Am I standing on this muthafucken stage?
Am I standing on this muthafucken stage?
And so begins Mo'Nique’s Netflix standup presentation, routine, maybe even, sermon.
It’s been a long journey for her—the Netflix showdown over pay equity and let’s call it what it is, financial dignity. She knew accepting their initial $500,000 offer for a comedy special was her accepting (participating) in her own financial humiliation. Comedienne Amy Schumer was able to get her offer increased by $13 million after she pointed to significantly higher compensation being paid to Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock. Like many before her, Mo’Nique paid a high price for pushing back.
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
The world was changing. I tasted it in the wine. I felt it on my palate. It was 2010. The first black president was two years into his presidency. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, spilling millions of gallons of oil into the sea—the worst oil spill in American history. Haiti suffered a catastrophic earthquake, killing hundreds of thousands. People pretend that the Covid-19 pandemic was the first time death was in the air. But it’s always in the air.
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
Looking back, I understand why the southern Rhône was my wine region of choice. I was drawn to those muddy, stewed earth notes (I was obsessed with Vacqueyras and Lirac). I craved that deep, dark, underworld wine—wine that smelled of secrets moving through dreadlocked vines and ghosts raiding cellars, pain rocking wombs and nocturnal creatures sniffing around freshly dug graves, spirits rising, change about come.
It was 2010. Mo’Nique was about to take off what my father used to call the grave’s clothes. She was Mary, mother of all we dare not see, leaning up against that cross, rollers in her hair, smoking a cigarette.
What did Nina Simone say? “I tell you what freedom is to me. No Fear. I mean, really, no fear.”
As I was watching Mo’Nique play Mary in the film, “Precious,” it felt like I was watching a kind of afterbirth. Mo’Nique had no fear. She was somebody’s auntie, cousin, godmother, neighbor, friend, or friend’s friend. The film was based on author Sapphire’s novel “Push”—a book I’m sure I read in high school but deliberately pushed out of memory. It went too far in, broke the hymen. Mo’Nique gave flesh and bone to poverty in all its forms—desperation, denial, dreams deformed, babies born out of incest, innocence unlived.
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
Mo’Nique as Mary in “Precious”
I had a similar feeling when I watched Tom Hanks in the film “Philadelphia,” where he plays a dying gay man who had been fired from his law firm after his partners found out he had AIDs. There’s no denying the genius of the comedic artform, but when these comedians slip into these roles where we, the audience members, are forced to see ourselves in our most magnificent fragility, when we are summoned from our colossal egos into the throes of truths too horrible to ponder without resistance—“That’s them or that’s their problem,”we are seduced, arrested, and sometimes transformed.
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
I remember watching the 2010 Oscars specifically because Mo’Nique was nominated:
Nominees:
Penélope Cruz, Nine
Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart
Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
*Mo'Nique, Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by SapphireI don’t remember exactly what I was drinking that night, but I’m confident it was from or near southern Rhône. I was drinking a lot of Alain Jaume wines back then—sweet, dark, dank, earth-rumbling juice.
I watched Mo'Nique standing next to Maggie Gyllanhaal during the pre-Oscar interviews. She was levitating, earth rumbling.
It wasn’t just that Mo’Nique was black. She was fat. She was raised by an “illiterate” mother. She was molested by her brother. She had been in “special” education. She was an actress and comedienne and talk show host before this moment, but in this pageant of whiteness, she was a person—not the fat girl-cousin or fat girl-bestie. She was a person fully realized—beautiful and ugly, celebrated and shamed, righteous and contradictory. She was the America we don’t want to talk about though as I type these words, in all parts of America, people are enduring the pain of skin quietly, quietly.
Then she won.
“You gotta play ball. This is not just show. It’s show business. I don’t like calling the race card. I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe in it. If I buy into it, it becomes real,” a quote from Lee Daniels—the “Precious” director said during a Don Lemon interview.
Mo’Nique believed what most folks believe after they crossover. Finally, I’m going to be paid my worth. But she was receiving scripts that weren’t befitting of an Oscar-winning actress. She wasn’t being offered pay befitting of an Oscar-winning actress.
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
So she spoke out (politely at first). I saw the interviews with Don Lemon and Sway. She explained that she satisfied the publicity terms for “Precious” but was asked to do more. She declined and was called difficult to work with. Folks said she had a bad attitude.
Interview after interview, I watched Mo'Nique trying to prove her worth, explaining herself, repeating herself—using her words, the unoffensive words, the sanitized words.
But folks weren’t getting it.
So seven years later, on the Apollo stage, she shouted:
“It would kill me not to say the real shit.”
“It would kill me not to say the real shit.”
Folk called her vulgar. She was messin’ with the wrong people. “As soon as you get closer to the finish line, it changes,” she said.
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
Shout, Swallow, But Don’t Spit
If you’ve ever gone to one of those big wine tastings where there are hundreds of bottles, as you get closer to the end, if you don’t spit out that juice as you go, you don’t last.
Your senses dull. You get lost. You get tired.
Your palate dies.
In pre-George-Floyd-pre-Covid-America, Mo’Nique was waiting for folk to catch up to her. She was waiting for silence to spill and for inequity’s stains to find their shape.
She settled with Netflix for an undisclosed amount.
Don’t stop spitting.