#recently watched spike lee's remake da sweet blood of jesus and was genuinely upset by ganja's monologue in that; ->

[iphigeniacomplex]

When I was about 10 or 12 years old, my favorite time of the year was winter because of the snow. And I made the best snowballs in all of Boston. I was in the best snowball fights, and I always won. This particular day, it was just snowballs flying, it was all you could see, that was all you could feel. Some hit hard, some hit soft and fell down behind your collar. You could feel it in your muffler. And I got home...about 6:30 or 7:00, cause I'd been fighting since 3:00 in the afternoon. And my mother said, "Where have you been?" I said, "I've been having this tremendous snowball fight, it's really fun. And I beat everybody, and everybody beat me. It was a tremendous day." And she slapped my face and said, "Where have you been? Someone said they saw you being chased by a boy." I said, "We were all chasing each other, because we were having a snowball fight." And she said, "You are a liar and a slut." And I said, "I swear to you that I was having a snowball fight." And she didn't believe me. She never believed me. It was as though I was a disease. I have a brother that's ten years older than I am and a sister that's eight years older than I am. So that I was obviously an accident. And it was, "Ganja, I came down with Ganja," you know? And I think that day, I decided that I was a disease. And I was gonna give her a full case of it. That whatever it was that I was, she was gonna have it. Maybe because she hurt me so badly. All that time up till then, I really worked for her to say, "I love you. You're a wonderful girl, Ganja." She could never, ever say that. The only thing she could ever bring herself to say was that I was beautiful. And I loathed my beauty for that...because she found it appealing. But that was a very decisive day in my life, because that day I decided that I would provide for Ganja always. Do whatever had to be done. Take whatever steps had to be taken. But always take care of Ganja.

ganja & hess (1973), dir. bill gunn