Pecola || camp nano

|| author's note ||

The inspiration for Pecola came from me being painfully haunted by Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye as well as hearing Viola Davis saying in Dark Girls she haven't seen black femininity being soft, beautiful, or kind while being portrayed by black women that looked like her until she saw Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. And I realized that because of how race and gender is racially coded in media imagery in their portrayals of black women, especially those with darker skin tones, despite our society's new interest in "diversity" and "representation," it is and always will be racially coded in a way that forces black women to act or be a certain way to be considered feminine. [This isn't meant to dismiss how femininity, beauty, desirability, being worthy of love is always associated with whiteness or proximity to whiteness/non-blackness.] 

Despite these texts being important for me to understand how color, gender, and race intersect to create black female subjectivity, I was/am tired of reading books about dark skin black women that explain the horrible effects of colorism, anti-blackness, and sexism on not only their psyche but the people who perpetrate the colorism, anti-blackness, sexism against these black women because I know people do not care. Thus, my desire to write Pecola really stemmed from my desire to read a book about a black woman with dark skin whose choices in life could include living in a community that accepts her choice to not accept or normalize how anti-blackness, sexism, and colorism within her own community [as well as other communities] have decided to make her a scapegoat to call ugly, etc. and normalize their decision to make dark skin and blackness being seen as making someone unworthy of love. Nor would this community require repeated explanations of why misogynoir is bad, harmful, and profitable and necessary for certain society to exist all at the same time. A community where the folks Love each other. A home for the weary and lovelorn. However, that sort of community would be a work of science fiction/alternative reality.

So, I imagined this alternative universe set in a timeline where black people, especially dark skin black women, gave up the useless fight of trying to have discourse about the effects of all the -isms  and made a community just for them where they could be celebrated without worrying about what the world thought. They could make a world where they would be free to just be. And then I imagined what would happen if a character like Pecola Breedlove or any black women went there? How would they react? What would they do? What does their femininity look like now? What is life like there? 

Thus, I present to you my first speculative fiction work Pecola [that is also heavily influenced with a Bojack Horseman style of writing/presenting a story]. And with that being said, I hope you are as excited about this book as I am.

with love, 

linda wright

p.s.: i don't own any of the images [such as models for the characters, etc.] used within the book so these images can be taken down at the request of the original creators/owners of the images.