All Hail Queen Oracene
Or the Case for the Invisible Woman
Have you also been feeling that almost everything in the world getting lauded, including all Next Big Things, should display labels that prominently read ‘Caution. (Invisible) Woman at Work’? Well, you’ve got company in P.
From among the multiple jokes that missed their mark at this year’s Academy Awards, or hit suspect new ones - what was that men-are-pieces-of-meat sketch and why did it feel like it went on forever? - the one Amy Schumer cracked about King Richard landed powerfully for me in the moment. And more so when I watched the movie recently - during a scene when Aunjanue Ellis who plays Oracene, the mother to the Williams’ girls, confronts her husband who’s been controlling the lives and life paths of two of their daughters whose striking talent as tennis athletes is now bringing them close to that phase on the other side of which lies unprecedented fame and success. It is to Ellis’ credit as a performer, besides the writing and direction, that this one scene turns around the entire premise of the movie. As she makes evident in the telling of it, she too has always been around, doing what she can, not only for Venus and Serena, but all her daughters, and also for him. It is the scene that holds to account and lends perspective to every other scene that has preceded it, and all the ones that follow. All the many, many scenes that linger on Richard Williams. Richard Williams as he’s beaten up - yet again. Richard Williams as he’s mocked - yet again. Insulted, humiliated, rejected - yet again. And yet he remains the Richard Williams whose conviction in the potential of Venus and Serena never falters. The father who could never take his own father’s love for granted, who swore to always be there for his daughters. Who abandons mealtimes and rarely sleeps so he can hustle some more, in his bid to land Venus & Serena a coach. The intense believer, whose visions could be mistaken for insanity in any other time and place. Only he sees what the rest of the world will eventually see - how two black girls from Compton, a ghetto rife with drugs and guns and crime, are destined to shatter records in a sport dominated by the spirit of, indeed birthed in, white middle class exclusivity. It is what makes Richard Williams the classic tragic figure, worthy of this epic retelling. As we witness his blood and sweat and tears, we know we’re in the presence of greatness. He is, after all, King Richard.
But there are no crowns (even of thorns) for Oracene. She is a woman, a wife, a mother, who keeps the house running, holds a day job as a nurse (we only see her nursing when she tends to Richard’s wounds who has been beaten up yet again by the local goons), and somehow finds the time to craft exquisite hair braids for Venus and Serena, all the while teaching them about historic black women, a space they are meant to occupy. We never see the back-breaking toil that goes into it all - the blood, the sweat, the tears. Until that confrontation scene, there is no pause for the viewer to reflect on how exhausting it must be, staying married to King Richard.
And even that scene, I know, after it’s poignantly played out, is a token gesture. A box to check. For those of us who would critique it, pat can come the reply: ‘Well, she does get to speak about her struggle and frustration. And besides, it earned Ellis an Oscar nomination.’ Yes, for Best Supporting Actress, for a movie in which she plays a character who is literally supporting everyone, including the manic King Richard, a role that of course got Will Smith the Oscar for Best Actor.
I get it. The system is rigged. I understand. I can rant all I like, but I’ll also take it, even if grudgingly. Glimmers of visibility, even if they’re rendered in overly dramatic or obvious ways like a scene where we spell it all out, do work. At least they’re passing the mic and all that. For every 100 viewers who saw only King Richard, there are probably two who saw Queen Oracene, at least in that moment. And, if we’re feeling hopeful, there is probably a 1-in-100 chance that they also saw Queen Oracene outside and beyond that one scene. That it lent the whole project perspective, setting everything into context and in proportion. So if we do the Math, we should eventually get there. In another gazillion years. Right?
