Candice Carty-Williams On Overcoming The Burden To Be ‘Strong’
In a personal essay, Candice Carty-Williams – award-winning author of Queenie and writer of exhilarating new BBC drama Champion – shares her thoughts on challenging the ‘strong Black woman’ trope through her writing, and how she learned to lean in to being vulnerable
Being a strong Black woman is a scam. I spent most of my teen years buying into, and performing, the idea that Black women can, and should, handle anything. I spent my early twenties attempting to do the same, holding on tight to a presentation of unshakability, fortitude and resistance. When I was 22, that terribly constructed wall of robustness fell, and I had something that was probably a nervous breakdown. It was, in all honesty, a terrible time. For two years I barely left the house; I wept every day; I couldn’t eat; when I slept, I had nightmares – you get the point. It was a full bag of what felt like unending personal horror.
I realized in that time, though, that what I was going through was a release. I wasn’t just crying for no reason; I was letting go of built-up pain, trauma, and of the lie that I should be able to have dealt with the things I’d gone through. I realized that I hadn’t cried in years. Any time an emotion resembling sadness or fear threatened to rise to the surface, I’d swallow it back down. A dearly departed friend of mine who had to bear witness to this painful metamorphosis suggested that I write a diary, but a fictional one. I had no idea what he meant. He explained further, suggesting that I wrote about my own pain, and experiences, and the rejection of this strong Black woman trope he’d seen me battle with, but through someone else’s lens. I still didn’t really know what he meant, so I put it to the back of my mind while I recovered. Therapy helped. Meditation helped. Saying that I hadn’t been good helped. But telling people that I wasn’t strong is what helped most of all.
“Vulnerability is how to connect with others and yourself, how to tell stories; it’s how to be and feel real
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Fast-forward to 2018. I’d listened to what my friend had said and had poured all of my pain into my debut novel, Queenie. It was a few months from being released into the world when I was approached by a production company about writing and showrunning an original TV show. I had to have a word with myself. Was I strong enough to do this? TV wasn’t a world that I knew, at all. I’d written a novel, sure, but that had been me, in my bed, with a laptop. I had a close relationship with my editor. It was challenging emotionally, but once it was done, it was done. What I did know about a TV show was that a script was, until it was shot, still a living and breathing thing, and that I’d be working on it with a lot of people. And I knew that after all that came production.
I can very easily (and perhaps surprisingly) say that having a nervous breakdown set me up for showrunning an entire series. And that’s because I knew, as soon as the process began, I needed to make it clear that I wasn’t strong. I needed to make it known that I didn’t have all the answers. I needed to shout about the fact that I needed support, needed my hand holding, and needed to be able to cry about the things that were challenging, and the things that were going wrong. Once I let myself be weak, an amazing thing happened; I found an unknown strength in myself, in my abilities, and in my voice. The relationships I made on Champion are based entirely on me asking for help, and on letting people know that I have more heart than I care to have force.
As I write this, I’m generally annoyed but mentally good. Physically, however, less good. I’m sitting on an offensively uncomfortable stool in someone else’s kitchen, resting my laptop on a prop cake while a scene from the Queenie TV adaptation – a book that I wrote about a young-Black-woman-who-had-to-present-as-strong-until-it-broke-her – is being filmed in the garden. It feels both strange and amazing to have, in the last few years, changed not just my own understanding of a what a Black woman’s strength should be, but to be putting new presentations of that same myth into the world. Like I say, being a strong Black woman is a scam. It doesn’t serve us. It serves others. It allows people to lean on and rely on you with no limitations or boundaries. It’s vulnerability that tells people who you are. Vulnerability is how to connect with others and yourself, how to tell stories; it’s how to be and feel real. That’s me, and that’s my work. Unafraid to talk about what it means to open to the world and what it does to us, what it says to us, and what it makes us feel.
Champion is on BBC One and iPlayer from July 1 in the UK, and released globally on Netflix soon