“Les, it’s 2010 you can’t be writing about bitter black women. Combining those words alone will get people enraged.”
This was the reaction of one of my girlfriends when I explained what I was planning to write about next. A sharp woman and protective friend, her tone was a cautionary one. A warning of the angry responses that were sure to come if I penned the piece I had in my head. And while I considered heeding her warning, I decided to put my big girl helmet on and speak on what’s been on my mind.
The bitter sister is not the Loch Ness monster. She exists and I’ve met her, on at least one occasion.
My girl’s warning was not far off base. Discussions on this woman is generally frowned upon when we as women of color speak amongst ourselves. After all, the image is an over perpetuated stereotype, another attempt to pigeon hole us and paint us as rage carrying females. After the hysteria of analysis that has followed For Colored Girls and the weekly discussion surrounding Nene Leaks and Co, it is far more popular now to showcase the positive woman, the graceful one, who despite life’s adversities has kept her head high and heart open.
And a part of me understands that. The need to talk about the whole women we are striving to be, the whole women we can become and not the character we are often assigned. I wonder though if in all our avoidance, we miss the opportunity to analyze how bitter women got that way.
But the bitter black woman cannot be dismissed as a myth. She is real and odds are you’ve met her at least once before. She is woman whose presence seems to suck the life out of you, whose bleak outlook threatens to dim your own. She is a woman who has walls fortified with steel, a rare laugh and a narrow smile that might crack if the emotion behind it was real. She is the Ms. Haversham of black women, surrounded by cobwebs and draped in the memories and hurt of her past.
I’ve always been of the staunch belief that bitter women make a choice to be so. And yes, I mean that without exception. It’s one of the things on my Oprah inspired list of “Things I Know For Sure.” Whether as a defense mechanism or emotional wall, bitter sisters made a choice to put it up. No matter if their story was meant to be penned by Sapphire and made into the most dramatic of Tyler Perry productions, somewhere in that woman’s life she makes a choice.
The common rule of thumb with bitter black women has been not to talk about them and definitely not to them. They are not after all trying to make personal connections so why should you extend yourself to them? They’re dangerous, so avoid them- shun them like the plague. On this rule of thumb, I wholeheartedly disagree.
Learning about the bitter sisters is necessary unless you plan to learn from them. So often in our rush to quell any thought that the bitter black woman exists we forget the thing we should shun is the bitterness, not the woman herself. Instead of pretending they are nowhere to be found we should be asking ourselves: when did she become this way?
The answer is never simple. For some women it can be from heartbreak, for others it can be from abuse. For some it is growing up in tough situations, for others it is having a good life yanked away. The scary thing about bitterness is that it is not based on demographics. There are bitter women of all shades, all incomes and all faiths. And while that fact makes fodder for fighting the stereotype, it is also a sharp reminder of how close we all can come to being the woman we dread.
After dealing with uneven love, unfair actions and unbelievable hurt, I still believe bitterness, like contentment is a choice. If anything, I believe it more fiercely than I did before. Because going though it, I am amazed at my own resiliency, my ability to grow stronger without building up another wall. Being content seems to be the choice that takes the most work, I would like to have enough believe in the power of all women to say that bitterness does not come naturally to us.
I think this week we should choose to explore how a woman can let her situation overtake her spirit. I think we should discuss it even if it hurts. Because unless we as women are open about the brokenness around us, we could all miss our chance to be whole.
