I’m not sure why I was allowed to see the movie as many times as I did—or at all, really. My parents had strict rules about what was unacceptable for a child of seven or eight to bear witness to: specifically, video games that involved violence, reality shows that involved sex, and MTV music videos that involved both. Despite these content restrictions, it was somehow permissible for me to sit on the living room floor, my mother curled up on the couch, and have Tyler Perry’s agonized, absurdist family dramas beamed directly into my developing prefrontal cortex. I was too young to walk to the store on my own—but not too young to see Diary of a Mad Black Woman.
It was one of my mother’s favourite movies, this orgiastic portrait of a doomed and crumbling marriage. And the plot was virtually the same as that of Perry’s other movies—as it has been for the past two decades: a downtrodden, exploited Black woman is rescued from cruelty and loneliness by a simple, working-class, churchgoing Black man, with a whole lot of circus behaviour as the backdrop. There are cartoonish drug addicts and ever-sermonizing elders. There are predatory, abusive Black men and helpless, suffering Black women. There is unforgivable violence waged on hairstyles (in some films, wigs shift partway through scenes). And there’s the gun-toting, manhandling, weed-smoking Madea, played by Perry in a grey wig and floral housedress, whose lingua franca involves creative liberties with Biblical quotes. Notably, there are no people, only slapstick caricatures and miserable tropes: minstrels that don’t speak or act like anyone from the block.
