Abstract
The book of Lamentations is one of the most visceral and disturbing narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures. Through the establishment of the literary metaphor, Daughter Zion, as well as the lamenting voices of the destroyed community of Jerusalem, the text addresses the intricacies of human life, loneliness, and experiences of loss, stigma, and gendered violence in the midst of war. These themes can serve as a vehicle to read Lamentations resistively in light of the continuing HIV pandemic in the United States, which disproportionally affects black and minority ethnic (BME) women. Using Sapphire’s 1996 novel Push and Lee Daniels’s film adaptation, Precious (2010), as intertexts to read Lamentations, Lu Skerratt explores how this biblical tradition gives a face and voice to the gender violence and intersectional oppressions experienced by BME women living with HIV and AIDS. They also argue, however, that Lamentations is a text of survival too; in voicing her own pain, Daughter Zion transforms the pain she has experienced into a moment of liberation from the inevitable finality and fragility of life.
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Notes
- 1.
All biblical citations are from the NRSV.
- 2.
See Bechtel (1991) for a discussion of shame as a source of anxiety and sanction of social control in biblical Israel.
- 3.
Throughout my discussion, I cite dialogue from both the novel Push and its movie adaptation Precious to illustrate my points.
- 4.
There is no mention of what happens to Precious’s daughter in Push. In Daniel’s adaptation, the final scene of the movie sees Precious carrying both Abdul and Mongo across New York—there is no indication of the life that these two children will lead. Mongo is seen as a problem body; not only is she black, a victim of abuse with an HIV-positive mother, but she is also profoundly disabled. The silence surrounding what happens to her is notable and is a further reflection on the systematic oppression of black bodies and the multifaceted intersections that continue to constrain them.
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Skerratt, L. (2018). For Precious Girls Everywhere: Lamentations, HIV, and Precious. In: Blyth, C., Colgan, E., Edwards, K. (eds) Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion. Religion and Radicalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70669-6_2
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