We Are Lady Parts and the Ability to Exist Beyond Marginalization
graphic by @aleexamarie
In a darkened room, walls decorated with posters and floors covered in West Asian rugs, we find ourselves surrounded by a punk band. Colourful and angry, they sing their hearts out as their manager observes them. We see Lady Parts, a three-member band soon to be four, live out their punk dreams. We see Amina (Anjana Vasan), new lead guitarist, Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey), leader, main singer and guitarist, Bisma (Faith Omole), bass player, Ayesha (Juliette Motamed), drummer and Momtaz (Lucie Shorthouse), manager.
We Are Lady Parts, written and directed by Nida Manzoor, follows the punk band with the same name as they navigate the London music scene and their own everyday lives in the hope for success in both. It follows the band through their friendships, family fallouts, unrequited love and much more. All of this is done whilst having the protagonists shaped beautifully- and each episode leaves the audience with chains of thoughts on what it means to navigate the world as a person of colour and how that is presented in the media.
It’s painfully clear people still have a hard time interacting with characters of colour, whether it’s about writing them or writing about them. Arguably, conversations on representation are still incredibly slow and the act of ‘representing’ has many traps; one of the biggest ones being escaping purely stereotypical characterial traits. It’s evident that one of two things tend to happen when writers try to foster an ethnically diverse approach to their work; One is we end up with characters who are defined by their marginalization and their marginalization only: think, all the poems about ‘cut up fruit’ and third culture kids embodied by one person, often tinged with a lot of added trauma. They’re more than often one-dimensional, which only suggests that for some, representing groups of oppressed people is solely about representing oppression. This process consequently results in the failure to acknowledge how multilayered and varying experiences of different oppressed groups can be. On an alternative side of the spectrum, some writers who also include characters of colour fail to acknowledge their marginalization, at all. Think Bridgerton… except oppression and politics is supposedly a thing far in the past and therefore not something that needs to be addressed at all.
Writing characters of colour should not be a difficult task. They’re normal individuals, with agency, who happen to be marginalized, and Manzoor writes them beautifully. There’s a certain kind of joy that fills you when you watch a show that knows how to balance marginalization with the ordinaries of everyday life, and that joy was doubled with Lady Parts. There’s such a diversity in viewing dynamics not only between friends but also between family members as well, and We Are Lady Parts’ ability to do this is what makes the show so refreshing. The way the characters function in the plot, paired with Amina occasionally breaking the fourth wall leaves you feeling like as a viewer, you are being invited into the show, and you’re able to join their bubbles with them instead of simply looking at them from the outside. It’s a great way of looking at how some individuals deal with marginalization as well, because their identities aren’t actually questioned until someone, and that someone being an interrogating magazine writer, comes in from the outside to do it. We know different identities can coexist within us. It’s when we’re forced to interrogate them, often from a very negative angle, that we end up in a place where we realise certain traits of identities can clash.
But just like in real life, this is (and can be) worked through. There’s a normality to the characters that’s quite hard to describe, maybe because of how well balanced they are. It’s so easy to give characters of colour one dimensional personalities, and the work Manzoor has put into each and every one of them displays her great care for them.. We aren’t inherently political beings. We’re people trying to navigate oppressed systems that we have the right to exist beyond. We exist beyond the projection of ‘the white gaze’ and ‘Lady Parts showcases this in such a beautiful way, it leaves you loving your interests a little more and thanking them for shaping you. It’s a joy to watch and it can’t be recommended enough.
By Nilo Khamani
(she/her)
Edited by Makella Ama