In order to answer the questions of how and why Beyonce Carter-Knowles’ 2016 smash hit Lemonade simultaneously fulfills an historic duty to commentate upon or affect change in civil rights after the fashion of the Black Power movement whilst functioning as a method of healing for Black women who have been denied by America at every turn (a hallmark specific to the Fourth Wave of Black Feminism), one must first acknowledge the intersection of Blackness and womanhood in America as one that is inherently and undeniably political and one that has given birth to art and to movements which have quite literally shaped a nation, then deconstruct the components which demanded the album be visual in order to understand how it speaks to the integral role the Black woman plays in the propagation of culture.
The Fourth Wave of Black Feminism is different from its predecessors and other feminist movements in that it not only centers the lived experiences of black women in America throughout history, it understands and explores the nuances and intersections of being alternately black and female – a constant paradox which has only recently been given credence as a struggle both separated from and unrecognized in both the black liberation and archetypal feminist movements: For example, though female jazz vocalists and instrumentalists influenced music and society in their own and later times (adding new musical concepts and vocal styles, working both to change the society they lived in and to find their place in music no matter what got in their way), it is only those who were deemed fit for ‘white consumption’ like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald that regularly see recognition for their works. Contrarily, pioneers like Memphis Minnie and “Sister” Rosetta Tharpe, who all but single-handedly birthed rock and roll and it’s many ensuing subgenres, are only in the recent years of the 21st century being rewarded for their efforts.
Politics ultimately boils down to the shaping and redistribution of power, thus one must first consider who has it and who does not. Through the lens of black politics, or the purposeful activity of black folks to acquire and maintain power, this equates to the old ‘40 acres and a mule’ adage, which is to say that the Black American began with less than nothing and has been fighting and scraping to gain power and capital since then — ultimately, the problem unfortunately lies in the concept of collective deliverance. To liberate a group from external control, one must then assess the needs of the group and see most if not all of them met in order to claim the collective has been liberated, the issue being that few people fit so poorly into a single group as the Black woman: the unwilling builders of a labor force in the employ of white supremacy, mothers and sisters and cousins and grandmothers forming the backbone of a nation that fails to see their complexity. The black man sees only blackness, white feminists see only gender, and the black woman finds neither unconditional acceptance nor deliverance from either party. True freedom, that collective deliverance, is a promise that remains broken until Black women are allowed the room to grow not just as nurturers and as birth givers and a means to continuation, but as a radical force in their own right: essentially, no one is free until the very last black woman is free. The importance of Lemonade is not just its focus on the Black woman but where she’s come from and who she’s been.
In response to this cultural erasure or smudging which strips the black woman of her rightful place in history, Beyoncé is performing and exuding an embodied black Feminism, as can be applied to Lemonade in her construction of black female autonomy. The images and lyrics of Lemonade solidify her audiences’ awareness of black female identity by speaking to race, gender, and black male patriarchy. Beginning her journey with “Part I: Intuition,” Beyonce employs the poetry of Somali British national Warsan Shire in the interludes between tracks to fill the gaps between visuals which hearken to the sins and triumphs of America’s past and lyrics serving as a call to arms for America’s future.
Lemonade speaks to the challenge of defining black identity, history and heritage, while simultaneously celebrating blackness, womanhood and humanism: Beyoncé’s negotiation of her own racial and gendered identity – in the track “Formation” in particular – celebrates personal and collective black heritage whilst at the same time calling for America to rethink its strict notions of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’. In “Part 4: Apathy/Sorry” a heartbroken narrator compares betrayal to death, an image sharply contrasted when Beyonce is joined by fellow black women on a bus called “Boy Bye,” their faces painted in the sacred Ori style of Yoruba tradition – the women travel from civilization to an open field, the bus ride (symbolizing her spiritual journey after “death”) leading her to a comfortable place where she is uplifted through sisterhood and unity. She’s briefly joined by tennis star Serena Williams, who has made recent news in the black community as a “race traitor” for marrying a white man despite the constant misogynoir (a term coined to specifically define antiblack misogyny) she faces on a daily basis from both her own race and others, twerking in a black bodysuit beside Beyonce, who is seated on a queen-like throne. The contrast of queenly imagery with twerking, a dance form that is all at once relegated to the realm of the vulgar and uncivilized and co-opted by white youth counterculture, silently explores the dichotomy of life as a black woman. The album boasts clever imagery with visual easter eggs for the audience to spot: “Part 8: Forgiveness/Love Drought” features a cut to Nina Simone’s Silk and Soul LP interspersed with soft narration of Shire’s poetry,
Are the hips that cracked
the deep velvet of your mother
and her mother…
and her mother?
