“What happens to brown girls who never learn to love themselves as brown?” The question is a line of poetry, the voice of an omnipresent narrator. It is also the question that the short film “El ritual de la Belleza”, directed by Shenny De Los Ángeles and Maria Marrone, seriously tries to answer. Her work represents the De Los Angeles family, three women from the Dominican Republic, and the beauty rites they practice to honor their cultural and racial identities. De Los Angeles’s grandmother erased evidence of her African ancestry from her own braids. Having passed this ritual, she says: “I was the one who ruined my daughter’s hair.” As a child, De Los Angeles made similar decisions. She highlighted her curly hair and the only thing she wanted from her was to go unnoticed, so she begged her mother to uncurl it, to remove the knots from her hair. “The Ritual of Beauty” is an exercise in healing the generational trauma that her mother and grandmother survived.
In an early scene, De Los Angeles scrubs a bathtub and builds an altar, on which photos of her mother and grandmother with natural hair and a copy of Ntozake Shange’s “Wild Beauty” sit on a bench. honor. She is cleaning the space, performing a ritual inspired by a religion she practices called Lukumí. As she continues the ritual, a voice addresses the viewer, pronouncing a poem that De Los Angeles wrote, which inspired the film; the speaker of it is the Yoruba spirit Yemayá, the “mother of the seas”. De Los Angeles thinks of Yemaya’s voice as “the most divine version of yourself,” she recently told me over Zoom, with her abundant curls taking up most of the frame. “That voice within you that encourages and challenges you, and shows you how to take space, surrender and heal.”
Marrone and De Los Angeles grew up together in Kissimmee, Florida, and both women are now twenty-seven years old. In framing the sequences of her hair, Marrone said she wanted those scenes to be tight and delicate: the narrow angles reflect fingers combing through tiny knots. Los Angeles elders internalized part of the racist history of the Dominican Republic; one method of their survival was conformity. De Los Angeles’ grandmother is Afro-Dominican and her mother is biracial. They put “fire” on her scalp and smoothed out the Africanness of her hair. Once she came of age, De Los Angeles had the freedom and courage to choose otherwise. These women, from three different generations, represent a triptych of constructive conflict, reflection and care necessary for healing.
When De Los Angeles trims her grandmother’s graying hair, wisps fly through the air. In another scene, a curling iron presses hard against his mother’s roots. De Los Angeles’s poem continues. “If our beauty ritual is to set fire to our crown. . . if beauty is really pain, if that is what we tell ourselves, how do we love without hurting ourselves? The friends had two creative goals: to tell the story of a family’s complex relationships with their hair and beauty, and to capture the spirit of that poem on film. “There’s always this kind of translation that has to happen when you cross media, and most importantly, we really wanted the images to serve the writing,” said Marrone. “How can we continue to capture the essence of what this story is meant to make you feel?”
Hair is a talisman in the film, a symbol of so many elements of identity. “I found pictures of my mom at twenty-one when she went natural, and I got to see a biracial girl for the first time,” De Los Angeles said. “I think I now have a better understanding of a lot of the privileges that I have for being racially ambiguous. . . . We also experience our blackness differently. My mom and I don’t share what my grandmother shares in her body. To my grandmother, I’m white, and that’s a complicated and nuanced conversation.” As for her, De Los Angeles told me that, these days, her journey through her hair “isn’t that deep,” and that’s the “beautiful part of it.”
Source: news.google.com