Queen Sugar

The television series Queen Sugar is produced and often directed, by Ava DuVernay: a black female filmmaker who, in 2018, became the first woman of colour to direct a film with a budget exceeding $100 million. Ava’s work focuses, consciously and unapologetically, on the lives and plight of African Americans- in the context of history as well as the present-day. More often than not, history and the present are intertwined in her work. 

Queen Sugar is particularly important to me because it does not feign sophistication. For a show that revolves around a black family in present-day Louisiana, the focus on racism is not made apparent immediately; the creators have made sure to depict the characters as members of an ordinary albeit dysfunctional family. The plot is straightforward, the characters are flawed, sometimes problematic and therefore relatable, human beings. Yet in all its simplicity, there is a depth to the show that demands acknowledgement. Acknowledgment of a history that has moulded the world one way and not another; acknowledgement of a history that often proves to be a soul-crushing weight; a history that prevents individuals from simply existing as individuals, no matter how hard they may try.

This is where Queen Sugar, in my opinion, strikes an exquisite balance: it presents characters that are so flawed in their humanity and so caught up in their day to day lives, that one often forgets the external factors at play: institutionalized racism, social injustice, sexism and so on. Through what will probably be an essay, I hope to convey how structural constraints ensure that, at the end of the day, no matter how much these characters try to escape this history, or to simply not have it at the forefront of everything they do, it keeps catching up with their reality.