There is a curse that will be broken. (1.7)
A quiet nod not just to Simone’s statement that ‘her music is everyone, but really she’s speaking to black women’ but to her 1966 song “Four Women,” an iconographic anthem affirming the existence, sanity, and struggle of black women to survive a culture which regards them as anti-feminine despite a long history of nurturing; “Sandcastles” a shot-for-shot nod to the Igbo Landing – a historic site at Dunbar Creek in Georgia and the setting of a mass suicide in 1803 by captive Igbo people who’d taken control of their slave ship and refused to submit to slavery – and Daughters of the Dust, the first feature film directed by a black woman distributed theatrically in the US and one that explores African American and Gullah folklore, of which the tale of the Igbo Landing has become an indelible part; “Daddy Lessons” uses Shire as a mouthpiece to ask,
Mother dearest, let me inherit the Earth.
Teach me how to make him beg.
Let me make up for the years he made you wait.
Did he bend your reflection?
Did he make you forget your own name?
Did he convince you he was a God?
Did you get on your knees daily?
Do his eyes close like doors?
Are you a slave to the back of his head?
Am I talking about your husband or your father? (1.6)
After cutting in and out of clips of home movies featuring both Beyonce and her father and husband Jay-Z with their oldest daughter Blue Ivy, commenting upon the often complex relationships black women have with black men. As her first foray into country the track was so successful its remix features country darlings The Dixie Chicks, and Beyonce’s 2016 performance with them at the CMAs drew all kinds of negative attention simply for daring to be a black woman performing at a predominantly white country event – lest history forget, Beyonce’s roots are southern, and the song itself hearkens back to Rosetta Tharpe and the early black pop-gospel-rock fusions of the early-mid 20th century.
However, what is perhaps so definitive and revolutionary about Lemonade is not necessarily the cinematography or lyricism, but the careful detail paid to evoking the African diaspora and informing viewers of its long-standing influence upon art, culture, and political activism in both. At its very beginning, the film takes the audience to the origin of the diaspora: images of stonewall tunnels allude to the dungeons of Elmina in Ghana, which Dr. Amy Yeboah, an associate professor of Africana studies at historical black college Howard University, said was the last place many African people were brought to before being brought to the Americas. “Hold Up,” a song about betrayal and infidelity on the surface, begins with Beyonce donning a flowing yellow dress, gold jewelry and bare feet and appearing in an underwater dreamlike state before emerging from two large golden doors with water rushing past her and down the stairs – in this Beyonce has cast herself as Oshun, a Yoruba water goddess of female sensuality, love and fertility who is often shown in yellow, barefoot, and surrounded by fresh water. Folk tales of Oshun describe her as having a malevolent temper and wicked smile when she had been wrong, and “Hold Up” finds a smiling, laughing and dancing Beyonce in the midst of smashing store windows, cars and cameras with a baseball bat nicknamed “Hot Sauce.” The casual imagery delves deeply into African spirituality, often lost to African Americans whose ancestors were stripped of their ancestral religion and brought into Christianity by force, but also ties it to modern Black spirituality as seen in the transition between her first two baptisms and her final emergence as an orisha. Throughout the visual album, the use of natural hairstyles and clothing, neck jewelry and beading draws inspiration from Nigeria and Maasai of Kenya while the face painting recalls the Ori tribe’s traditions. In classic African and Ancient Egyptian art, some of the most recognized paintings and sculptures are of women without arms, emphasizing the beauty of their faces and crowns of their hair and toward the end of “Sorry,” Beyoncé recreates traditional art as the music stops and she poses in a Nefertiti-inspired hairstyle. Her reference to “Becky with the good hair” paired with imagery of Beyoncé embracing African beauty is a message for black women everywhere who feel the pressure to Anglicize their look.
At every turn, Lemonade goes beyond the semi-surface level engagement with feminist discourse and delves into a much more complex and intersectional exploration of constructed racial and gendered identity and oppression. It purposefully uses distinct visual and lyrical references to transcend the strict social boundaries established by historic systems of patriarchy and racial hierarchy in the United States – It notably deconstructs and contradicts the binaries of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’, and in doing so has created a space that is not only inclusive of women of colour, but places them at the front and centre of the narrative.
Narrative is the basis or the sustenance of Black Feminist Theory, both the theory and the practice; For people who exist on the margin, and particularly for black women, the theory that dominates their lives is the theory of resistance: this is the theory that one formulates when trying to exist and survive in the midst of oppressive structures which seek to deny and destroy your very humanity. In the narrative created by Beyonce and company on this album, the themes that run through Black American life and history are layered and repeated: the story begins and ends on a southern plantation, featuring Ibeyi, Laolu Senbanjo, Amandla Stenberg, Quvenzhané Wallis, Chloe x Halle, Zendaya and Serena Williams – all prominent black women of varying ages and advocates for collective deliverance – dressed alternately in flowing white work shrifts and stark black bodysuits; refrains of references to God, the Bible, and faith combined with referential imagery of baptism, as in “Part 2: Denial:”
I levitated into the basement,
I confessed my sins and was baptized in a river.
Got on my knees and said, “Amen.”
And I said Amen. I whipped my own back
and asked for dominion at your feet.
