Beyoncé Saved My Life
The first time I conjured a Beyoncé fix to a problem was Valentine’s Day 2009. “Single Ladies” was still everywhere and, in my 23-year-old maturity, I had fantasized regularly about dancing to it in front of my ex-boyfriend.
As Bey would have it, dude showed up at the random club I was at with friends that night in Macon, Georgia. “Single Ladies” came on, and I danced my booty off with another guy making the ex super jealous. It felt incredible (until the shots I took caught up with me shortly afterward and I threw up in the bathroom).
That’s what Old Beyoncé did for me. I felt, momentarily, powerful and pretty and sexy when I listened to her songs while getting ready for any major event where flyness was a requirement. For a woman who’s struggled with feeling beautiful, Beyoncé was a healing salve. That’s no small thing.
But because I’d never considered “beauty” an asset of mine, I’ve never put much stock in it. Neither my confidence nor my self-worth ever rested on my ability to get other people to believe I was beautiful. So, Beyoncé’s music, while enjoyable, didn’t shake me.
Until Lemonade.
We are now living in what Roxane Gay has dubbed the “Post Lemonade” era, New Beyoncé is more woke than ever, and everything has changed.
It started in February this year, 7 years almost exactly, after her initial save. I’d just broken up with a boyfriend after months of me explicitly stating the way in which I need to be loved and him consistently saying, “nah”. Though I did the ending, it still felt like the rejection it was:
“Here I am, here’s what I need, will you love me in this way?”
“Nah.”
I was devastated. I thought, here I go again, asking for things that I didn’t deserve. Asking too much. Why couldn’t I just be happy with whatever this person was willing to give? Why am I always just too much.
I echoed words I’ve heard my whole life from family members (and wouldn’t they know?).
“She’s too radical” an aunt said about me when she thought I was out of earshot. I don’t even care for this aunt but her words picked at a scab that never quite healed and so what I heard was “She’s too radical to be loved.”
The aunt said it to my mother and my mother responded, “Well….” voice trailing off into nothing. Nothing. It was settled, then: I am too much.
With my last ounce of dignity and power I kicked them all out of my head, and the aunt and the ex out of my life, but still, I was distraught.
I panicked. I believed I would be alone forever because I’d tried to decolonize love–to unlearn every destructive, patriarchal, sexist, misogynoiristic thing I had ever learned about how relationships between men and women are supposed to work–and I had failed.
I was angry with myself for believing I could have a partner willing to do the necessary work decolonization takes. I was angry for not leaving sooner when it was so clear that it would never work. I was angry that I didn’t just shut up and take it. Why can’t you shut your brain off and be (a miserable zombie drone that looks) happy?
I didn’t eat at all that week. By Friday, I’d lost 5 pounds. I cried until dehydration set in because I believed that there was zero likelihood of me finding a Black man interested in decolonization.
And any non-Black man who could, I believed I would resent; after all, isn’t it easier for men who face less oppression to give up privilege than the men who have been so oppressed that they scrape to hold on to every ounce of privilege they can access? There was no hope.
Then, in that great, getting up Saturday night, Beyoncé dropped ‘Formation’.
The first time I watched the video, it served as little more than an amazing distraction. A hot song with a dope beat that made me want to dance. I immediately watched it again and was mesmerized by the visuals.
A little Black boy in a black hoodie danced triumphantly in front of a line of armed riot police, and at his command, the police put their hands up! Beyoncé drowned herself on top of a NOLA cop car in Katrina! She’s just as angry as we are. She’s fed up with oppression. She’s tired of police murdering us with impunity. She’s fighting back.
And she’s calling Black women, who have held it down for our community since we got here, to action: “Get in formation. Slay, trick, or you get eliminated.”
It was time to get informed, get organized, and to collectively fight back, because it is life or death in these streets. It was the first time her music met me on a soul-level, right where I was at.
