Self-Made Writing Assignment: The Watermelon Woman

The Watermelon Woman
Name
Institution
The Watermelon Woman
Watermelon Woman is about a black lesbian, Cheryl. She works at a video store and has reams of being a film maker. She has obsession about a black woman actress from the 1930’s. Cheryl suspects that the actress billed as “watermelon woman” must have been a lesbian. She sets out to find more about her and on the way, she falls in love with a white woman called Diana. This causes tension between her and her friend Tamara.
The “watermelon woman” is fiction. There was never anybody like that; yet the playwright uses that story and identity to create a lesbian history. The playwright wants to use the past and rewrite the history of black women. According to the writer, there were times when black lesbians thrived in the movie industry, the times of the Watermelon Woman. And yet no one talks about black lesbians now, no one wants to even recognize that they exist. In actual sense, no one ever recognized that they existed even back then in the 1930’s. It is this lack of recognition and acceptance of their existence that drives the playwright to create the fictitious story of the Watermelon Woman to bring black lesbians back to the picture in the film industry. Societal prejudices have limited the opportunities available to black lesbians. In fact, it has made them to be rarely recognized and put into the picture. The playwright wants us to know that black lesbians are an isolated lot in the film industry, with very few people they can...