I threw myself into a volcano,
I drank the blood and drank the wine.
I sat alone and begged and
bent at the waist for God.
I crossed myself and thought I saw the devil.
I grew thickened skin on my feet.
I bathed in bleach and plugged my menses
with pages from the Holy Book. (1.2)
And again in “Love Drought,” the title of which is displayed over open ocean waters viewed from the shore and which claims that faith and love are strong enough to move a mountain or end a drought, and later cuts to nine black women in sheer dresses up to the ankle in shallow water and hand-in-hand,
Baptize me
now that reconciliation is possible.
If we're gonna heal, let it be glorious.
One thousand girls raise their arms. (1.7)
Reaffirming the Christian idea that baptisms represent healing and rebirth as it simultaneously salutes the people of Igbo as if to suggest that their mass suicide was panacea rather than the tragedy history suggests is all it represents; and most notably in “Part 11: Redemption,” from which the album gets its title:
Take one pint of water, add a half pound of sugar,
the juice of eight lemons…the zest of half lemon.
Pour the water from one jug, then into the other,
several times.
Strain through a clean napkin.
Grandmother, the alchemist.
You spun gold out of this hard life.
Conjured beauty from the things left behind.
Found healing where it did not live.
Discovered the antidote in your own kitchen.
Broke the curse with your own two hands.
You passed these instructions down to your daughter.
Who then passed it down to her daughter. (1.11)
Interlaced with sunlit, idyllic shots of generations of black women filling a old southern plantation home, sitting on its porch and around a large dining table or milling about a spacious kitchen, Beyonce’s grandmother Hattie narrates on her 90th birthday: I've had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” It is this moment to which the entire album has been building, one that best serves as a reclamation of the black woman’s narrative. From this point of view the black woman is all at once alchemist, aesthete, magician, child of god, kitchen witch, goddess, and nurturer, this knowledge passed from generation to generation to create a force capable of resilience and sacrifice that has gone largely untold and uncelebrated.
Rap has also developed as a form of resistance to the subjugation of working-class African-Americans in urban centers. Though it may be seen primarily as a form of entertainment, rap has the powerful potential to address social, economic, and political issues and act as a unifying voice for its audience. The best example of this is that modern day rap and hip hop, for all that they’re looked down upon by ‘polite society,’ are a direct continuation of West African griot, storytellers that play a crucial role in society as oral historians. Despite the world of white academia shunning it as the primitive and incendiary rantings of an oppressed people who cannot simply forget the injustice done to them, the multidisciplinary content of hip-hop's knowledge base presents theoretical richness in the fields of sociology, visual and sonic arts, religious, gender and cultural studies, critical race theory and art history. The black underground music movement has always served as a true recollection of black history in this country, and is often the source from which modern black people get their news.
It follows, then, that social-movement theory and history should reveal Black music and musicians can (and should) play a key role in Black America’s next-generation battle for criminal justice and civil rights. Lemonade wholeheartedly picked up the proverbial gauntlet with the unannounced public release of “Formation” just days before a 2016 live Superbowl performance featuring complete with black female dancers dressed in Black Panther outfits to publicly denounce the increasing intensity of police brutality, white supremacy and the decades of mistreatment foisted off onto the black American, most especially the black woman. In “Forward” the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner are featured holding pictures of their deceased sons, whose deaths spurred the grassroots Black Lives Matter movement. “Formation” is an important conversation piece in the Black Lives Matter movement. The song was released during Black History Month and one day after what would have been Trayvon Martin’s 21st birthday and one day before what would have been Sandra Bland’s 29th birthday. Lyrics like “You mix that Negro with that Creole” and “I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros/I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils” call attention to various epithets historically used to categorize and demean black Americans, as well as directly challenging the European standard of beauty (which has demonized every aspect of black aesthetics from hair texture and style to bone structure and skin tone). Finally, Black Power anthem “Freedom” (featuring rapper and Pulitzer Prize winner Kendrick Lamar) boasts a chorus paying homage to slavery (ie; “I break chains all by myself/I'ma wade, I'ma wave through the waters/I'ma riot, I'ma riot through your borders), boldly challenging listeners to “call her bulletproof” before Lamar’s passionate verse alludes to police brutality, racial profiling, disproportionately severe convictions for black men compared to white offenders, and the prison-industrial complex as a direct continuation of slavery.
In summation, the intersection of Blackness and womanhood in America is one that is inherently and undeniably political, not to mention one that has given birth to art and to movements which have quite literally shaped a nation: In order to answer the questions of how and why Beyonce Carter-Knowles’ 2016 smash hit Lemonade simultaneously fulfills an historic duty to commentate upon or affect change in civil rights after the fashion of the Black Power movement whilst functioning as a method of healing for Black women who have been denied by America at every turn (a hallmark specific to the Fourth Wave of Black Feminism), one must deconstruct the components which demanded the album be visual in order to understand how it speaks for the integral role the Black woman plays in the propagation of culture.