Formation: The Revolutionary Power of the Black Woman Collective
“Ok ladies now let’s get in formation – slay”
Long before Beyonce dropped a visual and auditory feast of Black revolutionary power upon us SuperBowl weekend, I spent my early years in a Brooklyn houseful of Haitian-American women who understood what it meant to be in formation. My mama, her sisters, my grandmother and ‘nem each had her own life, her own babies to raise, and her own work to suffer through. But the collective power manifested when they joined forces to pay bills, child care, legacy build and pray was unprecendented, and, I believe, the best way they as Black women knew to shift power into their hands. They lived the tenets of activism and movement building without the language of organized resistance. Individually, they were powerful. Together, they slayed.
With each subsequent viewing, Formation unfolds. Like a poem, the visuals and lyrics offer something with each visit. In the 24 hours since the video’s release I have gleefully consumed the think pieces emerging from Black writers, each with a unique and nuanced take on the song and video. The first layer of my response, or reading if I may mix metaphors, is that I want to snatch up my homegirls and start strategizing boss moves around our individual and collective futures. This reaction is in and of itself what makes Formation powerful art: it impels and encourages movement grounded in self-actualization. I read Formation as a new thread in the conversation on the power of the Black womanist collective. Strength in sisterhood. Individually we are strong, together we are a force. Step in and out of formation.
Formation is for and of the Black South: spliced with images from Chris Black and Abteen Bagheri’s 2012 documentary on New Orleans bounce, That B.E.A.T.; featuring the voices of New Orleans stars Messy Mya and Big Freedia; and visuals and energy that pay homage to all that the Black South is. But the unbridled joy I am seeing from Black women across the diaspora consuming this moment is because there is something here for all of us. It gives me the same sense of unapologetic ownership of self that I get when viewing 90s Patra wining in a Kingston street with a crew of other rude gyals, or the women of Brewster Place joining forces in 1980s Black America to tear down a wall that attempts to keep them caged in, or the three Black, queer women founders of Black Lives Matter unapologetically calling for the loss of Black life to cease. The revolutionary power of the Black women’s style, voice, and sisterhood is centered in the latest video from the most powerful popular artist working today – an artist who happens to be a self-described Black Southern bamma.
Formation is the public, mainstream celebration that my kin and the women like them never receive. I feel like the world just caught wind of what anyone who grew up in the presence of Black women has been knowing. Black women have long understood what it means to be in formation.
The images of Bey’s honey locks surrounded by black women of every shade, moving in unison and collective story telling gives me chills. The Southern parlour scene evokes Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust. In this scene, video director Melina Matsoukas pans to close up shots of Black women in resplendent, Victorian white with afros and threaded braids, unsmiling, unflinching, unblinking. Y’all - in a world where many Black women cannot walk down our own streets without being told to smile, this moment makes me want to shout out loud with joy.
In an age where the Academy Awards have made it clear that Black art doesn’t matter, the most powerful artist in music just centered the Black aesthetic as THE visual, auditory event in pop discourse for 2016. The strategic drop of this on the weekend that brings us Superbowl 60, and what should have been the 29th birthday of Sandra Bland’s birthday and 21st birthday of Trayvon Martin’s is a powerful lesson of what it means to be in formation: to The power of a hoodied black boy – some black woman’s child – dancing himself free in front of a line of armed police men. All of this is the power of being in formation. Of being proud of who you are as a Black woman, when the mainstream tells me I should not.
I cannot wait to see what Beyonce does with this song at the Superbowl. With the recent announcement that she and Jay-Z have donated 1.5 million to Black Lives Matter, we seem to have entered a new age of a more public and unapologetic stance on Black life and art. I am here for this. Black women owning and centering our own goals and destiny.
I go hard/get what’s mine/I’m a star.
In Formation:
Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust
The Color Purple
Mary McLeod Bethune
Women of Brewster Place
The B.E.A.T, New Orleans bounce documentary by Chris Black and Abteen Bagheri