When DuVernay was a child, her Aunt Denise fostered a love of art in her, but also showed her that art and activism could be combined. Her aunt was a registered nurse who worked night shifts so she could “pursue her passion during the day, which was art and literature and theater….She was a patroness. She worked to live. But what she loved in life was the arts. She was fed by it,” says DuVernay. “That was a huge influence on me.” Her mother was socially conscious, and both women taught her that “you could say something through the arts.”
DuVernay is fearless despite working in an industry that hasn’t seen many black women who direct, write or maintain career longevity. She began as a publicist, and she was good at it. Over the years, she developed a voice and vision that flowered into reality as she made more films and documentaries and television that effortlessly combined art and activism across forms. When I ask her about her career, she says, “I try to be a shapeshifter and do a lot of things. A: because I can. B: because the traditional walls collapsed so there’s more flexibility, and C: because you can’t hit a moving target.” Her social consciousness and her appreciation of good art not only inform her work, but they inform how she works as well. Planning for “Queen Sugar,” which has run for two seasons on the OWN network and has been approved for a third, she made a list of possible directors and then noticed that they were all women. “I thought: We should commit to this. At a time in the industry when there’s a lack of opportunity for women, we could really use our platform here to say something important about correcting a wrong.” A total of 17 women directed the 29 episodes of the first two seasons.
DuVernay’s perspective adds a revelatory dimension to the representation of black people in this country. We have decades of art, music, literature and film that bear testament to black Americans’ survival and drive to thrive in the United States. Much of it is powerful and moving. Often, it reconfirms our fire, our fight. Frequently, it reconfirms our agency and centers our stories. “All black art is political,” DuVernay told me. “I think our very presence is political. Anyone that is able to establish a voice and a consistent presence and put their voice forth is doing something radical and political with their very presence.”
But her work bears something more. It shows us an aspect of ourselves, of black people, that we rarely see on film: It allows us vulnerability. In “Queen Sugar” the characters, women and men and children alike, show emotion when they are sad or conflicted or in pain. They cry and sob and weep because they feel unappreciated or betrayed or angry or remorseful. They feel safe enough with one another, safe enough in the world, to bare their hearts with those they love. The experience of watching authentic vulnerability on the screen helps us to understand that we don’t have to be ever invulnerable, ever strong, ever inviolable, ever emotionless, even though this world seems to demand this of us. Instead, if we find ourselves in places of safety with people who engender that safety, we can let ourselves feel. DuVernay knows her show has this effect. “Some people say he [Ralph Angel] cries too much,” she says, laughing, “but it’s a very feminine, very caring show.” When I fell in love with “Queen Sugar” in the first episode, I realized how starved I’d been for emotionality in someone who looked like me.