“Why don’t you love me? Tell me, baby, why don’t you love me. when I made me so damn easy to love”
Blackberries start off with a beautiful, simple sampling of the Beyonce song, and then gradually moves into the intense rhythm of the spoken word aspect of the video. Blackberries is a poetry video by Celestina Rowaiye that depicts the struggle black women have with dealing with black men who choose not to love black women because of the white-standard that has become prevalent.
This beautiful work of art is special in that it drives the point home directly by asking the black man who has taught him to think that the edgy, willful glory of hair on the black woman is not beautiful, or who has taught him that the standard of beauty is a specific color/complexion?
“They say the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice, so why do some of its farmers refuse to taste the sweetness of this fruit?”
The video is a call to checking yourself! Are you actively avoiding your own people? Are there glitches in your mind, confining you to ideas of beauty?
These are some of the questions that Blackberries looms out in the mind.
It’s a beautiful work of art that makes you acutely aware of your own biases and the tendency for black women to bend their beauty and awesomeness because of the confining beauty boundaries that have prevailed in the world. Absolutely love how Celestina paints a critical picture of how the glitches in the mind cause a ripple effect.
Celestina Rowaiye is a poet whose work explores the human condition whilst simultaneously capturing the black and woman experience. She is the co-founder of Poetic Impact which aims to promote poetry and spoken word, encouraging people to create and engage with the art form. She is currently working on her poetry series ‘Re.Works’ and ‘Blackberries’ is the first piece in the series with Omenka, the beautiful-voiced singer who sampled the Beyoncé song.
For updates on the series of Poetry, follow Celestina on Twitter, Instagram and subscribe to her YouTube channel.