Lemonade

If you’re petty enough, you can try to make it about a tabloid-worthy divorce drama, but that would be hard.

“Lemonade,” Beyoncé’s latest visual album, featuring poetry from the inimitable Warsan Shire, is about more than that. It is about (and for) black women—black trans women, black women-of-center folks, black people who sometimes feel like women or identify with femininity and womanhood in some way—what this world does to them, what black men do to them, what white people do to all of us. It is about fathers and their mistakes, their sorrows. And it is about grandmothers and their lemonade.

My grandmother is a force. She is made of solid rose gold. She can make lemonade.

Every woman and transgender and gender non-conforming person of color I’ve talked to about this album has had a host of complicated and hard-to-articulate thoughts about it, but they have all said one thing: that they wish they could walk down a street, taking a bat to glass and toxic masculinity and other comparably fragile things like Beyoncé does in “Hold Up.”

Beyoncé is first and foremost acknowledging the toxicity of masculinity. But where many people get lost in trying to convey the complicated intersections of oppression within the black community without demonizing black men, Beyoncé treads gently, with love. In “Forward,” she depicts black women holding photographs of black men. In one segment, Michael Brown’s mother, her chest adorned with beads, holds her son’s graduation photo. She is shaking her head. In a physical and metaphysical sense, something of sorrowful impossibility passes between her, the photo, and the black viewer. Of course, I do not know the feeling, but I know something microscopically like it. I feel it now, shaking my head, my eyes welling up with words I don’t know how to speak. A tear falls down her cheek. She opens her mouth. The segment ends.

“Lemonade” is an album that made me want to call my mom. It is an album about imagining a greater reality in which trans inclusionary black feminism (a redundant term, as no true feminism should be trans exclusionary), is a universal ethos in the black community. In “Anger,” we hear Malcolm X’s voice over images of black women—black women who look like my aunties and the women at the beauty salon I go to back home—smiling somewhat uncomfortably. Malcolm X, who was not not a misogynist, declares, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” Beyoncé returns, pausing, making it clear she does not want “protection” as in night in shining armor, she wants “respect” as in shift in community values. She sings, “I am the dragon breathing fire,” and the beat kicks back in.

And here is where many films and bad sitcom episodes would peg Beyoncé the tragic and “crazy” cheated upon woman—mad and black in every sense of both words. But Beyoncé precludes this reduction entirely. She is, in all of “Lemonade,” reconciling herself with the word “crazy.” A word thrown constantly at black women. She rips the word back and pops it in her own mouth like spicy hard candy from the corner store. In “Hold Up,” Beyoncé asks “What’s worse, being jealous or crazy?” and after shattering a couple dozen car and store windows, moves on to “What’s worse, looking jealous or crazy? Jealous and crazy. Or like, being walked all over lately...I’d rather be crazy.” She re-situates herself inside of the term crazy, and re-situates the men who spit the term at her as trampling, culpable beings.

The video ends on hope—on black babies and grandmas at their 90th birthday parties and black folks adorned in lace perched in a mossy tree. But the video makes room for rage, too. It makes room for crazy. It makes room for hurt.

At the end of “Anger,” with a telling loss of fire, Beyoncé asks, “Why can’t you see me?” It’s a sort of desperation I feel here every day. Directly thereafter, at the beginning of “Apathy,” she asks, “So what are you gonna say at my funeral, now that you’ve killed me? Here lies the body of the love of my life, whose heart I broke without a gun to my head. Here lies the mother of my children, both living and dead. Rest in peace, my true love, who I took for granted.” This is about more than an affair. It is about a community—the black community—and how we can better love one another.

With “Lemonade,” Beyoncé gives me space. She gives me space to be whatever amount of woman as long as I be. She gives me space to be joyful, to be spiritual, to be enraged, to be tired, to forgive, to be crazy. She posits black love as a solution, as hope, a salve, but she does not fault black love for its imperfections, does not fault self-love for its absences, does not fault women for their uncomfortable smiles.

I—like Beyoncé, I assume—am tired of being made to feel like a problem. My feelings about this album are complicated—it is a text that will require further study—but I know one thing. With “Lemonade” Beyoncé sits her intended audience down and says to us: Look at all of these ways to be “black woman.” Look at all of these things that you can be. Here, this says in mourning. This says nonbinary. This says laughing. None of these say “problem.”

Madison E. Johnson ’18 is a History and Literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.