I MAY DESTROY YOU, Michaela Coel’s brilliant 12-episode series released last summer on HBO (and BBC One), chronicles the haphazard recovery of millennial writer Arabella Essiedu after she survives a sexual assault. In Coel’s hands, Arabella (played by Coel herself) is never reduced to a battered woman or a perfect victim. She remains, throughout, entirely human—as do her friends and family. Watching the show reminded me of a line from Bertolt Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues in which an actor protests that he cannot play both “butcher and sheep.” Coel seems to disagree. Her Arabella is both warm and wildly narcissistic, armed with a righteousness that often wobbles into unbridled megalomania.
I May Destroy You is a champion of nuance. Although rape is allowed its own category of awfulness, Coel, as writer, draws her audience into other situations that aren’t so clear cut.Each episode is as compassionate as it is damning of human selfishness and myopia. Considering how little mainstream television centers the trauma and healing of Black women (much less with complexity), the critical acclaim Coel has accrued thus far is not surprising. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with art made by people of color, Black women in particular, this acclaim has yet to materialize in awards. I have mixed feelings about awards, especially when the diversity conversation in Hollywood seems in love with its own stagnancy. However, that doesn’t mean awards aren’t nice to have, or that their conferral signifies nothing; awards often reveal the white cultural establishment’s willingness to give something up. After all, if I May Destroy You gets nominated for a [insert trophy here], “Memily in Maris” might not win!
As you may have deduced, my impetus for this column was the Golden Globes’ snub of I May Destroy You while giving a nod to the amusing though shallow Emily in Paris. But the more I’ve thought about this issue, the more it seems that Coel’s goals can’t be measured in shiny objects—even if they are thoroughly deserved. Through her excellence and ambition, Coel is performing a kind of experiment on us, one designed to help us heal. When we talk about “experimental” work, we often look to surreal arthouse films, yet what is more daring than finding a way to talk about your experiences in a world that is trying to rob you of language?
Last week, in a virtual studio visit, one of my classmates shared Assata Shakur’s poem “Affirmation.” The last few lines still follow me. “I believe in birth,” Shakur writes. “I believe in the sweat of love / and in the fire of truth. / And i believe that a lost ship, / steered by tired, seasick sailors, / can still be guided home / to port.” In I May Destroy You, Arabella and her best friend, Terry, say to each other, like a liturgy, “Your birth is my birth. Your death is my death.” It feels as if they might also be talking to us. The project in both cases is empathy, an affirmation that our fates are intertwined, whether we wish them to be or not. We are the “tired, seasick sailors,” our society the “lost ship,” and Coel is reminding us that we can—and must—make it home.
Faith-Marie Zamblé is an artist, writer, and M.F.A. candidate in dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama. This is her final "Curated" column (for now).
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