EXPOSES INNER LIVES OF BLACK WOMEN / TUTORIALOUTLET DOT COM EXPOSES INNER LIVES OF BLACK WOMEN / TUTORIALOUTLE | Page 5

children can play, busting
out windows with her bat Hot Sauce, and relishing a theretofore
unrealized freedom to be
emotionally human.
Lemonade's multiple chapters — intuition, denial, anger, apathy,
emptiness, accountability,
reformation, forgiveness, resurrection, hope, redemption — are at
once about one couple;
many couples; the sometimes complicated relationships between
black women, men, fathers
and daughters; and black women's relationship to an unequal
America. In their number, the
chapters deliberately obscure alternative organizations of the work,
like those deployed by
Erykah Badu's "Denial," "Acceptance" and
"Relapse" on "Green Eyes" or Coltrane's
"Acknowledgement," "Resolution,"
"Pursuance," and "Psalm" on A Love
Supreme. This refusal to
group emotions into larger categories compels us to experience a
broader spectrum of black
women's emotional lives.
Lemonade is Beyoncé's intimate look into the multigenerational
making and magic of black
womanhood. In its moves through genre, space, place and time, it
offers new tools to see black
women, to listen to us, and to say our names. To black women, it
offers up a saffron-tinged
blueprint for love and salvation through love — of ourselves, of our
significant others, of our
children, of our spiritual lives — when we are so often treated as
fundamentally unloveable.
And though it is for certain a work of black girl alchemy, it contains
infinite lessons for our
fraught political moment, teaching us to register a range of emotion so
we might begin our
own collective journeys of transformation.