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“Every Nigga Is a Star”: A Critical Reflection on the Fifth Anniversary of Moonlight

2022; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/qed.9.issue-1.0001

2327-1590

Jeffrey Q. McCune,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

Barry Jenkins's Moonlight opens with this refrain from the 1973 Boris Gardiner hit “Every Nigger Is a Star,”1 as Juan (played by Academy-Award-winning Mahershala Ali) rolls up in a 1973 Chevrolet Impala Custom coupe. He is immediately met by two other Black men, one a drug-dealing colleague and the other who is searching for a drug fix. The man asking for the drug hook-up turns to Juan and compliments with conviction: “you know you my man, right Juan.” To which Juan replies, “this nigga.” (Every nigga is a star.) And this 1973 refrain and homage is not a coincidence, as 1973 marks a watershed moment where a record breaking four mayors in major cities were Black. And I highlight this moment not to romanticize the nature of politics as some space of administering Black people a “way in” or a way out of anti-Blackness, but rather to speak to the affective character of the moment of heightened Black ascendency. To envelope the story of Moonlight in this symbolic register is to position Juan, Paula, Little/Black/Chiron, and every character as being as much stars in the rigorous living as Black, as those who live as stars in the spectacular sense. Jenkins's coloring of this Floridian landscape of stars, and McCraney's incorporation of “nigga” paints a motion picture that attempts to recognize the gross accessibility of Black stereotype as well as choosing to refuse the container of the “nigger” that has foreclosed possibilities for Black life. Moonlight, unlike its contemporary companion Brokeback Mountain, does not attempt to mark a narrative of exception or the outstanding, but rather emphasizes the perplexing and necessary truths of the pedestrian, everyday Black—its beauty, trauma, and complex truths.This opening to the film is an invocation into the film's Blackness, a filmic space that the late and great Manning Marable might call the representation of “the zenith and the decline.” McCraney writing this moment as the framework for all we see going forward in the film, for me, narrates a world where “every nigga really is a star.” The cinematographic emphasis on Black beauty in the film, along with the constant complexity given to each character—as you will see narrated in the great articles ahead—provides a rich terrain under which to see Black genius, excellence, creativity, and everyday rigor within scenes of high social constraint and a world of anti-Blackness. To be alive as Black, in the queerness of its frequent death, is to be a star. This gesture—recapitulating the inseparable nigga–star dialectic is not one that is about celebrity iconography, or magic if you will, but the quotidian life of Black folks, to be at once rigorously making it and shining nonetheless. There is no real glossy of this film, until we get to the water (a space inhabited by Black bodies dead and alive), to speak to the ebb and flow and flux of Blackness, speaking to Omiseke Tinsely's claim that the “ocean obscures all origin.”2 McCraney's writerly use of Yoruba-based spirituality through water as anchor, and Jenkins's directorial attention to the flow and flux of the ocean carrying Black bodies and things disrupts originary logics and normative constructions of Black bodies in this space as separate from the quotidian, offering instead a water source that is always a presence, an ever-active energy against which Black bodies rely and relish.McCraney's offering here—making “every nigga a star”—a declarative and concrete artistic statement in which there is no question to be posed to any figure who emerges within the frame of the film—extends a critical generosity that, like comedienne Monique, “always bets on us,” or in the spirit of actor and director Issa Rae “roots for everybody Black.” McCraney's writing of this Black queer world is like Ava Duvernay, coloring our complexity through filmic portraiture and complex characters and narrative—to afford us a Black world where we are not simply living under the machine of death, but one in which WE determine the significance of Black life and death. Unlike some contemporary theorizations that ignore the staunch rigor of anti-Blackness to produce illnesses within, McCraney and Jenkins's filmic theory here allows for a space where we see the bodies, worlds, things of Blackness as having evidence of toxic encounters with whiteness and anti-Blackness, but also possessing radical and robust richness in a world that is imagined without white people (the film literally chooses to not represent whiteness). In this way, this Black radical imagination makes alien the toxic elements of the environment, centering on not only the making do, but the making of Blackness, Black queerness, Black queer diaspora, Black womanness, and even the Black quiet.Some of what we find in the articles of this special issue is an imperative for us as scholars to stop saying we are recuperating Black folks and things, but rather that we are giving clarity to what is before us. For me, McCraney in his oscillatory writing of characters—who at once may seem just fucked up, then in the next scene feel radically tender—gives clarity to the ethnographic truth of Black life, rather than rescuing Black representation from the evil of distortion. To recuperate is to accept on some terms of illness, or lack of luster; when to render is to recognize the star that is before you and its gifts to the world. In