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Remembering Nina Simone

The lights must have blinded her at first. The glittering luminescent chandelier, the spotlight that set her figure aglow. Carnegie Hall's sparkling lights must have blinded Nina Simone as she strode across the stage and sat at her piano. Did she feel fear when she gazed out at a thousand faces that stared back at her expectantly? Knowing Nina, I think not.

This, her first solo concert at New York’s prestigious Carnegie Hall, would be punctuated by her performance of the damning and ironic protest song “Mississippi G—m.”

And it would be one of the first recordings of Nina Simone’s music that I would ever hear.

I was probably still in my teens and one of the only things I knew about the woman who was born Eunice Waymon was that she was cool enough for Lauryn Hill to reference in a Fugees song.

When an algorithm in some internet radio player selected and subsequently released a spry refrain of bass, guitar and drum cheerfully blended together, I was intrigued.

“The name of this tune is Mississippi G—m,” Nina said in her feminine tenor.

The audience laughed out loud.

“And I mean every word of it.”

The audience’s next response was a collective unsure chuckle.

I found that I was immediately enamored with Simone’s artistry. I loved the way she blended cheek with an anger evoked by oppression, making them the heart and soul of a protest song sung over what could have been the score of a Broadway musical.

I would fall in love with Simone’s work a second time as I watched my high school’s dance company undulate and leap to “Four Women.” The dancers were characters in the stories Nina told, their skin tones and movement matching the appearance and mood of the women in each vignette.

It was through “Four Women” that I truly began to comprehend the importance of Nina Simone.  With "Four Women" she had managed to encapsulate the struggles of black womankind in less than five minutes. 

Nina was the black woman’s lyrical historian, a bard who sang our history and archived our triumph and shame with sound.

That song spoke volumes to me about the triple consciousness of being black, female, and American in a way that no one else had perhaps other the first time I had heard The Mis-education of Lauryn Hill.

After that Nina Simone would become for me both muse and teacher representing a black femininity that was Afrocentric, sharply intelligent and ensconced in social consciousness. Her sculptured hair, her brazen denigration of racism and her belief in the beauty of blackness were all things I wanted to imitate.

Nina Simone’s throat was a revolver and her words were bullets that pierced prejudice. She sung truth and transmuted apathy into so many shards of glass with the machine gun of her voice.

As I consider who Nina Simone was and what she stood for in the year she would have turned 80, I believe that this is her legacy: truth and passion.

Perhaps in no other song was she more truthful or more passionate than in “Mississippi G—m.” That night in 1964 at Carnegie Hall Nina transitioned from entertainer to a human clarion call naming the sins of a segregated America. 

She artfully expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of social change by integrating elements of blues and gospel. During her performance Nina Simone sings the words “desegregation” and “mass participation” and male voices respond with “too slow,” embodying the collective voice of a righteously impatient black America.

To sing such a politically charged song in 1964 took incredible courage. It took a level of zeal and integrity that surpasses fear. 

That remarkable authenticity and ardor was Nina Simone’s genius and it was her gift to us.

Originally published on For Harriet

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On Creating Womanist Myths

In 2021, the movie studio A24 released a film called The Green Knight, an adaption of an epic poem about a man who risks his honor when he fights a mysterious green warrior. I saw The Green Knight’s trailer and I was immediately mesmerized by it. The film’s fabulous geographies and medieval grandeur reminded me of Peter Jackson’s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit. Both cinematic universes encompass worlds that are thrilling in their detail and their expansiveness. Arguably, they are also both examples of epic storytelling translated into film. The Green Knight derives its story from Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, a medieval epic poem that sits alongside other works of classic epic poetry like Gilgamesh or The Odyssey.

Wikipedia’s definition of Epic Poetry best describes my understanding of the genre. It is also a definition that applies to many forms of storytelling beyond poetry:

"An epic poem is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily involving a time beyond living memory in which occurred the extraordinary doings of the extraordinary people who, in dealings with the gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants, the poet and their audience, to understand themselves as a people or nation."

I believe that epics are stories marked by their grandeur, scale, formative roles in shaping a community's identity, and their use of the features of speculative fiction. Any story or art form that has these qualities can, in my view, be called an epic. That said, I am particularly interested in epic narratives about Black womanhood. I find myself wondering: How does one create a Black feminist epic or a womanist myth? How do we tell grand, expansive, speculative stories about Black womanhood?

When I think of grand storytelling, Beyoncé comes to mind. Telling stories that are expansive and rich in their scope is something that she’s always done well. For instance, the concept for Beyoncé’s first joint tour with her husband Jay-Z translated a fictionalized version of their marriage into a grandiose narrative where adventure and romance converged. If one wants to answer the question of how to create epics that center Black women and Black feminist concerns, Beyoncé's 2016 visual album and surrealist film Lemonade would be a good place to start.

Lemonade is a Black feminist epic because it centers Beyoncé as its protagonist and documents her quest for emotional healing. Like Sir Gawain in The Green Knight, Beyoncé sojourns through perilous and marvelous landscapes in search of resolution. Her journey delves into the precarious geography of the soul while Sir Gawain’s journey takes him into the wilds of Great Britain. Both films include scenes that are surreal and heavy with meaning. In Lemonade there are shots of burning houses and women with gold-covered hands. In The Green Knight there are sequences of giants and a king's burning crowned head. The symbolism in both films is wondrous and either gestures towards or embraces the otherworldly.

While Lemonade shares similarities with The Green Knight, it doesn’t need to be compared to a European story to prove that it’s worthy of being called an epic. Lemonade’s creators imbued it with a sense of splendor that stands on its own. It is a story sung from the purview of our nation-within-a-nation's women and its weight is in the sparkling beauty of its vantage point. It is teeming with magnificent characters. It features Black heroines like our generation’s greatest living athlete and one of the South's most legendary culinary artists. It also includes the noble oration of a shining Black prince whose words reveal the narrative’s gleaming heart.

If we look to Lemonade as a model for womanist myth-making we would want to imitate how Beyoncé and her team used surrealist scenes to depict the trauma of infidelity and the challenges of healing from it. Their masterful filmmaking reminds us that we can create Black feminist epics and myths by using worldbuilding, surrealism, and other aspects of speculative storytelling as a fantastic canvas for depicting Black women’s concerns in grand ways.