In Homing Instincts, a book on early motherhood by writer and founder of Vela magazine, Sarah Menkedick breaks down the labour of those we politely refer to as homemakers: ‘the feeding, the nurturing, the staving off of chaos, work not measured in hours, miles, words, or dollars’. The ‘essential ground-level work’, she says, and adds the crucial qualifier, ‘work that doesn’t count as such’. It’s why Menkedick finds herself typing emails with one hand in the first month of her motherhood, as she nurses her baby, whose head is safely placed in the mother’s football hold, in a bid to ‘rejoin the ranks of multitaskers’. Again and again, the women who can, choose ‘work’ in the false ‘work-home’ binary we’ve constructed as a culture, because that culture only really sees you working, when you’re ‘at work’. Doing the work that counts as such. What Ratika Kapur’s titular character in the sharp, enjoyable novel The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, describes as ‘work-busy, which is totally different from being house-busy’.
How we look upon the very real labour of women - or rather how we do not - in a way that it doesn’t hold weight, and is rendered hidden, invisible, finds strong manifestation in our understanding of mothers and motherhood, those hallowed, romantic ideals in the Mother’s Day month we find ourselves in. It is nature’s tragedy in a sense because it starts right with pregnancy - a body we often romanticize and/or worship, seldom giving thought to the very intense labour and churnings that are in constant motion inside the woman’s body, because we cannot really see it on the surface. And as a culture, we shy away from the precise details of what’s actually going on because it’s well, TMI. The cultural blindspots vis-à-vis women’s labour, as a result, I could argue, begins right then, and only worsens and intensifies from there. According to a Lancet study, women In India perform unpaid care and healthcare work within their families to the tune of USD 38 billion a year, as against men whose contribution is USD 9.6 billion. In the informal workforce sector, this invisibilizing is turning literal with the shrinking of women in this economy through the pandemic.
No wonder then, that the camera doesn't see Oracene’s sweat and tears in King Richard. No wonder then, that she’s not glorified to the point of royalty.
But are we, all of us invisible women, seeking glory? The obvious, and I’d say tempting, response is yes. A resounding one, at that. Isn’t it why our mothers seek out the melodrama in their daily lives, why they obsess over the women in the afternoon soaps, why they rant about the chores of cooking, cleaning, keeping house, all those grunts and heavy sighs in the kitchen whose only objective is to draw attention? It’s another version of Oracene’s outburst, isn’t it, which also plays out, not coincidentally, in the kitchen? For years, the woman has watched how simple it is for the man, to simply breeze in through the front door after a ‘hard day’s work at the office’, expecting chai. While she needs to make it all visible, herself, her labour, her never-ending work. Nagging and assuming the martyr position has been a tried-and-tested method of doing just that. It’s not unlike what the actress Taapsee Pannu, who’s unarguably been playing the central character in film after film, declared in an interview, in a nod to grand slow-mo entries men have been getting since forever in mainstream Hindi cinema ‘I want to be the hero from the first frame’.
So while I get it, and I’ll take it, does it really help understand how real the labour is? Its pain and challenges, and maybe also, dare-I-say-it, its rewards?
How about seeking, crafting a new language in culture then that is beyond handing women glorious crowns of thorns? What are the other ways that can make us the protagonists of stories that have thus far either simply missed our views, or missed the point? Queen Oracene can’t or needn’t or rather shouldn’t just be the female response to King Richard after all. Surely, there must be ways to do this beyond the romance of tragedy? Do we always need to become mythical creatures, superheroes, larger-than-life figures, invoke cult tragedy, in order for people to pay attention?
There is the new redemption genre of course, which is seemingly attempting just that. Putting back into centre all those misunderstood women on the patriarchal peripheries, setting the record straight. But if this route tones down the over-the-top martyr’s glory approach in the name of realism, it also goes the other way by offering narratives that come across as reductive. It’s food for thought for another edition of Outspoken-ish perhaps but TBH, Pam and Tommy is an exercise in skewed reduction, in much the same way that the ‘I need to test you for Covid with my tongue’ Oscars joke was, whose premise seemed to be ‘look what happens when we turn the tables’. (What happens exactly though? Now we get to be the creepy harassers? Score for feminism?).
