(Not So) Random Thought: My Immediate Thoughts on The Exorcism of Roman
I’m totally posting some shit i wrote in a reblog b/c i don’t want it to get lost in people ignoring the ish that I reblogged.
bolded fof realness and truth. i am personally a huge nicki fan. i’m going to go to sleep, wake up, and rewatch the performance. collect all my thoughts about it. i love it already on the basis of the pop culture references in abundance but i want to pick it apart.
one thing i already think…it was nick’s night to be the provocateur. she could have gone with a more toned down party track (super bass comes to mind) single off the last album but she decided to go a different route. i’m excited about what’s going to happen on the next album. i would love if she did an extremely dark horror influenced album. i’m personally really interested in the embracing of the abject/afro-futurist themes by mainstream rap/r&b artist (kanye, rihanna, wayne,) these days.
i think the comments about the ruining of Black history month are more telling about how uncomfortable our folks can be when we let our weird come out in public (i.e. in front of white people.)
lastly, the notion of a reparative/alternative read on the exorcist is really interesting to me. i think taking a part people’s anxieties about uncontrolled and uncontrollable girls/women (who are represented in horror as possessed by satan) is a dope dope move. and to me that’s what the performance was about.
i’ll probably do a paper on this. maybe submit it to a journal.
thanks mama nicki.
ENTIRELY with this. Nikki made my fucking night. I’m thinking push back on the Catholic church re its colonization and its argument that black women needed to be contained even more than white women. I can’t, this is WONDERFUL.
^^ holy shit that’s BRILLIANT.
And the whole our African religions are of the devil and evil? GODDAMN Nikki YES!!! I want ALLLLLLLLL THE META ON THIS SHIT. ALLLLLLLL OF IT. Somebody talk to me, does Trinidad have a voodoo/obeah/something similar tradition? What are the elements of Christianity that got mashed up into it? What are the tensions between the “good christian people” who both see that tradition as something to shun (too african and thus too lowerclass) but yet may go to under the quiet for help? ALLLLLLLL OF THE META.
Like, yeah white people did this first, but bring poc into the mix and ALL SORTS OF RACE AND CLASS AND HISTORY start bubbling up all ova the place.
Trinidad has a VERY strong obeah tradition that underpins its other major religions — Christianity, Hinduism, Islam — and, in the diasporan tradition of syncretic faiths, for the most part exists peacefully alongside them.
My family’s got a bunch of all the religions but nobody too fervent, so I grew up a Hindu-Catholic with intense respect for obeah. I went to a Catholic girls’ school for six years and I don’t recall ever being told anything about obeah being bad? Which doesn’t mean there weren’t real religious types who condemned obeah, but as far as I remember it wasn’t a huuuuuuuge deal. Everybody I knew had their stories about going to the obeahwoman for something or the other, not exactly on the sly but not a visit you’d bring up to outside people if you know what I mean. *g*
I haven’t watched Nicki’s performance yet, but I expect as an Indo-Trini who went to Catholic school, I’m gonna have a lot of thoughts about it when I get around to it!!
