Writer's Block: AKA
I love figs. They're the sweetest most toothsome of fruits, so rich and luxurious I only ever eat them rarely. Since I've always enjoyed the juxtaposition of opposites I added "bitter" to "fig" for the first time when I was creating a character for a story I was writing.
In early 2006, before I started my livejournal account I was working on a novel called The White Darkness (which I never finished). The White Darkness was going to be loosely based on the life of filmmaker Maya Deren. Deren began her artistic life as a dancer before expanding into experimental filmmaking. During the heyday of the studio system, Deren became a pioneer of independent and experimental film. She made movies as art rather than commerce, creating strange, haunting, and deeply personal visions such as the amazing Meshes of the Afternoon.
In the 1940's Deren when to Haiti for the purpose of filming folk dances and became fasinated by Voodoo, writing the book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti and eventually becoming a priestess herself. Ever since Deren's death in the early 1960's (of a brain hemorrhage linked to amphetamine abuse and malnutrition)there have been rumors and whisperings of her occult powers and that her death was linked to Voodoo.
The original Bitterfig was a supporting character in my novel. She was a priestess of a fictional religion based loosely on Voodoo. A small, fiercely angry woman,emaciated in her thinness,her skull like face contrasting with her full, voluptuous lips. A native of an unnamed island modeled after Haiti who was disgusted by white tourists but able to mingle and move among them because she was very light skinned. Seeing a sort of alchemy in Ruth's films, Bitterfig set about to recruit or seduce Ruth into the mysteries of her religion. The more prominent obstacle to Bitterfig's aims was Ruth's all-consuming and deeply co-dependent relationship with her dangerously, perhaps suicidally, promiscuous husband.
I wanted to make Bitterfig the sort of evil, exotic, seducer of the innocent witch that so often appears in the 60's Euro horror films I love but also a part of Ruth who offers her artistic liberation and freedom from the entanglement with her husband who constantly threatens to pull her into the vortex of his self-destruction.