“Finding Your Black Swan” by Hanlie Raath
The movie ends and the audience remain seated in dead silence. I feel ripped open, as passion must for me to unravel and yield and sacrifice my control. I look around me, and instantly it’s clear that the women in the audience are more deeply affected than the men. The men seem quite refined in their appreciation of the sacrifice just witnessed, and quietly search their women’s faces to see what was sparked in them.
Several women slip into denial and fear - deflecting their shakiness by muttering about the psycho-babe that needs medication, and the explicit lesbian scenes. The Mind takes control and insists on absorbing this most profound statement about female sexuality by examining it to a literal interpretation. The question of: Where are you in relation to your own Black Swan? - is both incisive and disruptive.
Yet no one is astonished when Natalie Portman graces us with both her great beauty and intellect, and is crowned Queen of the Oscars. She is proudly expectant, and adoringly thanks her man for choreographing her next role, and thus gives this Swan a more radiant completion.
The White Swan represents our chastity, and is an end result of the nurturance or neglect or engulfment offered by our mothers. It creates the baseline- a starting point in how we traditionally perceive our role as women. When nurturance is sufficient, the White Swan is confident in her capacity to offer love, gentleness and compassion.
When the mother has been too consuming or neglectful, we internalise self doubt, become highly self critical and dispirited. She pushes her mother away, as we must for us to experience true passion – it has to be our own brand of femininity and womanliness.
Another aspect of femininity which haunts women is the competition, hate and envy we confront in relation to one other. Patriarchy sets us up for this, and women fail each other when they backstab, cheat or betray their friendships with women, to succeed in work, get a man, or bad mouth each other – to make themselves look superior or varnished.
As in the movie, eating disorders - develop as a means of placing distance between the mother and daughter. She self – mutilates and we do this on many levels by choosing unhappy relationships, unfulfilling work, unsavoury friends that indirectly endorse our lack of worth.
Our spirit gets broken. Only The Black Swan can bring that passion and power back... The energy is aggressive, defiant, and deliberate. She bights the man’s lip and draws blood by piercing that aspect of masculinity that manipulates, criticizes, diminishes and patronises her talent. So many women embark on the quest for their Black Swan as a manipulative ploy, to be approved of or loved by a man. I love the fact that the men are just observers of this journey. For once - it’s not about how men see us, but how we see ourselves. Whilst men do applaud this journey in their women, they can have nothing to do with it.
In the Black Swan’s moment, back arched, wings spread and head held high - her Presence was both breathtaking and mesmerising – she is fully seen and valued but not invincible.
We continue to swim from both these shores.
Warmest Wishes,
Hanlie Raath
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