People's got beef with X-Men's Storm, and the fact I used her image in my Stan Lee homage.
"Why not use Black Panther? Or a real African person?" I was asked.
Listen, I used images from one of my favourite Marvel stories ever: Lifedeath. In the plot, Storm has had her Goddess-given power stripped from her in trying to save Rogue, who was an enemy at the time.
I actually got the second comic first, and when I opened the cover and beheld that first page with Storm trudging through a sandstorm, and words like blossoming, my mind did that thing Emily Dickenson says poetry is: "it's when you feel like the top of your head is going to explode." The image looked like Art-nouveau, with something of the Pre-Raphaelites in its tone.
At the top of the page were the words, "Stan Lee presents." So it was perfect for me to use to personally pay tribute to Mr. Lee.
But people felt that someone who looks like me should have shrugged off using Storm. Which is ironic, considering comic-book buddies always felt I would have been a perfect casting choice for the character.
Being|Outside
Thing is, I had my big-deep issues with Storm as well; most particularly when I was going through my intensely Afrocentric period in my early twenties, and I was practicing a very real type of racism dressed up as ethno-cultural pride.
So Storm is this Black woman from Africa whose name translates to "beauty." But she has straight blond hair and very light eyes. "How?" "What's the message?" "It's saying real Black is not beautiful!": the things people, myself included, have uttered.
It's hard, though, truly hard when you are a mixed-all-how person to keep holding on to concepts of exterior identity that seem to say there is only one way a thing could be.
If you lined up my twenty-plus nephews and nieces end to end, you'd get twenty-plus different shades of skin-tone, twenty-plus different types of hair texture and all kinds of continents coming together in facial features and physiognomy.
With that evidence before you, it's hard not to know that all people -- as in all "races" of people -- come in many shapes, forms, colourings, looks imaginable, even inside their specific racial classification.
 |
| Lady in a Breeze: Vernon Boodoo, National Museum of TnT This artist's stylised carving brought Storm to my mind. Photo by Jhaye-Q |
Also, as a visual and literature artist I've encountered countless imaginative renditions of humanity. Artists wield that God-like power to re-shape humans to their will and fancy after all, so why shy away from the gift, right.
At the time that Storm was created and manifested on the pages of Marvel comics, it would have been totally easy to make her a white woman, without any fear of flack about blond hair or blue eyes. But they choose to go with a Black woman from Africa. On top of which, Storm was proper brown, she was.
I used to look at her as a girl as I glutted on Uncanny X-Men comics and I swear it never really registered that she had that colour hair, those colour eyes. I just saw that her skin was like mine: a true true brown. That's no small thing to a girl-child in a country that largely tells you light-skin is always better, at a time when almost every Black female face on TV that was labelled "beautiful" was light.
Recently I was talking with one of my younger writing proteges about Storm and people's attitude toward her, She instantly pointed out that she always thought the eyes and hair had to do with reflecting lightning. Honestly, I had never thought about that.
 |
| Untitled: Turunesh, National Museum of TnT In this artwork I see myself, and yet every woman, too. Photo by Jhaye-Q, 2018 |
Anything that moves us beyond smallness and bile into a bigger way of seeing anything on this amazing super world of ours is, I say, good ... really good.
Open up.
No comments:
Post a Comment