“I remember being stunned,” she said. “I was like, ‘But you do have sex, right?’”
Brock Akil has consistently defended the need to tell the stories of Black women who reject the demands of respectability politics that tell them how they should behave, especially in romantic relationships.
“I’m very proud of carving out space for Black women’s sexuality,” she said. Thinking ahead to how she would be like to be remembered, she said she hoped to be recognized for liberating Black women “from the asexual trope or the ho trope.”
“We are somewhere in between — we are at the spectrum,” she said. “We are not the polar opposites.”
As younger audiences have discovered her work via streaming services, many have called out the women on “Girlfriends” for being toxic friends, or described the romance on “The Game,” in which a young woman gives up medical school for her football star boyfriend, as a horrific cautionary tale.
Brock Akil doesn’t feel affronted. That was the point, she said: to hold up a mirror.
“I wrote the truth,” she said. “And the truth is, if you think about a gem, it has different facets, you see different things depending on how the sun hits it and what you’re looking at, and we are all of it. Joan is amazing as she is toxic.”
In this new era, Brock Akil hopes that her vulnerability through Dionne’s story will give readers a new muse to resonate with.
“Dionne, I think, is my way of hugging that version of myself that’s brave,” she said. “Who went through something harrowing to get to this moment, to use her pen to say hey, maybe we should pay attention.”
