Moonlight (2016)

directed by Barry Jenkins

Orlantae Duncan

Since learning in elementary school that the human body is made up of 60% water, I have had an unshakable marriage to a certain nautical metaphor—that each human is a stream or river unto themselves, and while we all may belong to, and eventually cascade back into, the same sea, no two bodies of water are the same. A different flow, a different temperature, a different host of flora and fauna unique to each person. I often would forget this childlike way of waxing philosophical, or just how precocious a little black boy I was, until the scene of another little black boy, standing on a Miami beach while the moonlight painted his body blue-black, brought the poetry of water all rushing back to me.

When I first saw Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight, it was not until after it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and even then I still had not one inkling of what the film was about, having somehow avoided all talk surrounding it; so you can imagine the surprise when I (25 at the time, unapologetically black and undeniably gay) found myself spirited away from a mostly-empty movie theater one Tuesday afternoon to a beach located in the Distant Present, wading waist deep in familiar waters. What began as a solid plan to take a personal day from work and treat myself to a movie as a means of self-care, quickly became, for lack of better words, a spiritual experience like none other. An experience doubled in its sacredness by the strange feeling that playwright Tarrell Alvin McCraney, and through him director Barry Jenkins, were ghosts of my queer boyhood, somehow haunting every experienced hurtle and triumph placed in the path of my coming-of-age. A feeling as if all of my secrets were exposed and laid bare, not only for me to revisit and reflect upon as if inside a museum of myself, but as a means to have America, particularly Black America, play witness to them.

While the protagonist, Chiron, and I spoke different languages (his journey in Miami, mine in central Virginia), there was no denying that we shared the same vocabulary: an absent mother whose struggle with substance abuse ruptured familial love; a schoolyard history of bullying and verbal abuse; a home unequipped to successfully raise a particular type of black boy; a nervous temperament and fear of the world that manifested in closing in on oneself and one’s silence. An hour and 55 minutes of seeing myself exposed on an operating table designed as a big screen in a dark space that reeked of stale popcorn and overpriced chocolate bars.

I remember sobbing uncontrollably during two particular scenes:

Chiron’s mother, Paula, is out with a man one night, parked outside of an at-risk neighborhood where drugs are dealt, and is approached by Juan, the stand-in father who acts as a guardian and sanctuary to Chiron but is also positioned as the source from which Paula gets her drugs. As she takes a hit of a crack pipe, Juan demands to know what she is doing and Paula, eyes filled with both hate and acute hurt, attacks Juan: “Who the hell you think you is? Huh? What’s it, you gonna raise my son now? You gonna raise my son? Yeah, that’s what I thought. You? But you gonna raise my son though right? Hmm? You ever see the way he walks? You gonna tell him why the other boys kick his ass all the time? Huh? You gonna tell him?”

The second scene follows shortly after, when Chiron is at Juan and his partner Teresa’s kitchen table and asks, “What’s a faggot?” The following dialogue nearly caused me to forget I was in a theater, and believe I was at the table with them, asking the same question and needing the same answer:

“A faggot is...a word used to make gay people feel bad.” 

“Am I a faggot?” 

“No, no. You can be gay, but you ain’t gotta let nobody call you no faggot.”

I was lost growing up, split in half in a psychological warzone that made me believe my blackness and queerness were diametrically opposed and could not co-exist in the same body. To be a man, a black man, I had to be strong. Any softness was seen as weakness, and weak black men do not survive. That continues to be the dogma issued in many black homes still to this day, and how could it not be when history, this country, the powers that be, give us incontrovertible evidence and records that black bodies are the most abused and discarded? My grandmother tried to instill this in me, but I often failed: not taking to sports like the other boys, showing an obsessive interest in the arts, an inability to fight back against the peers who bullied and teased me, possessing a flamboyant way of walking with a slight lilt to my voice when speaking. I knew she saw this as weakness and a calculated guess to the longevity of my survival in the world.

Chiron grows up, as all black boys must, in a way that reflects the aforementioned tenets and expectations placed on black youth from our community and elders. He gets bigger, his demeanor is more dominating and his attention more demanding, an exchange that sacrifices individual identity (“softness”) for the tools of survival (“strength, power”) that leaves queerness palimpsest on the body. He seems to have solved the grand riddle of how he can exist, if he must, knowing what lies beneath the veneer. This, among several other differences, is where he and I split paths in our queer black maturation. I was fortunate, in ways that became more apparent the older I got, in being able to obtain a college education, and shortly after graduating, finding spaces of my own to explore what manhood could look like in all its myriad forms. Chiron did not, nor could not in any degree with limited resources and support, realize that manhood, and strength, is varied. What is perceived as weakness to some, may be the foundation of truth and stability that guides others. To stress the metaphor: no two rivers are the same, nor can two men tread the same waters.

I have seen Moonlight twice since that Tuesday in 2017, once with a group of friends I was eager to watch it with after immediately purchasing it on DVD, and once alone during a difficult time this past year, and while the film still allows me to burrow within myself and reflect upon the knowledge that my own story is no exception to the plethora of queer black youth who must navigate their sexuality alongside their blackness, it continues to highlight the gaps and work still necessary for me to tease out in my own journey. Where Chiron found peace in reconciling his mother’s neglect, I still struggle with the pain left from a family who loved but could not understand me. Where Chiron found the courage to accept the invitation to be loved by those in his past, I burrow my head in the sand in an attempt to see only my present. Unlike the film, my story goes on, day after day, with no abrupt blackout and no credits signaling an end. This terrifies me, knowing that the vast flow of life continues to move, with each day offering new storms to leave me shipwrecked—yet I am not alone. I never was, and Moonlight is my testament. Now, if only I can find a man whose river can conjoin with mine.

Orlantae Duncan is a writer, foodie, and resident of Richmond, Virginia. His work has appeared in Homology Lit, Cartridge Lit, and Allegory Ridge's poetry anthology, Aurora vol. 1.  He has served on the editorial staff of The Rappahannock Review, and manages his own blog, Between the Blog and Me (https://btbamblog.wordpress.com/).