EXPOSES INNER LIVES OF BLACK WOMEN / TUTORIALOUTLET DOT COM EXPOSES INNER LIVES OF BLACK WOMEN / TUTORIALOUTLE | Page 3

breakup screed, Drake's
perpetual hurt from the good girls who get dressed and go out too
much, Kendrick Lamar's
struggles against a depression-inducing capitalism — Lemonade takes
up a bittersweet space to
explore how it feels, and how it has felt for so long, for black women
to be so black and blue.
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Lemonade is a womanist sonic meditation that spans from the
spiritual to the trap, with stops at
country soul and rock & roll in between. Its visual landscape is
packed tightly with a consistent
iconography of black Southern women's history and movement
through the rural and urban
Souths of the past and present. The film signifies on Eve's Bayou and
Julie Dash's Daughters of
the Dust, centers sacred Nigerian body art practices, draws on the
words of Warsan Shire and
grandmothers' reflections and returns again and again to Louisiana
plantation spaces where
black women become both the hoodoo man and the conjure woman,
setting things ablaze
from their very depths and surviving and healing. This rich,
multilayered backdrop is not the
canvas for the revelation of trite tabloid tidbits.
Although there are some
underlying tensions between
verisimilitude and reality in
Lemonade, Beyoncé invites us to
the work as a memoir, a
meditation and a celebration.
Like much work that has
emerged in the age of Black Lives
Matter, we are to read the literal
relationship turmoil as a metaphor for black women's relationship to
modern systems of oppression. By offering up a
prayer first, Lemonade spurns from the outset the unrelenting hate-