this sense, Isaiah Wooden's “tenacious readings” are timely and offer us so much to chew on in terms of what Moonlight offers us in its distillation of Blackness, “queerness, and the outside.” In his article, he offers us a way into thinking about the narrative as one that is anti-Bildungsroman: a coming of age story it is not; there is no clear kind of incorporation into society. Chiron/Little/Black remains a Black queer, marked deviant, but in the spirit of McCraney and Jenkins, shines and evolves—constantly creating new worlds and new ways of being inside and outside.The attention to the generative force of deviance is what I find instructive about Terrance Wooten and Maurice Tracy's articles. In Wooten's offering, focusing on the mother and othermothering in Moonlight, we see resistance to a public reading of Black motherhood and queer sociality as flat and predictable. Through his critical reading we are allowed to read and process Chiron and his relationship to his mother. Through a grammar of Blackness, Wooten assists us to understand the discourses surrounding these Black mothering bodies, rather than simply relying on the filmic setting to be determinant of the mother–son dialectical possibility. What might be called a “reading of accidents,” we see Wooten in this article place characters against the historic characterization of Black folks in particular proximities to so-called deviance, in a way that deems them worthy of exploration and far more complex than the camera may be able to capture.Following in the vein of what I call “disobedient reading,” I turn to Maurice Tracy's article, which at its core gives attention to the constructions of manhood in Moonlight, providing a range of readings that speak to the richness of McCraney and Jenkins renderings. Most fascinating is Tracy's refusal to read beyond trauma but instead to lean into it. Through Tracy's attention to Black queer readerly tendencies toward trauma, he highlights a queer reading that is not triumphant but trauma-centered. He explores primarily the mentor–mentee/father–son relationship between Juan and Little, as a conjuring of Black queer trauma—in particular by being attentive to the ways in which male–male intimacy has been a site of perpetual abuse. Tracy's sitting with trauma as a hermeneutic produces a different kind of “truth” for the film; it moves away from the romanticism given to Moonlight as a production where all the relationships are working toward the good and generative, pushing toward a queer reading that centers how reading for some is always moving with and in the direction of trauma.The Forum articles—On Black Intimacy and Touch—forge a conversation about connections between men, born of sensual (non)sexual pleasures, which manifest a constellation of relationships uncommon to the filmic screen. What I appreciate most about Marlon Bailey, Antonia Randolph, Godfried Asante, and Baba Badji's offerings is that they provide another way to think about how we gaze at relationality between Black men. Together these writers provoke us to think about mutual recognition, close encounters, critical fondness as a filmic gift—all in a world that perpetually attempts to kill the Black queer. The opportunity to ponder the meaning and value of Black male tendency through offering of essay and poetry, allows Black queer folks to articulate the meaning of the film on their terms, providing introspective, intracultural readings that may commonly be unavailable in public discourse.I am struck by a line in Baba Badji's poem in the forum: “that Blue Black Boy is a fable.” In recalling the refrain of “In the Moonlight, Black Boys Look Blue,” I always felt it was an attempt to create purchase power in the glowing and the glossy—to articulate the shiny of Black queerness, in particular the Black queer boy under the moon close to the water. In retrospect, Moonlight's aesthetics are opposite. Moonlight does not require the star that shines bright, or the glossy that coheres for all the world to see. The aesthetics of Moonlight might be better to help us imagine a poor Black queer studies, to riff on Matt Brim's polemic for queer studies broadly. Though rather than lean into the institutional forces that stratify, Moonlight offers us a look at another Black queer world—full of stratification—yet is strikingly different than the worlds that simply pivot and counter white queer life or study.As we celebrate the fifth anniversary of Moonlight, we recognize it as a monumental film and a critical study in Blackness and Black queerness, inviting us to reimagine a queer pop cultural text that does not require the triumphant or glossy, nor is it simply tragedy on the horizon of triumph. It is something more. In a more apt description, it is a reality of a young man and his community in impoverished Florida, where all the characters may feel a “fixed star”—but are in constellation and oscillating between queer worlds, born of the thick of poverty and the histories of diasporic Blackness in the face of colonization, while also recognizing spaces and relationships that do not need much to shine. Too often, the shining of Black queerness is arrival and recognition, where in the film it leaves things undone, unfinished, and unresolved. The star moves and sits, shines and dulls. It is all Black.The second verse of the 1973 Gardiner classic rings:I have walked the streets aloneTwenty years I've been on my ownTo be hated and despised (Poor nigga)No one to sympathize (Poor nigga)But there's one great thing I knowYou can say, “I told you so”They've got a right place in the sunWhere there's love for everyone, and[Refrain]Every nigga is a star.