Lemonade: Bitter and Sour is Okay
Lemonade is Beyoncé’s sixth studio album and her second “visual album”. The visual album goes song by song with added poetry by Warsan Shire to show Beyoncé’s journey through discovering her husband, Jay-Z’s, infidelity. It has been critically acclaimed and seen as a beautiful capturing of the lives and struggles of American Black women. Although it has received much positive feedback, bell hooks, a renowned Black feminist, claims that Lemonade is “capitalist money making at its best”. She argues that the visual album does a good job of repositioning society’s gaze onto Black women, but doesn’t do anything to “truly overshadow or change conventional sexist constructions of Black female identity”. Often, there is a debate over whether personal experience and narratives are radical or political (i.e. the personal is political). Beyoncé’s Lemonade is a perfect example of “the personal is political” at work with the messages that it sends about the struggles of Black people and Black women specifically. It shows the emotional violence of infidelity in a relationship and how that affects an individual who is already struggling from being both Black and female. bell hooks makes valid points about personal narratives like Beyoncé’s not rejecting or fighting the conventional sexist constructions of Black female identity, but I argue that the personal is very political and that it is important that we listen to lived experience to further understand how societal structures and power dynamics affect us individually.
Through Lemonade, Beyoncé expresses and portrays the anger of the Black woman in a positive light, rejecting the negative stereotypes usually assigned to angry Black women. An article by Mary McNamara in the LATimes succinctly describes why female anger is important with the line: “Historically, anger is the tinder of protest, often the only path to reform. Men shout in righteous rage, but women who raise their voices are still often seen as losing control or, heaven forbid, 'shrill’”. McNamara also touches on how angry women are referred to as “crazy” and how this is reminiscent of “a time when women could be committed to an asylum for rebelling against their husbands or fathers”. Women historically have had their voices silenced and their emotions invalidated, and when it comes to Black women, this problem is even worse. Black women deal with the oppressions of both sex and race, feeling the interlocking oppressions of intersectionality.
Lemonade itself talks about Black female anger in the lyrics of each and every song (some touch on it more than others). “Jealous or crazy, more like being walked all over lately, walked all over lately, I’d rather be crazy” Beyoncé sings in “Hold Up” while smashing the windows of random cars on the street. bell hooks argues that female violence is no better than male violence, but seems to disregard the fact that when anger is unable to be expressed, it festers and becomes violent. The problem is not necessarily that Beyoncé is smashing car windows, but that this is what she must do to cope with the infidelity of her beloved husband, Jay-Z. Revolution is complex and often involves violence; how does one expect a whole group of people to quell their anger caused by injustice and to always seek the high road. As Michelle Obama said, “when they go low, we go high”.
Michelle Obama’s message of going high despite the “bullies” going low is important; it however ignores the simple fact that Black women are never allowed the opportunity to even sink anywhere close to low. Beyoncé’s personal work may not completely rewire the infrastructure that is the capitalist patriarchal white machine of doom for Black women everywhere, but it takes stabs at it and says that she will be angry about the injustices that occur to her. Her personal narrative is important and so is bell hooks’ and every other Black woman in the world. Personal narratives are not perfect, but they do a lot more than what we give them credit for.
