Beyonce' and Huma Abedin and the Story We Diminish

On my way to a Lake Merritt music festival, around 3 pm yesterday, I parallel parked below Lance's window on MLK, beeped up to him, "I'm here," and queued Beyonce's "Sorry" to share with my best friend in my car. 

"You got to hear this." 

Lance gasped every time Bey cursed.  

He surprised me with his surprise.  "You ain't know?"  I asked him.  I think "Sorry" may be my favorite on her "Lemonade" album.  

The song bounces in phrases that work despite that annoying but popular clipped delivery that's usually coupled with an autotune treatment and in the worst renditions, is impossible to understand.  In this case, sans auto-tune, the repeated phrase, "n-word, nawwhh" is decipherable.  And that would normally be a turn off for me:  I hate the way careless black folks give white folks permission to use that word:  my daughter said she watched a white girl's lips as Bey sang "Sorry" at the concert, just to see if she would repeat it.  Ish is complicated.  

But here I am, near about middle-aged, a bit learned, a bit worldly, a bit radical, a bit contented, peaceful, and damn it if I ain't feeling that song (Let's set aside the "suck on my balls, balls." Not feeling that.) 

Why? What is it that draws me in?  What is it that keeps me tuned?  Why am I respecking Bey like never before?  First, the music--yes.  The production is thick, tight, knocking, progressive, and comprehensive in its scope.  The lyrics ring true.  When she sings, "I left a note in the hallway/by the time your read it I'll be far away" I am with her.  

Second, and more than anything, it's the emotion.   This is Bey's first album for which I can connect with the emotional authenticity. I am a feeling being first.  I am a thinking being second.  I want my art to move me emotionally.  And because I don't care nothing about who put a ring on whose finger or bootiliciousness, Bey missed me for most of her career.  (And she's done quite well without me).  

But now, I'm in formation.  She's got my ear.  I'm listening.  

So, to say that bell hooks bothered my "Lemonade" joy with her "Moving Beyond Pain" response, would be too soft.  Why?

An old sociology teacher turned me on to bell hooks in undergrad.  I dug her then and appreciate her now, but am rarely moved by her pronouncements because they elevate the intellectual too far above the emotional.  

When I read her, I hear her tendency toward labeling:  capitalist, feminist, patriarchal, hetero-normative, violent, sexist, white, other.   The labels give us a name for the thing; they are not the thing.  The reliance on labeling also distances me from the feeling, the humanness of the story.  It's the same response in me that's triggered when I hear millennials speak politically in overwrought academics that ring insincere.  So overwrought are the academics, the humanity is lost.  And we tune out the droning automatons who've ceased speaking to our commonality because the political has taken the personal hostage.  And isn't that what we're here for in the first place?  The personal connection.  Lighting the places in the human heart that increase empathy.  

And women know.  How many women, black women, have sat with soaked shirt collars murmuring  to themselves, "Me and my baby we gone be alright/we gone live a good life." (Bey) 

Compare this to, 

"No matter how hard women in relationships with patriarchal men work for change, forgive, and reconcile, men must do the work of inner and outer transformation if emotional violence against black females is to end. We see no hint of this in 'Lemonade'. If change is not mutual then black female emotional hurt can be voiced, but the reality of men inflicting emotional pain will still continue."  (hooks)

So the analysis falls short here because although she may be absolutely right, "Lemonade" is a story thick with color, emotion, and realism.  It's the story that should be elevated above the intellectual because intellectualizing affects thinking, primarily.  Feeling affects behavior.  

This idea hit me last night as I dipped into my entertainment budget to rent "Weiner".  I watched it twice, Lord.  Why? I'm going to paraphrase Weiner's final proclamation to the makers of the film,  whatever your intent in creating this documentary, it will be overshadowed by that thing that people want more of.  Weiner's right.  I wanted more.  Nothing I had ever read, seen or heard, prepared me for the moment I connected Huma Abedin's story with Beyonce's "Lemonade" story.  The moment Abedin turns to a tv screen to catch Weiner's blurred sexting photo posted on CNN is riveting and heartbreaking at once.  Any woman who's ever been humiliated by a man's behavior will freeze here.  She turns to him and claps the air.  All that's not said in this moment is its power.  Dead silence.  

Abedin, the cool political professional looks like a grenade with a pulled pin.  Weiner asks that the cameras shut down.  

So many women betrayed, and what is worse than the abuse of a woman's heart, of her family, of her future? A smiling Abedin emerges to deliver a press conference statement in support of this man she clearly loves, but who is so damaged, he can't give her what she deserves.  Abedin was pregnant when Weiner got caught sexting the first time. ... 

Big Homie better grow up. 

She haunts the screen:  kind, gorgeous, brilliant, accomplished before him, pushing a stroller through NYC.  Bey and Huma. 

So here's where hooks fails.  She insists, that "images of female violence undercut a central message embedded in 'Lemonade', that violence in all its forms, especially the violence of lies and betrayal, hurts."  bell hooks' analysis calls attention to problem/solution dynamics.  But it's dry and easy to forget.  And frankly sounds like that person who tells you why you feel the way you feel and what's wrong with your feelings.  The response is heady and disconnected when all you wanted was for them to listen and give you a hug.

