Embracing the Sapphire: Black Women’s Rage in Speculative Fiction

Abstract

Embracing the Sapphire: Black Women’s Rage in Speculative Fiction Jasmine H. Wade (bio) “Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it becomes the blood that courses through my beating heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity of existing in external circumstances that work against my survival.” —Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” “If this what you truly want. I can wear her skin over mine. Her hair, over mine, her hands as gloves, her teeth as confetti, her scalp a cap, her sternum, my bedazzled cane. We can pose for a photograph, all three of us, immortalized. You and your perfect girl. . . . Why can’t you see me? Everyone else can.” —Beyoncé Knowles, Lemonade Representations of the Sapphire, the Angry Black Woman, are peppered throughout the cultural history of the United States. In television and film, there was the original Sapphire: Sapphire Stevens on Amos and Andy (though the stereotype predates her). Other examples include Pam James on Martin, Coffy, and Terri from Barbershop. Reality shows and tabloid talk shows, like The Jerry Springer Show, reinforced the stereotype of the angry black woman (Pilgrim). Within the stereotype, the Black woman’s anger is bitter, irrational, destructive, and emasculating. In recent years, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, gymnast Gabby Douglas, and tennis star Serena Williams have all been accused of unnecessary aggression and anger. Even Michelle Obama fought to shake off the label of Sapphire. Throughout history, the Sapphire is presented as a woman whose anger is destructive to her family and her country. The Sapphire persists as a stereotype that presents Black women as pathological “instrument[s] of castration” (Spillers 74). The archetype’s primary purpose is to silence and invisibilize Black women. The epigraphs included at the start of this piece suggest embracing an inner monstrosity in order to avoid a sentence of invisibility. In both, rage is an important catalyst in seizing one’s monstrous side. In this essay, I argue that Black women are born in rage, which is to say Black women’s rage is such a fundamental [End Page 106] part of us1 that processing it can trigger modes of metamorphosis.2 In literature and film, the Angry Black Woman or Sapphire figure has been employed as a means of dehumanization. Black women are often instructed from girlhood to resist appearing angry or at least to be aware of appearing angry. Black speculative fiction in some cases opens the door to subvert this norm and embrace the Sapphire in all her power. This essay explores two examples of Black speculative fiction in which the Sapphire is embraced and Black women’s rage is seen as a force of survival. In Victor LaValle’s Destroyer (a graphic novel), Dr. Josephine Baker fights against processes of dehumanization by expressing a monstrous rage with an appetite for destructive creation to protect herself and her family. In Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country (a horror television show), Ruby Baptiste’s rage against white supremacy is tangled up in her use of respectability as a defense mechanism. That is, until she gets a taste of magic and white privilege. In both speculative works, Black women express their rage and transform into otherly human forms. The close reading I perform in this essay relies on a theoretical framework that braids theories of rage by Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynter. Together, these Black feminist theorists support my claim that Black women are born in rage as a result of historical and ongoing trauma. What might it mean to think of Black women’s rage as not only affective but also onto-epistemic through Sylvia Wynter’s conception of sociogeny and Hortense Spiller’s conception of the flesh? What does Black women’s rage have to do with self-definition as a project of Black feminism? My exploration of these questions brings me to the idea of metamorphosis, in which new self-definitions offer different conceptions of what it means to be human. A new human...