Liz Taylor

•  

• 2021

Video. 1 min 50 seconds.

Notes: Our societies put high value on being married and being married for life. And this attaches stigma to divorce. Umi was married six times. Six marriages that ended in six heartbreaks. This always puzzled and frustrated me. Why did she keep trying? I asked and I judged her. In US society, even with divorce becoming ever more common, divorce is a crisis that needs to be solved — hence Oprah's question, “Is it a virus of the mind?” For Black people the “crisis” is a pathology that is holding us back. But as Dr. wadud teaches here, lifetime marriage is not actually something that humans have always done and Islam provides ways to be divorced. So this montage poses the question, “What might it mean to think of marriage and divorce differently?