She walks through the waters of Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain with five women behind her. They are all dressed in white, and their hands are clasped together in front of their midsections. The sun is beginning to set; the sky is tinged with hues of blue, light gray, yellow, and magenta. Besides a branch, no other entity is in the water to detract from these women. No birds or planes fly overhead.
As they cross the shallower parts of the lake, their moving feet create ripples that expand and multiply. They walk slowly because they need to take their time. Their leader is “going through,” as older black women used to say. She is “going through,” an ambiguous phrase that sounds small but encompasses a wide range of experiences and emotions. The only way to get through is to go through, and so she and her black female companions have taken to the water. Enslaved blacks went through these same southern waters to escape captivity. They would submerge themselves in the water to throw the slave catchers’ dogs off their trail. But this scene reaches back further than 1619, when the Dutch sold the first captured Africans to the colonists in Jamestown. Water is a part of the Dagara cosmological wheel, an element that focuses on healing and reconciliation. It is a belief system used to build identities and communities. This water is about reconciliation; water creates balance and restores peace. It is a conduit through which someone can see beyond her turmoil. Immersion in water represents rebirth across many major religions: a Christian baptism, a mikvah in Judaism, the release from the cycle of life and death for Hindus who bathe in the Ganges, the Islamic practice of wu?ū. This scene, when she crosses the waters of Lake Pontchartrain with five black women behind her, is called “reformation”: reformacion, reformationem, reformare, an improvement, an alteration for the better. She is moving across landscapes and traveling through emotions, and we are privileged enough to journey alongside her. Her name is Beyoncé, and she is both who we thought she was and everything we were not prepared for her to be.
When Beyoncé released her Lemonade special for HBO in late April 2016, I was not ready. I have a tendency to avoid watching and listening to highly hyped releases at the same time as everyone else because I think that their often exaggerated anticipation and response will affect my viewing and/or listening experience. But I received an assignment from Elle.com to write about Lemonade, and because I was getting paid, I knew that I had to do it now and I couldn’t allow those exaggerations to affect my judgment. I had been wowed by the release of “Formation” two months prior. I knew that Beyoncé would show that black people are humans who deserved to be treated as such: capable of rage and deserving of respect. As I watched Lemonade, however, I felt like I was being broken open and hollowed out like a gourd, which Beyoncé filled with her raw melodies of ancient heartbreak and grief.
I was mourning throughout the entire hour-long special. I mourned for a relationship that I’d never had. I mourned for a love that I’d never experienced. I mourned for sons I’d never birthed. I mourned for a marriage in which I was never bound, a man who had never united himself with me, good times that never transpired, bad times that did. I did not know if I was projecting or if, through Lemonade, I was tapping into some deeper, communal spirit passing through an invisible wavelength connecting me to the women who came before me, existed alongside me, and will come after I am gone. I was beside myself, and had no idea how I was going to form a cogent argument, let alone open the essay. The experience was similar to watching something in a foreign language that you understand, and yet as soon as you feel those words with your entire body you are no longer able to translate because in that process, something will be filtered and therefore lost.
When I watched Lemonade for the first time I happened to be with my mother, who had assumed that, because of the ominous trailer, Beyoncé was up to some scary business and therefore initially had no interest in joining me. But she was intrigued by my unblinking eyes, so she sat up and readjusted her head scarf. She asked me to unplug my earphones from my phone so she could listen. In a matter of minutes, she was able to help me formulate an argument with a kind of clarity that made me wonder if she had watched it before the rest of the world. The truth is my mother had been cheated on and betrayed. Unlike me, my mother could mourn for a relationship, a love that she experienced, a marriage to which she was bound, a man who vowed to unite with her, the good times that transpired, the bad times that had passed but were still engraved in her memory like characters on tombstones.
When I logged on to Twitter after the special was over, I realized that I was not alone in my mourning. That night, the social network became a reservoir which black women filled with emotions that they might or might not have been fully able to articulate, but felt within all the grooves of their souls. Beyoncé awakened something in all of us. Her songs laid claim to something dormant in us all, something that we had consciously or unconsciously been hiding. Lemonade was not about uplifting black people in general, but rather black women specifically.
In October 2014, the French film Girlhood (Bande de filles) was released to much critical acclaim. Set in a poor Parisian suburb, the story centers on Marieme, a sixteen-year-old black girl who is failing academically and desperate for a sense of belonging because her workaholic mother and abusive brother cannot provide her with the comfort and support she needs. She eventually befriends a group of other black girls, and although they swear and steal, they are also a tribe that looks after its members. There are true moments of friendship, when they sing Rihanna songs in hotel rooms and dance outdoors, but they engage in vicious fights with other women in rival gangs and attempt to ingratiate themselves with men not out of romantic desire, but rather out of a desire for respect.
Girlhood is magnificent and fatalistic. It is an exploration of how a black girl can or cannot become dominant in a racist and patriarchal society, one in which a path of continual poverty, lacking any upward trajectory, seems to be already determined for both her and her friends. Frames contrasting silky weaves and natural hair, open doors with men lurking beyond every corner, and safe spaces behind closed doors reinforce the idea that this film is not a simple coming-of-age story. Girlhood is different not only because the main characters are black, but also because there isn’t much emphasis on these teenagers’ psychological and moral growth. They are just trying to survive, pushing back on reality every once in a while through song and dance before returning to their hermetically sealed world, which is completely at odds from the popular perception of Paris that centers on the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-élysées.