I recently saw Tyler Perry's film adaptation of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, and although this was not a creative nonfiction piece, it does have to do with biographies in a sense that Perry took the stories of seven women and put them to the screen. He studied the play (over a thousand times, he said in a letter on his website), studied the women, did the same kind of research that we would have done had we continued our biography assignment in class. He could not speak to these women because they did not exist, similar to the fact that we could not speak to the women that we were writing about. All we had were words that they left in letters, books, articles and words spoken by those who know them. Words are powerful--it can make the difference in portraying someone as evil or someone as resilient. I admired Perry for his work because he took the words from the play and added more to them to create the screen version. It was not easy blending poetry with film, and several others have said that this is one of the donwfalls of the film, but he told their stories. He told their stories like he knew each one personally, even though he didn't create them. The theme that I seem to repeat in my blogs is the art of storytelling, and how my idea of it has changed over time.