While there might be a dearth in current culture, and until we wait, there are also always finds. Such as Kevin can F Himself on AMC (Prime Video for India), which does a striking job of rendering the psychological, emotional, mental labour of Allison visible in ways I haven’t encountered before, at least not outside of books. It also finds the spots of joy in its wonderful portrayal of a sisterhood-in-the-making. Closer home, The Great Indian Kitchen, manages this feat powerfully, in its repetitive monotony of shot after shot that foregrounds the woman’s labour.
Perhaps the on-screen Nimisha (The Great Indian Kitchen) and Oracene can collaborate with Jada Pinkett-Smith - the invisible woman at the centre of that slap controversy, on which reams were written focussing on Will Smith. While yet another woman’s invisible pain and the labour of invisibilizing it all in her struggles with navigating fame vis-à-vis alopecia, went unnoticed.
A new-ish fact emerging in hot-as-hell May (so hot and arid the locals have a sub-term for the summers-within-summers - nautappe or nine days of heat) at Khabar Lahariya - India’s only news platform run by many women from rural, marginalized communities - gives me hope. We hear about the current generation of women refusing marriages in villages where the water tables are low, because it seals their fates as lifetime water-fetchers and carriers. Walking several kilometers through the heat and the dust of the northern Indian hinterlands, they are pushing aside their destinies as invisible women.
Postscript from T
I was thinking about the (in)visibility of women’s labor while watching the short film anthology Modern Love Mumbai, released this past week on Amazon Prime. Modern Love Mumbai, similar to Modern Love, adapts stories from the New York Times column of the same name. I don’t remember reading in the credits which films are based on which personal essays, and so, have no way of telling what exactly was adapted other than perhaps the column’s general vibe (?!).
The six films of Modern Love Mumbai run the full spectrum, I thought, in their approach to women’s labor. The first three, also the strongest, linger prominently on women’s physical and emotional labour. In Raatrani (directed by Shonali Bose), there’s a scene in which Laila (Fatima Sana Shaikh) has to deal with the roof of her house falling at a time when her ten-year-long marriage has also just crumbled. The camera follows Laila as she overcomes the physical and psychological hurdles to keep it together. The short film would be stronger without some of the overbearing expository dialogues and soliloquies (delivered spiritedly by Shaikh); Raatrani still was an excellent watch because of the places and moments on which it lingers. The next film, Baai (directed by Hansal Mehta), focuses on a grandmother-grandson relationship. Although the grandson gets more screen time and it is his perspective we follow, the two most remarkable scenes of the film are between the grandson and grandmother. Baai (Tanuja) does not get too many lines of dialogue, but her presence of mind and compassion are established. When she is bedridden and frail, we still know we are in the presence of a formidable woman. Mumbai Dragon (directed by Vishal Bharadwaj), my favorite in the anthology, shows the Chinese-Indian community in Mumbai, and tracks the turbulent emotional life of Sui (Yeo Yann Yann), a widowed mother, overseer of the Kwan Kung Temple, and keeper of the family’s various recipes… This film, too, has some long winded expository stretches, but they receive a quirky treatment, and sentimental attachments are portrayed with a mix of humor and tenderness that works. All this brings me to what I thought was the weakest film in the anthology: Cutting Chai. Cutting Chai’s treatment of women’s desire and labour is…well…confusing.
Cutting Chai (directed by Nupur Asthana) follows a woman struggling to write as her husband and child constantly demand her attention. The film establishes the level of cognitive and affective labor she is expected to put in. And then, when she protests, she is told by the husband that if she had a book in her, she would have written it already. The film, however, takes several U-turns after that. These turns do not make the film unpredictable as such but non-committal. In the end we are left with a somewhat cliched ‘everyone has to adjust a little’ variety of feeling. I wondered if the writer or the director of this film is one of those people who says, ‘I think women are great and very important. I am a woman but you know, I am not an activist type. I am not a feminist.’
More from T
T’s interview with author Naheed Phiroze Patel about her novel Mirror Made of Rain was published in Electric Literature.
T’s poem “Stray Ghazal” appeared in the anthology They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets.
More from P
Momspeak, P’s 2020 book on motherhood offers a more detailed view of the invisible labours of motherhood and parenting, you can order it here.