And Beyonce' in that mustard dress toting that bat favored Abedin's thunderclap to me.  And both "Lemonade" and "Weiner" worked to strike a chord reflective of the shocking depths of emotional pain experienced by women everywhere at that moment when their worlds crash.  There's no thinking out of it.  It's visceral.  It's hot.  It's devastating.  It's life changing.  Both artistic renditions of women's hurt are meaningful and evocative enough that they might cause any man viewing it to pause to consider the damage his choices might inflict upon his woman, his family, and his community.  As well, it may increase the empathy of the observers who objectify and distance other humans enough to continue to label:  them and not us.  

We've had enough of rationalizing and too little empathizing.   

The Search for Better: Pressure on Black Life in America

Helen grew up down the street from my mother in Pine Bluff Arkansas.  She was dispatched by her family to check in on us after my brother, Toure, was killed in 1998.  She lived only blocks away from Mama's duplex off 35th, in Oakland and she and her husband drove us over to her house for dinner one late fall evening.  It was just me and Mama and Helen, ultimately who ended up on her floral print sofa chatting and sipping wine.  Toure had been gone for thirty days at most; so the pressure that ascends into the body after heavy trauma was not yet below any surface.  It was vivid and tangible, in our voices and waiting for our skin to open and let it into our blood.  And it would, over the years, slip deeper and deeper into our blood.

I noticed Helen's teeth first.  They made her whistle when she spoke.  I wondered why she had never had them fixed to fit more neatly in her mouth.  Mama would have explained that cosmetic tooth care is a luxury for most folks.  And Helen wasn't living luxurious.  She lived, in fact, in a house that was sliding down a hill.  A fact that did not relieve her of a mortgage payment, but that instead also cost her more each month, as she paid for the exorbitant price for water that leaked out of a pipe that sat between her sliding home and the street to which it should have stayed attached.  Helen was kind and fed us well.  She also offered Mama and me some comfort:  she had attended Toure's memorial, she said.  She had sat among the thousand or so who'd shown up to Allen Temple for this young brother who'd been slain while espousing his religious principles, working to speak peace between two bickering factions of black men.  She told us, "At least you can be proud of Toure.  My son died doing dirt."  She had been estranged from her boy.  She said she thought of him during the memorial service because he favored that handsome minister from San Francisco.  Same hair and height.  Her boy was handsome.  But he had fallen, she reported, to the lure of the street.  And in order to save herself from constant worry, from bonding him out of jail, from inserting her in his street conflicts, from feeding and sheltering his grown body, she'd had to let him go.  "I'd been through enough," she said.

He'd moved to Brooklyn and only because a stranger had phoned in the middle of one otherwise muted evening, did Helen know something had happened to him, "I think your son is dead, Ma'am.  In New York."  That was all the stranger said.  

Helen packed a small bag; set it by her door.  For three more days she retrieved files and input data down at the Alameda County Court House waiting for a Friday paycheck in order to purchase a $700 open-ended ticket to New York to find her son.  She flew out Saturday morning and hit the streets of Brooklyn.  She used what she knew of files and court houses and street commerce to search for her son.

She met with success on day four after sucking it up and heading first into the hospitals and finally downstairs into the morgues.  She found him.

In the morgue:  a technician walked her down as he finished chewing the last of his pastrami sandwich.  He flung open the drawer, she said, and grabbed her son's body.  "This here one is yours ma'am."  He said it as he chuckled and grabbed the boy's head.  "He's got your forehead!"

Helen said she couldn't believe he had spoken to her in that tone.  As if she was nothing and her son was nothing.  As if this scene could possibly register as ordinary and not devastating and not horrifying.

Helen withdrew the last of her real savings and flew her son back to Arkansas to have him buried in ground she knew.  Just like Mama, she sought some comfort in returning her boy to the deepest sanctuary she knew.  Buried him among people that'd long known his name.  Buried him among the pines where she'd have rather watched him grow and prosper and start a family.  But Helen had had to abandon the people and the pines, in the search of something that had been promised as better.  She had to leave.  Her son was made to wander from one street corner to the next in search of better.  But better never came, except for one brief period in the 70s:  before crack, before AIDS, before the guns and Reagan ... before the chaos.

"Least you had something to be proud of," she said it to me and Mama again as if to assuage the sense of our own dangling off a hillside.  We were told it would get better, eventually.  But before another decade was done, we'd bury another brother, two first cousins, a father, aunt, countless friends and our dear Grandmother.  We'd step up like Helen and Mama did, in tribute and obligation to the family and the dead, put them away nice.  And each time, the task would fall upon another one (who is able this time?) in the family to handle the searching, the detailed arrangements, the endless answering questions.  All an ageless exercise in purging and catharsis that is promised to be followed by relief.  That's the mythology.  But in this age, whereby ruthless capitalism is inextricably bound to racism, sexism and violence, the mythology doesn't exist.   There's no clean resolution.  No rest.  No better.  There's a back and forth.  A frenetic attempt at mending.  A reaching for better from sources safe and not safe.  Unending pressure.

A wealthy little black girl I nannied years ago in Marin County came home one day and said one of her wealthy white friends asked her why black people were so "irritable".   She told the white girl she didn't know.  But had she been honest, she would have told her because we live precariously in this country.  Though the little black girl was wealthy and lived in extreme physical comfort, she had lost her father before she was born.  Her uncle lived in the projects across town and had just been nearly missed by a drive-by shooting in Richmond.  Her next point might have been that her own seeming "irritability" may stem from her John Henry-like efforts to never have to live in the neighborhood where she would have to dodge bullets. We understand who and where we are and have never relinquished our desire for better.