MIXING LEMONADE, REMIXING AMERICA
I SAT DUMBFOUNDED, JAW ON THE FLOOR, FOR THE entire sixty-one minutes of Lemonade (including credits) and for an unknown amount of time directly following its HBO premiere on Saturday, April 23, 2016. I couldn’t tear my eyes from the screen. It wasn’t just the sheer majesty with which Beyoncé presented a genre-bending narrative and catchy-as-fuck collection of songs—a fully realized visual album unlike anything prior—but the way she expertly, cohesively retold many of the same stories and conversations I’d been having with students in classrooms for years, emanating from her other work. Of course, there was much that was new and particular to Lemonade. It was deeper, more complex, concisely refined and merged into one film. But there were elements of everything that came before blended into those eleven tight tracks, interspersed with British Somali poet Warsan Shire’s poetry and illustrated through lush visuals based on Julie Dash’s 1991 independent film Daughters of the Dust (the first widely distributed feature film directed by a Black woman). A perfect recipe; a groundbreaking artistic achievement. Lemonade out of lemons in a multitude of ways.
So many incredible Black women critics, activists, thinkers, and artists quickly—with lightning speed, actually—produced scholarship geared toward a deep understanding and analysis of Lemonade; there are far too many to name in these pages. The speed with which critical engagement appeared spoke both to the complex artistry of the narrative and the profound desire for more nuanced Black women’s stories to be featured and available in mainstream pop culture. Engagement far surpassed typical reactive think-piece fodder, intensively mining cultural references and honoring experiences that aren’t typically celebrated and centered, even still. A particularly robust and comprehensive list of writing on Lemonade was compiled by Janell Hobson and Jessica Marie Johnson for the African American Intellectual History Society and published online only three weeks after the album’s release, titled “#Lemonade: A Black Feminist Resource.” Additional college courses emerged devoted fully to Lemonade, along with the “Lemonade Syllabus” compiled by Candice Marie Benbow. The achievement truly catapulted Beyoncé and the way the public at large viewed her work into a new critical galaxy.
As a fresh addition to the syllabus in 2016, and given its explicit focus on the experiences of Black women—more so than anything else in Beyoncé’s catalog—I immediately jumped to pedagogical and personal questions about where Lemonade fit into “Politicizing Beyoncé.” How could I carefully and honestly address and position Lemonade in a way that wouldn’t overstep any boundaries, but still allow students from various backgrounds to respectfully grapple with this brand-new cultural touchstone as the next piece of Beyoncé’s growing legacy? I’d always pushed students to look for the subtle politics layered into Beyoncé’s work in the classroom, but with Lemonade, so many of the explicit politics were shamelessly on the surface. Because the entire conceit of my course is to not assign writing about Beyoncé, I needed to get even more creative and unconventional, as most everything possible to say was immediately and importantly said, and continues to be said, by Black women critics and scholars.
While the narrative is a deeply personal and painful story of an infidelity and its aftermath, a Southern gothic love letter to Black women as a celebration of vulnerability and strength, Beyoncé also created Lemonade in such a way that everyone, regardless of identity, plays a role. Beyoncé invites wider participation as long as Black women are centered first, with others positioned on the margins. As a tribute to resilience in the face of a lie, the album is also an indictment of the lie itself and an exposé of a broken promise. Those who aren’t lied to are the liars—only able to enter the narrative of Lemonade through that broken promise, as part of the culture that devalued Black women so much so that recognition and reclamation were necessary in the first place. Just like the perfect balance of sugar and lemon in the water that makes lemonade, Lemonade is a meticulously balanced blend of celebration and condemnation.