The next day, I got every ounce of my life when she performed “Formation” at the Super Bowl, dressed in Black and gold like Michael Jackson, like a Black Panther along with her froed-out back-up dancers, Black Power fists raised victoriously in the middle of your wholesome family fun, as if to scream: I’m BLACKITY BLACK BLACK BLACK! In case you aint know. It was glorious.
My breakdown week was instantly over. It was time to get my life back together. I had work to do. I had hope. I felt again that I could joyously dance in front of the enemies who sought to break me down, knowing God would make them my footstools.
It was a restoration.
My “Formation” high lasted for weeks, months. Then, I had another break-up in April.
I’d met with the pastor of the church that I loved to discuss how to implement a framework to decolonize Church. “How can we be more explicitly anti-misogynistic?” I asked. “How can we implement women in positions of real power in the church?”
It turned out there was no interest in either–at least not in any sense that felt tangible or immediate to me. There was definitely no women who would get to be pastors or elders in the next year–if then!– and certainly not without some seriously heavy lifting on somebody’s part, to explain why women deserve equity in the churches they build, fund and populate.
Well it wasn’t going to be my emotional labor. I wasn’t going to be exploited while I’m denied access to spaces of power. And I couldn’t stay in a church where queer folk were taught celibacy is their only hope and where women’s “different but still equal!!” roles had no real power.
“Here I am, here’s what I need, will you love me in this way?”
“Nah.”
Another heartbreak.
If the nicest people I’d met in New York weren’t interested in decolonizing, weren’t interested in helping me get freedom, who on earth would ever be?
The very next Saturday, Beyoncé dropped Lemonade.
Bump what you thought: It aint about Becky. As I wrote for The Rumpus,
[I]f you peel back the skin—as Beyoncé eerily offers to do to her husband’s mistress, “Becky with the good hair,” as a gesture of her devotion to him—there is so much more meat and bone to Lemonade than just a woman scorned.
The album, which must be watched as well as heard, is Beyoncé’s awakening. Her husband’s betrayal is the catalyst that allows her to reject and unlearn the patriarchal, Eurocentric ideas of love and religion that she’s been socialized to embody and defend, at her peril: husband as god; woman as less-than; patriarchal Christianity as Gospel; Africanness as heathen.
Through her decolonization journey, she rejects her husband as a god and finds God, instead, in every part of her West African, Southern American, Creole, Negro-nostriled, Black woman self.
With the help of her ancestors and a community of Black women and girls, she heals from the impact of systemic oppression and helps others heal, setting up a formation for decolonized love that strengthens her marriage and empowers her community against subjugation.
READ MY SONG-BY-SONG ANALYSIS OF LEMONADE HERE.
Lemonade, for me, has been hope. It’s an affirmation that I’m not wrong to fight against systems of oppression. I’m not wrong to fight against patriarchy outside and within my community. I’m not wrong to fight against it in the Church, that’s supposed to be safe for all of us. White Supremacist Capitalist CisheteroPatriarchy is destructive. It is toxic to love and God is love, therefore, it is poison to a relationship with God. It is, as Beyoncé repeats, the “curse that will be broken.”
Beyoncé set out to decolonize both God and romantic love, and by the end of Lemonade, she succeeds! That success made me dive head-first into Dr. Cristena Cleveland’s and Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas’ brilliant decolonization scholarship with renewed vigor. It energized me to know I’m not doing this alone. There are so many other people who want to get free too.
And for those who stand in the way of that freedom, like she says on “Don’t Hurt Yourself”: “I fux with you, until I realize, I’m just too much for you. I’m just too much for you.”
She repeats herself, like she’s ensuring her betrayer gets it but also that she gets it, as well. Being “too much” for folks speaks not to an inherent flaw in me. It’s simply a statement of fact about what other people are equipped to handle. What someone else can handle is not a reflection on me or my worth. And it’s okay to leave folks behind who try to blame you because they can’t contain your magic.
It’s okay. I’m okay. And I’m not alone.
Thanks, Beyoncé.