{"id":329,"date":"2026-06-02T11:10:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T11:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=329"},"modified":"2026-06-02T11:10:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T11:10:12","slug":"the-heretical-energy-of-is-god-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=329","title":{"rendered":"The Heretical Energy of \u201cIs God Is\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You\u2019re reading Critic\u2019s Notebook<\/strong>, our weekend column looking at the most interesting moments in the cultural Zeitgeist.<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Night rarely falls on the harsh, sun-bleached world of Aleshea Harris\u2019s film \u201cIs God Is,\u201d a revenge parable about the breaking, or the burning, of the Black family. A glare backgrounds the protagonists, twins with matching cornflower box braids, named Racine and Anaia, who carry on their skin, to varying degrees, burn scars. Racine and Anaia are motherless and fatherless. They work as cleaners at an office; at one point, Racine exposes a raised scar, on her arm, to a pretty, professionalized woman, who recoils in disgust, activating Racine\u2019s violent instincts of reprisal. Anaia\u2019s scarring is a different situation. Her face is keloided up to the neck, like raised tree roots, like the meaning of Racine\u2019s name. Racine, played by Kara Young, is a beauty in the face but a bullet in the body, ready to attack any and all who shrink back in disgust at the sight of her sister, who is played by Mallori Johnson. The opening scene is in sepia flashback, and it shows the twins as children, filmed from the back, at a playground. A child taunts Anaia offscreen, prompting Racine to beat him bloody.<\/p>\n

Read more The World Cup According to Gianni Infantino<\/a><\/p>\n

One day, Racine receives a letter from a woman claiming to be the twins\u2019 mother, Ruby, asking them to come see her, as she is dying. Anaia, feeling jilted that the letter was addressed only to Racine, cowers in hurt, like a street cat. How was she forgotten? Aren\u2019t Racine and Anaia one? The sisters, brushing their teeth, speak telepathically, inner thoughts printed in caption text across the screen. When they do go to meet their mother, the encounter is a shock to the twins; the scene, in its gothic splendor, is a shock to the viewer. Ruby, played by Vivica A. Fox, is a bedridden queen, mummified in compression wraps, immobile except for the lips, and attended to by nurses wearing gold door-knocker earrings, as if ladies-in-waiting, who file her talon nails and braid the ropes of her wig. A mask obscures her own extraordinary scarring. Racine, manic with zeal, reasons that Ruby must be God, given that she created the twins. In flashback, this god tells us what happened to her. The twins\u2019 father (Sterling K. Brown), credited as Man in the script, slipped into the family home, knocked her unconscious, and set her on fire. (He is shot from the mouth down, in classic horror-camp style.) The flames claimed the girls as collateral, scarring both of them but disfiguring Anaia, who worked the hardest to save Ruby. She informs her daughters that their father took up with other women, and gives them information to set them on their way. Her dying wish: \u201cMake your daddy dead,\u201d Ruby\/God commands. \u201cReal dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Reviewers have pressed this film into the Southern-gothic mold, invoking Kasi Lemmons\u2019s \u201cEve\u2019s Bayou,\u201d and into the Greek-tragedy mold, invoking Sophocles. Of course. But there is a nearer antecedent, which should always be on our minds when we are faced with the diptych of child sisters: \u201cThe Color Purple.\u201d (By using the motif of twins, Harris, a playwright who first staged \u201cIs God Is\u201d at the Soho Rep some eight years ago, is concentrating on the spectre of sister love which has long haunted Black literature.) Harris has taken the religious patina of Alice Walker\u2019s tale\u2014most chiefly the Christian God, to whom Celie writes her heartsick journal entries after she is separated from her beloved sister, Nettie, by the monstrous Pa and the vindictive Mister\u2014and dirties it, wisely. Celie forgives her tormentors, in \u201cThe Color Purple,\u201d ushering in redemption at the novel\u2019s and film\u2019s ends; Harris deprives her story of that final, harmonic beat. A heretical energy powers the script of \u201cIs God Is\u201d (though Harris\u2019s bending and twisting of language isn\u2019t matched by the movie\u2019s visual sphere, which never quite mirrors the chilling filmic tableau of the dying Ruby and her nurses). And so, naturally, an old-fashioned controversy is brewing around the film. Blasphemy, the detractors\u2014many of whom are Black, and male\u2014are claiming. How dare the film depict God as female, and as murderous? How dare it depict Man as callous and abusive? The righteousness is cover for egoistic anger, and it also echoes the reception to \u201cThe Color Purple,\u201d two generations ago, which was criticized for being a so-called dangerous representation of Black men.<\/p>\n