America as a whole broke its promise to Black women. Removed from any gossip about Beyoncé’s personal life, that’s the truth at the core of Lemonade. Some conversations about the experiential weight of that broken promise, of course, are for Black women to lead, but other conservations must be had by wider, diverse groups of people. My students have always come from many different backgrounds, so I urge them to find and investigate their places in the narrative. As with all her other work, I try to highlight aspects of Lemonade in class that invite everyone to talk about complicity and responsibility in critiquing the same world that devalues Black women, because everyone exists together in that world. In the aftermath of Lemonade, part of that impulse became connecting moments and themes from Lemonade back to pieces of Beyoncé’s previous work—seen as historical texts themselves from the vantage point of 2016—on top of all the other works assigned. Here, I’ll discuss some larger aspects of Lemonade, but many other moments get looped into subsequent chapters by theme. Lemonade itself creates a performative historical loop in Beyoncé’s catalog, one that moves backward and forward in time. “Formation” is Lemonade’s prologue chronologically since it was released months before the album, but featured on the album as an epilogue, track twelve and not included in the film’s narrative. This clever move requires the viewer look even further back into the past for prologue—to the ghosts of B’Day and “Déjà Vu,” where some of Lemonade’s ingredients also first appeared. With many stops in between. A much longer story that remains the overall focus of “Politicizing Beyoncé.”
Beyoncé weaves a critical tale with Lemonade on its own that attempts to rewrite the social contract itself, to imagine a different world. She offers instructions to repair what has been and continues to be broken by examining what the Combahee River Collective named “Black women’s extremely negative relationship to the American political system” in their famous 1977 statement. In addition to all else that it is, Lemonade is an examination of that negative political relationship, that broken promise. It also highlights potential complicities in the system that is devaluing and lying to Black women continuously. Ultimately, Lemonade leads the audience on a journey that exposes freedom itself as nothing more than America’s most intimate lie—a perpetually broken promise by design.
For students, I pair Lemonade with selections from a trio of writers: Saidiya Hartman, Claudia Rankine, and Octavia E. Butler. Together, they draw out some major overarching themes. Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade next to her personal travels in Ghana in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. She writes, “As both a professor conducting research on slavery and a descendant of the enslaved, I was desperate to reclaim the dead, that is, to reckon with the lives undone and obliterated in the making of human commodities.” Hartman’s family lineage was lost somewhere between Africa and antebellum Alabama when records were misplaced, destroyed, or never existed and are now untraceable. To “lose your mother,” as the title metaphorically suggests, is to be broken apart from history, split in two and constantly haunted by ghosts around every corner. In the introduction, she notes, “History is how the secular world attends to the dead.” But when history doesn’t tell the full truth, or actively erases pieces of the past, the dead come back as ghosts. And in Lemonade, ghosts conspire to expose traces of the past in the present. American history has tried to keep them buried, but they assemble nonetheless—watching from trees, in anachronistic moments where things appear out of time. As Beyoncé narrates in the beginning: “The past and the future merge to meet us here / What luck / What a fucking curse.”
Just like Hartman, Beyoncé reaches backward through generations of women, through her own family line. The album title comes from a combination of both Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s grandmothers as referents for an older proverb. Lemonade features footage of Hattie White proclaiming, “I had my share of ups and downs, but I always found the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade,” at her ninetieth birthday party, and Beyoncé’s own family lemonade recipe passed down from her maternal grandmother, Agnéz Deréon. She also reaches backward through her career in an act of artistic genealogy: the geography and aesthetic of B’Day; a resurrection of Sasha Fierce; the tight, focused musicality and structure of 4; and the rich visuality of BEYONCÉ and its explicit Black feminist focus all reassemble.
Claudia Rankine meditates on the citizenship contract between Black women and America in her own genre-bending poetry/prose collection Citizen: An American Lyric, naming it a contract contingent on forgetting. Forgetting past injustice, forgetting racism, forgetting sexism, forgetting all the violent oppression from and on which America was founded, which it literally wrote into a constitution that never included Black people or women, let alone Black women. Citizenship for Black women, according to Rankine, involves looking the other way—away from oppression, lies, and infidelity. Beyoncé plays (and very well may personally be) a Black woman scorned by a cheating spouse, and Rankine’s citizenship contract is easily superimposed onto that relationship in Lemonade. Marriage itself is a contract between two individuals sanctioned by the state or government. Lemonade finds Beyoncé not only refusing to forget the lies, but foregrounding the broken promise at the heart of the citizenship contract between Black women and America. “I tried to make a home out of you / But doors lead to trapdoors / A stairway leads to nothing,” she says. Tracing memories back and staring history in its face, attempting to write a new contract.
