“
Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.
”
Lupita Nyong’o won an Oscar for her staggering performance in 12 Years A Slave, made the animated Maz Kanata come to life in the blockbuster Star Wars: The Force Awakens, continues to rule every red carpet she steps on, and just picked up a Tony Award nomination for her Broadway play Eclipsed.
And yet, people continue to question whether the 33-year-old actress knows what she’s doing with her career.
Nyong’o described her experience with an unpleasant reporter while doing press for her new Broadway play Eclipsed, writing in Lena Dunham’s Lenny newsletter how she was asked, “Why would such a big star choose to do such a small play?”
“I
think as women, as women of color, as black women, too often we hear
about what we ‘need to do,‘” Nyong’o wrote. “How we need to behave, what
we need to wear, what’s deemed as too much or not enough, the cultural
politics of what society considers appropriate for us and for our
lives.”
“As an African woman, I am wary of the trap of telling a single story,” Nyong’o continued, praising her Eclipsed character of an orphan fleeing the Liberian civil war. “The chance to appear in Eclipsed after
winning an Oscar was an opportunity to share in the incredible (and too
rare) freedom of playing a fully rendered African woman.”
(L-R) Actresses Pascale Armand, Lupita Nyong'o and Saycon Sengbloh from ‘Eclipsed.’ (Photo: Mark Sagliocco, Getty Images)
“So
often women of color are relegated to playing simple tropes: the
sidekick, the best friend, the noble savage, or the clown … I love the
idea of people of color participating in mythical, magical stories,
whether that’s as hero, villain, sage, or sorceress,” she said,
referring to her recent role voicing the Jungle Book’s wolf mother Raksha.
The
beautiful essay reinforces that Nyong’o shouldn’t have to justify her
career choices to anyone — it’s clear she knows what she’s doing. Next
stop, the Tonys.
6. Cycle lanes are built just for you, and then the cars drive in those too.
7. And you can’t go out at night because cars will run right over you.
8. You better watch out for the drunk ones
9. Even if you DO use the cycle lane because it is “Safer for you” A lot of times there are obstacles and other things in the way to make it more difficult to navigate.
10. Sometimes cars will honk or swerve at you for their entertainment
and the drivers will laugh when you react defensively, because they’re safe in their
car and don’t realize how dangerous that looks to you on your bike.
11. Some places have much better cycling lanes than others, which is good for those places! But it doesn’t fix the unequally-shared-road problem and really underlines how cyclist-unfriendly other places are.
12. The Door Zone in general. Will every parked car slam a door open directly into your path as you’re passing? No, of course not. Do you have to watch every parked car for opening doors anyways? Yes! Because even one surprise crash into a suddenly appearing door can lead to injury, sometimes serious, or even death.
A Palestinian baby sits in a crib after the child’s family home was destroyed in the West Bank community of Khirbet Tana near Nablus on 7 April. Israel has demolished structures in the community four times in less than two months under the pretext that they were built without permits. Israel rarely gives building permits to Palestinians living in large swathes of the West Bank.
