durgapolashi:One night Marieme (Karidja Touré) and her three girlfriends, Lady (Assa Sylla), Adiatou
durgapolashi:One night Marieme (Karidja Touré) and her three girlfriends, Lady (Assa Sylla), Adiatou (Lindsay Karamoh), and Fily (Mariétou Touré), rent a hotel room. They talk and laugh. They tease each other as only teenage girls can, with sweet reverence and slight clout, but also with an attitude that permits them to intervene in a world that will not have them or presumes to claim them. They are each other’s warrant on life: on the potential that is invariably denied to them time and again.In this hotel room, temporarily immune to what pains them, they listen to “Diamonds.” They dance and mouth the words as it plays in its entirety. They move with purpose and self-made sovereignty, reveling each time Rihanna sings shine bright and feeling the rapturous appeal of repeating we’re beautiful. They’re also, it’s important to note, having fun. What rises up in them is not just the diversion of song but its associative capacity and a distinctly charged kind of levity. A levity that — and this is crucial — mobilizes. The scene is exquisite. Essential in its rejection and flawless collapse of what teenage girls and women of color have come to expect: that self-possession and the pleasure of appetite — of delighting in and seeking more, of yearning — must be approached with caution.For those three or so minutes, Marieme, Lady, Adiatou, and Fily conceive a space that is entirely theirs, defined not by the odds that are stacked against them — failing school systems, concealed and overt white supremacy, the categorical violence flung at black girls every single day, an older brother and his patriarchal hold of the home, a rival girl gang — but by the vitality that emerges from closing one’s eyes and singing with resolve as if to say, I am not here for you. In this room right now, I am here for me. Together the four girls are, to quote Audre Lorde, “deliberate and afraid of nothing.” -- source link