She narrates the entire process, from describing and exposing the lie to prescribing possible remedy—from intuition to redemption (each track is paired with a corresponding emotional force) and various stages/songs in between. Reconciliation only becomes ultimately possible through a reorganization of the system—one contingent on Beyoncé remembering, not forgetting. “6 Inch” provides the turning point in the narrative, but it’s during “Sandcastles” (and the notion of forgiveness with which it is paired) that Beyoncé signals her specific refusal to forget—through the seemingly innocuous inclusion of a kintsugi bowl before the song’s first piano chords ring out. Kintsugi is a form of ancient Japanese pottery in which broken pieces are repaired and joined together again with lacquer, often dusted with precious metals, in such a way that the cracks are featured as part of the beauty, not hidden. The bowl becomes more valuable, considered stronger because of the visible cracks—a way to focus on accountability as a constant process, not a destination. A metaphor for what America could be as opposed to what America is. A refusal to fully forgive, forget, or erase the damage of the past; rather, a conscious decision to hold them in tension. The bowl is shown fleetingly, but its importance is highlighted in How to Make Lemonade, Beyoncé’s limited edition coffee table companion tome to the album.
Reaching back through generations, remembering history instead of forgetting in order to expose the deep cracks in America’s foundation, also involves time travel. Ghosts bring the past to the present, but Beyoncé’s lemonade must also quench the thirst of the past, travel backward to tell the truth about history. In Kindred, Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 novel, Dana, a Black woman, gets called back and forth in time between the antebellum South, in order to save a particular white man from death at different points in his life, and her own 1976 California present. Over the course of the novel, she learns that her own ancestral line is violently tangled with this man’s. To let him die, as much as she wishes to see him dead, would erase her own existence in the present. Kindred opens with Dana’s confession: “I lost my arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” The arm was severed from her body by a wall in the present that didn’t exist in the past, and at the exact spot where her white ancestor, Rufus, aggressively grabbed her in order to hold her in that past. Where Dana’s arm used to be is named an “empty place” in Kindred, and exists not as an absence but the presence of a physical and psychic wound, impossible to heal. After all, there is no arm to reattach in 1976. It technically no longer exists.
Time travel may be a less obvious aspect of Lemonade, but it does create interesting, unorthodox conversations around Beyoncé’s magnum opus. Black-and-white scenes are littered throughout, the first being a simple shot of metal chains in the film’s opening moments. I ask students to think of all the black-and-white scenes as marking time travel outside a linear narrative. Moments where Beyoncé and others, like Dana, are called back and forth through time. Or, from another direction, moments where Beyoncé calls the audience back and forth in time to draw further attention to the ways that this past is still alive today. Calling attention to places in the past and present where white men’s hold on history inflicted life- and history-altering pain on Black women and others. Exposing the great lengths to which Black women’s pain has been central to America’s promise of freedom for only some. Alongside Butler, Beyoncé holds up and celebrates the empty places in Lemonade while also demanding change. Doreen St. Felix named Lemonade, at its core, “a demand for flesh” in her MTV review of the album, and paired with Kindred, it becomes a demand for the return of flesh, to fill the empty place where Dana’s arm used to be. To repair broken bonds with something different, like the lacquer and precious metals used to fuse pieces of the kintsugi bowl back together.
To create the bowl, pieces first have to be broken. To rewrite the contract, the old one must be exposed and destroyed. Beyoncé has to reopen the wound. In Lemonade, she follows her intuition into denial and anger, and takes to the streets with a baseball bat to break what is old and not working. She throws her wedding ring at the camera and onto the cold, hard ground to wipe the slate clean. After the emotionally raw “Pray You Catch Me” and a swan dive off a skyscraper, Beyoncé emerges from a grand doorway, unleashing a flood onto a city street. She channels the Yoruba and Ifá deity Oshun, the goddess of water (and sexuality, beauty, love, and pleasure). Joan Morgan points to the mirror the goddess carries as “the tool Oshun holds up to our faces when she requires us to do the difficult work of really seeing ourselves.” Though Beyoncé doesn’t hold a physical mirror herself, her mirror’s direction, like Oshun’s, is doubled—reflecting Black women back to themselves, but also reflecting the broken promises of America back to those who refuse to look, demanding the violence of history be seen.
