Lemonade asks, What is it like to be a black woman in America?, and the answer is one no nonblack director or performer could give. She is the most disrespected, unprotected, and neglected person—as quoted from Malcolm X’s 1962 speech in Lemonade—and also the most resilient. Lemonade is not simply a love story, but rather a multilayered portrait of all that the black woman experiences, all the pain that she endures, divided into eleven chapters: Intuition, Denial, Anger, Apathy, Emptiness, Accountability, Reformation, Forgiveness, Resurrection, Hope, and Redemption. One of Beyoncé’s biggest strengths is that she is able to lead, and yet also fall into formation herself. Her voice glides through Lemonade’s sumptuous visuals of black women, and is often the backdrop against which other black women can exhibit as many tumultuous emotions as she does. This stylistic choice emphasizes that although Beyoncé is a black woman, her experience is different from that of Lesley McFadden, Michael Brown’s mother; of actress Amandla Stenberg; of Leah Chase, the “Queen of Creole Cuisine,” all of whom appear in the film. Black women are not one thing. In Lemonade, healing is not achieved through the individual but through the plurality of community. Beyoncé is supported by a brigade of black women who assist her as she sorts through all of her feelings. They move through the water, hands linked, facing the setting sun as though they are beginning a ritual. They will uplift her not through words but rather through proximity and touch, ushering in self-love and acceptance.
That all of this empowerment takes place within nature enhances the project. Nature is where black women can give themselves permission to indulge in their emotions, and roam around free from any outside forces that may stifle them. The massive oak trees that appear throughout Lemonade echo Sethe’s chokecherry tree scar in Beloved, which represents the horror of slavery and intergenerational trauma. At the same time, trees also symbolize “the healing and regenerative power of nature and community.”2 In Lemonade, the stoic black women sitting on top of the tree branches or standing in front of the oaks are there on purpose. Trees stand not only for eternal life but also, of course, for strength. Like the trees themselves, black women stand together, tall and unmoving. Seen together in the final chapter of Lemonade, they show that despite their anger and emptiness, they are still alive. Pain does not ravage the black woman’s experience; rather, pain embellishes it, for it is through that pain that she recognizes her own tenacity and is reaffirmed by her community, without which she could not survive.
This idea undermining Girlhood, that saying I feel for you to a woman unlike yourself means you somehow share in her experience, is one of the pitfalls that plagues mainstream feminism. It signals to women of color that their stories are only worth telling if a white person can understand them, and therefore that a white person’s emotions and responses are of greater importance than the stories themselves. We cannot come together if we do not recognize our differences first. These differences are best articulated when women of color occupy the center of the discourse while white women remain silent, actively listen, and do not try to reinforce supremacy by inserting themselves in the middle of the discussion.
In 2015, the rapper Nicki Minaj was snubbed for an MTV VMA nomination for her “Feeling Myself” video, which also featured Beyoncé. Taylor Swift, then America’s reigning pop queen, won a nomination for “Bad Blood.” Alluding to her “Anaconda” video, which was released the same year as “Bad Blood,” Minaj tweeted: “If your video celebrates women with very slim bodies, you will be nominated for vid of the year.” Swift, whom the mainstream always seems to protect, responded by tweeting directly to Minaj: “I’ve done nothing but love & support you. It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot . . . If I win, please come up with me!! You’re invited to any stage I’m ever on.” Minaj was venting her frustration about being a black female artist in a white media world, yet Swift inserted herself into the conversation by positing herself as the victim. Other examples of white artists co-opting stories or spaces that are not their own include Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, and anything Miley Cyrus did in 2013. Any kind of general feminist statement also defaults to whiteness (see Lily Allen’s “Hard Out Here” video or Patricia Arquette’s historically inaccurate 2015 Oscars speech: “To every woman . . . we fought for everybody else’s equal rights. It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America”).
For as long as I’ve been writing, I have struggled with this idea of universality. I would love for anyone to read my black-female-centered work and find themselves engaged. However, I do not believe that readers need to be able to see themselves in my work in order for that to transpire. I do not need a white reader to appropriate African-American vernacular, emphatic gestures, and certain experiences as she tries to figure out where in the narrative she can locate herself to feel closer to the characters. I do not want sympathy but acknowledgment, the freedom to tell an unapologetic story that is both black and female and for people to interact with my words rather than corrupting them altogether to suit their selfish desire to be at the center. I believe that the Otherness of young black girls in Paris fascinated Sciamma, but oftentimes white people’s fascination with black girls and women becomes a hotbed for exploitation. If Sciamma believed her narrative to be universal, then that is because she unconsciously placed herself within the story. How else was she going to be able to fill the gaps in her imagination if not with her white, middle-class experience, which often produces a voyeuristic quality when documenting the lives of people of color?