Kathleen Collins’s “Blue Obstacles”: Scenes from an Unfinished Novel

In the mid-1970s, the Black American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and activist Kathleen Collins (1942–1988) drafted the first four chapters of a novel titled “Blue Obstacles” in a composition book held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. It is likely that this draft material constitutes the only known trace of Collins’s first novel, which was later titled “Treatment for a Colored Movie.” Extending recent efforts to disseminate and properly value Collins’s work across mediums and genres, edited excerpts from the first two chapters of “Blue Obstacles” are reproduced and contextualized here. The accompanying essay draws on Collins’s correspondence and other literary and cinematic work to situate this project within her oeuvre. In addition to offering a rare insight into Collins’s writing practices in its exploratory phases, “Blue Obstacles” is part of a constellation of texts which demonstrate Collins’s practices of working through and with her memories in various fictional genres, particularly in the decade from around 1974. In this respect, the unfinished novel offers a model—and impetus—for Black feminist archival scholarship committed to, in Collins’s words, “writing the guts out of the past.”