My takeaway from my experience watching Black Mother, Lost Daughter is that at its core, it is an expression of grief. It is a method the playwright uses to express to the best of her ability, what cannot be explained in her own words alone. It is an expression of the collective tiredness experienced by the Black community, whenever justice continues to elude us consecutively, time after time again. It raises the question of whether justice can even exist for us. Alongside that, with the show’s name, it is also a story of motherhood, specifically Black motherhood.
I think that while it is typical for the older generation to butt heads with the younger, what is so heartbreaking about the relationship between Princess and her mother Natalie is the lack of understanding and communication. Throughout the show, we constantly see Princess’s willingness to spill out her emotions in front of other people, completely negating the “strong Black woman” archetype that is more apparent in her mother’s actions. Natalie is incredibly silent, we only ever see how she truly feels in the wake of Queen’s death when is alone, and nursing a bottle of “tea”, the alcohol pulling out all the thoughts and feelings she cannot bear to speak aloud to Princess.
But towards the end of the play, what truly breaks my heart is when Natalie completely misremembers a core memory of Queen running away from home, and how she failed to properly reconcile that emotional wound. What we find out is that Natalie completely misremembered in her grief, and the child that actually ran away was Princess. And rather than apologizing and reaffirming her love for her daughter, Natalie wills it away, asking her daughter if she’d like something to eat. To me, it seems as though some Black mothers would rather almost die than admit that they were wrong. It creates a cycle of trauma that may have existed since time immemorial There’s so much more that I could say about this show and the messages it imparted, but what I can say is that it was a simultaneously enlightening and sobering experience.
Image sourced from hellogiggles.com
