rose Afriyie's writing on representation in Precious, we need David Edelstein's review of the movie's artistic merits, we need the Jezebel girls' critiques of his reviews, and we need his response. I know all of this. My only conflict is my wish to be able to straddle as many of those worlds, and to do as many of those kinds of criticism as sensitively and perceptively as I possibly can.