By honouring a region historically coded in pain, Beyoncé and her collaborators rewrite that trauma into a treasured heritage.The big news at the 65th annual Grammy Awards: Beyoncé broke the record for most wins in the event’s history. Visually, the camera worships both the urban and pastoral spaces its characters occupy. The film was shot mainly in Louisiana, and in the song Daddy Lessons Beyoncé shouts out her Texas roots.
Beyoncé draws proudly on the rich musical legacy of the South: New Orleans, the birthplace of jazz Clarksdale, home of the blues and Atlanta, where trap music, the latest euphonious fruit of black expression, originated.
Geography is integral to the power of Lemonade. If the Plantation Era has traditionally been the symbol of white Southern pride, here it becomes the pinnacle of African-American female resilience, a place of safety and a community of grace, from which its heirs draw strength. A gathering of women prepare food, and the scene is a familiar one, as are the sequences of young girls playing outside slave cabins, in parlours and draped across the Spanish moss-covered branches of oak trees. Necessarily so, for the singer evokes the oldest image of black womanhood, the slave woman – cowed, violated, and powerless – and imbues her with a rarely afforded dignity. The singer references literary mothers as well, from Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker to Toni Morrison: in Lemonade Beyoncé becomes Janie, Shug, and Baby Suggs all in one – lover, aggressor, and leader of women. One girl watches Beyoncé in the mirror, echoing photographer Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table series, while the monochrome Sorry sequence recalls the glamour of Coreen Simpson’s fashion portraits. Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) receives perhaps the most explicit tribute, but scenes of little girls wandering the halls of an antebellum mansion and bouncing playfully on beds resemble Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou (1997). This legacy of survival, handed down from mother to daughter, emerges as one of the film’s prevailing themes, as the singer pays homage to the black female artists who came before her.
In fact, the film takes its title from the testimony of her husband Jay Z’s grandmother Hattie Smith, who declares that when life gave her lemons, she made lemonade. Confronted with her husband’s betrayal, Beyoncé retreats to verdant matriarchal havens, where she finds comfort, security, but above all empowerment.
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