How Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ Exposes
Inner Lives of Black Women
History-reclaiming visual album offers new tools to see and be seen
Lemonade continues Beyoncé Knowles’ longstanding engagement with black Southern
regionalism. The video album writes black women back into national, regional and diasporic
histories by making them the progenitors and rightful inheritors of the Southern gothic
tradition. Beyond “strong” and “magic,” Lemonade asserts that black women are alchemists and
metaphysicians who are at once of the past, present and future, changing and healing the
physical, chemical and spiritual world around them. Rihanna uses her “glitter to make [your
shit] gold,” Erykah Badu compels men to “change jobs and change gods” and Janelle Monáe’s
Cindi Mayweather is secretly leading the Android Revolution. But Beyoncé accounts for the
method behind black women’s alchemy. Traversing genre and space, she fundamentally
transforms the Southern platitude about what one should do when life hands her lemons.
Part of black women’s magic, born of necessity, has been the ability to dissemble: to perform
an outward forthrightness while protecting our inner, private lives and obscuring our full
selves. We have drawn on this culture of dissemblance, as Northwestern University historian
Darlene Clark Hine has called it, to deflect physical and discursive violence, cultivating rich
inner lives that play out behind the enduring walls of Jim Crow. Beyoncé rejects any magic
predicated on constraint with Lemonade, a meditation on the process of becoming a black
woman in a society in which black women matter the least, are “the mule of the world” and are
the most disrespected, neglected, and unprotected. Through the metaphor of lemonade — the
South’s other cold drink, sweet tea’s antithesis and sometimes nemesis, but perhaps its best
collaborator — Beyoncé insists on alternative forms of inner magic that demand emotional
disclosure for healing, wholeness and a freer kind of freedom.
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