This week’s episode of Black Enough, “Butterfly Wings,” showed many of the characters in struggle– or in the words of creator Micah Ariel Watson, in metamorphosis. Amaya endeavors to find a new look that encapsulates who she is becoming; Jaheem finds that his big bro, Dre, doesn’t rock with his rapping; and Lena stumbles in her engineering classes. Even supposedly self-assured Vaughn lets Amaya in on a little secret– she’s been rejected recently, too. The poetry that provides a narrative through line in this episode is about becoming, and it is decidedly not pretty, easy, or smooth. It is difficult and complicated, and we have to believe that it will make us into something better, otherwise the process will break us.
Perspective is hard in that moment when you are flooded with sadness, anger, anxiety…all the feelings that course through “Butterfly Wings.” In the moment that Dre tells Jaheem that perhaps rapping isn’t for him, he can’t hold on to the feeling of limitlessness that he associates with music and that viewers see just moments before in a bright shot of Jaheem rapping, surrounded by greenery like a Kehinde Wiley portrait. Lena cannot find the self-assuredness she normally exudes when thinking about her path as she cries in the bathroom after class. Only Vaughn manages to find a little perspective when Amaya compliments her hoops during their check-in, and seeming to remember herself, she replies, “You’d be surprised how much power they hold.”
“Butterflies grow wings, but Black girls? We grow hoops. Gold ones.”
This episode is about growth; it’s about detaching ourselves from notions about who we believed we were and giving ourselves completely to the journey towards who we will become. It is about sitting in that hard, uncomfortable space where there is no one but ourselves and God, and being still. Then, we work to understand the power of everything that came to a head for us to be who we are in that moment. As Dr. Stephanie Crumpton says so poignantly in her interview, “your grown woman self might be like ‘I remember when I was little I wanted to take over the world’ but your grown self is the one who has to show up.” Dr. Crumpton is insistent on the battle to become– it is not magical, it is work, and one cannot forget that.
And I’m interested in that, as a scholar– how we understand, communicate and transform the battle to become. In my interview clip that’s used at the end of this episode, I discuss my interest in how we as Black people, and especially Black girls and women, take the weight, the chains, or the battles that create us and turn it into wings. I think Dr. Crumpton is absolutely right to insist on making our battle to become visible, but I want to push past this into an even more beautiful plane of existence. Where can Black girls go to become the fullest version of themselves? Where can we exist beyond our wildest dreams, and then some? Where can we take all the battles that make us and craft them not into anchors but wings that propel us higher and further? What are Black girls in our imaginations, when our imaginations are not forced into one conceptualization of the world and the beings in it? When we are allowed to take up as much space as we want, what do Black girls imagine themselves to be?
In short: What does Black girlhood and womanhood look like when we can fly?
I think Watson takes up these questions in the entire webseries, but in this episode in particular. While we may not have comprehensive answers, I do think that Black Enough as a webseries, a form of digital Black self-making, constructs the beginnings of an answer. Despite the many shortcomings of the digital, I find the self-making possibilities in this space infinite and deeply satisfying.
So it makes sense to me that Amaya would begin her journey to feeling whole in the digital.
To modify Shange, “I found God in myself [online] and I loved her fiercely.”
Further Reading:
Check out Tanisha C. Ford’s non-exhaustive list of key texts on fashion, beauty culture and body politics in an African Diasporic context: http://www.tanishacford.com/resources/
“Alter Egos and Infinite Literacies, Part III: How to Build a Real Gyrl in 3 Easy Steps,” Jessica Marie Johnson & Kismet Nunez
Ravynn K. Stringfield is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at William & Mary. Her research focuses on Black women and girls as creators and protagonists of futuristic, fantastic and digital narratives in new media. She often likes to say she writes about Black girls flying. When she’s not researching, you can find her writing for her blog, Black Girl Does Grad School; learning new yoga poses; or bullet journaling.
Black Girl Does Grad School 