Spoilers ahead. God has ordered a crusade. \u201cWe ain\u2019t killers,\u201d Anaia insists. Racine, her voice moving like sludge, retorts, \u201cWe come from a man who tried to kill our mama and a mama who wants to kill that man. It\u2019s in the blood.\u201d Their weapon of choice, invented out of necessity, is a rock in a sock. On the open desert road, Racine and Anaia track the other women Man has taken up with, following their trail like hounds. They meet a cult leader, Divine (Erika Alexander), and a repressed housewife, Angie (Janelle Mon\u00e1e), who is Man\u2019s latest wife. The confrontations result in wild, libidinous killing. The odyssey ultimately brings the twins to a bourgeois mansion in the desert, Man\u2019s home for his replacement family, which includes another set of twins: two strapping young men, Scotch (Xavier Mills) and Riley (Justen Ross). Anaia and Racine pose as strippers, ordered for the boy twins, one assumes, by Daddy. It\u2019s Racine who is turned on by taking blood; Anaia shudders, her morals compromised. In this story of inherited trauma, Anaia and Racine can be seen as halves of a shared consciousness: rage living with docility, agency living with passiveness. The perceived ugliness of Anaia has cast on her the sufferer\u2019s nobility. (We join her in our minds with the beleaguered Celie, these women\u2019s eyes beaming weakly at us.) At the end of the film, Man does meet his fate, a cleansing fire, which takes Racine, too. The last scene is of Anaia, who had been secretly pregnant, clutching her child happily in a sort of Eden, launching an alternative myth.<\/p>\n

Read more The Happy Ending Romeo and Juliet Didn\u2019t Get<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cRacine\u201d is not only a reference to roots. It is no accident that Harris, a playwright first and foremost, has named the agent of revenge in \u201cIs God Is\u201d after the French tragedian Jean Racine. The women of his dramatic \u0153uvre are always split women; the inner division is because they are in love with the verboten, and love is an illness in Racine\u2019s emotional world, for all intents and purposes. In \u201cPh\u00e8dre,\u201d the titular character hangs herself because she cannot shed her love for Hippolyte, the son of her husband, King Theseus. In \u201cB\u00e9r\u00e9nice,\u201d the Queen of Palestine is heartbroken when her lover, Titus, the emperor of Rome, won\u2019t abdicate the throne after his people refuse to accept a foreign queen. Jean Racine inscribed upon the scroll of his own life the rhythm of a tragedy, albeit an intellectual one. At the height of his career, he renounced the stage, taking a royal post as the hagiographer of Louis XIV, and devoted himself utterly to God. That is to say, the Church extinguished his art.<\/p>\n

Ugliness, a Christian ugliness, is what makes \u201cIs God Is\u201d go. It is the disfigurement of God that plants the seed of revenge; it is the disfigurement of Anaia that makes Racine rage like Daddy. His act has bestowed on the girls a second sight, allowing them to see the world through the eyes of the spectacularly marginalized\u2014those who, as the beatitude promises, will inherit the earth. The triumph of self-abjection serves as a soothing narrative hook in a certain species of female-survivorship tale. This is what Blitz Bazawule, the male director of the \u201cColor Purple\u201d musical-film adaptation, from 2023, did not understand when he performed a kind of castration on the text through his \u201cdecision\u201d to delete Shug Avery\u2019s awed appraisal of Celie, \u201cYou sho\u2019 is ugly,\u201d from his interpretation. To Bazawule, the through line of Celie\u2019s perceived ugliness was like scum floating on soup, residue of a nastier era to be removed, and not at the heart of the question of desire, and of the urge to love and to be loved.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more Leo Woodall Gets a Tune Up<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Doreen St. F\u00e9lix considers the playwright Aleshea Harris\u2019s directorial d\u00e9but, an adaptation of her play of the same name, comparing it with Alice Walker\u2019s \u201cThe Color Purple.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":328,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-critics-notebook"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Heretical Energy of \u201cIs God Is\u201d - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=329\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Heretical Energy of \u201cIs God Is\u201d - 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