Oshun’s mirror becomes Beyoncé’s baseball bat, and she begins gleefully destroying cars, buildings, and windows, revealing America to itself through all the damage it created. Her destruction is a visual manifestation of broken promises, as well as action that turns the tables and breaks things back. The destruction is presented through sonic dissonance; viewers see explosions and shattered glass, but hear none of it. Instead, the upbeat, dancehall-inspired “Hold Up” bounces from the speakers and Beyoncé mimes blissful denial, happily destroying shit. All of this is in response to the direct question, finally asked: “Are you cheating on me?” She already knows the answer, and viewers know she already knows the answer, but she demands it be spoken. Seeing the broken promises as systemic and institutional, Beyoncé’s actions can also be refigured as constructive, not just destructive. Paving the way for something new. She’s neither “crazy” nor “jealous,” the only options for how she can be perceived listed in the lyrics. When she proudly declares, “I’ma fuck me up a bitch,” she’s wielding calculated political critique of the system, not irrational emotion, through the tip of her baseball bat.
Extending that critique, Beyoncé breaks the classic fourth wall of film twice during “Hold Up” with progressive importance. Rule one of the fourth wall—traditionally known as that which separates a performer from the audience—is to not look or speak directly into the camera. First, Beyoncé walks straight up to a security camera surveilling the street as the viewer’s gaze becomes funneled through its lens. The audience is watching, but she’s watching back. With a smirk and sneer, she smashes the lens and the feed cuts to static. Rejecting and refusing her own surveillance. Cutting ties. At the end of “Hold Up,” she walks toward the main camera with another knowing look in her eye. The one that’s supposed to remain invisible in order to give a film or video the illusion of depicting actual, real-time events. After a last dramatic windup, she swings for the fences and demolishes that lens too before dropping the bat. The camera also falls to the ground, and the impact flips the shot to black-and-white. The viewer’s window into the action falls with the camera. The baseball bat echoes against the ground (breaking the video’s sonic dissonance) and Beyoncé walks away. She knocks the narrative into the past to return her destruction of America’s original promise—now broken many times over—back to its origin. Time travel here indicts the mistakes of a system with which at least parts of the audience are no doubt complicit to varying degrees.
It’s at this moment that Beyoncé poses the major question that haunts the entirety of Lemonade: “Why can’t you see me?” She asks it three times before adding, “Everyone else can,” then moves into “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” She’s multiply referencing Black women themselves as erased by the system, and the ghosts of history, the “ghosts of black women scorned” that Janet Mock names as ever present in Lemonade in her own meditation on the visual album. Footage of a Malcolm X speech where he calls Black women the most disrespected, unprotected, and neglected people in America interrupts the song after Beyoncé asks her question about visibility to mirror her point. Beyoncé also redirects the injury of Black women’s erasure (and other physical and psychic injury)—Dana’s lost arm—back at the system itself, exposes through the lyrics how when America hurts Black women, it hurts itself. Conversely, she offers a bit of advice for repair: “When you love me, you love yourself.”
Jack White, a white man well-known and lauded for his work in rock music, is featured on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” and his inclusion subtly replicates and replays the song’s lyrical conceit through its very musical structure. Beyoncé officially featured white men for the first time in her career on Lemonade, an album undeniably and explicitly about Black womanhood. The curious juxtaposition alone points to deeper layers and meaning. White stands in for white America, specifically the appropriation of rock music by white artists. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, a queer Black woman known to have created the electric guitar sound that has become widely recognized as today’s rock music, by blending gospel and blues, still goes largely uncredited. Her 1944 single “Strange Things Happening Every Day” can easily be considered the first American rock single, but instead, white artists like Elvis Presley are usually named as the genre’s originators and creative forces (the same is true of almost every genre of music). Beyoncé uses White’s presence in Lemonade (heard but not seen) to reclaim Black women’s roots in the genre while ultimately proving the dynamic in the lyrics true: what’s done to Black women will be done back to the system in time. She reclaims the music stolen and reenacts what was done to Black women in the past by using white White in the song but never showing him. Literally “re-appropriates” the genre of rock according to Brittany Spanos for Rolling Stone, sampling a Led Zeppelin track too, which was built off an older song cowritten by Memphis Minnie. What goes around comes around.
In “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Beyoncé also utters the important line, “I’m just too much for you,” before pitching her wedding ring to the ground. The humanity of Black women is literally too much for a system grounded in racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of intersecting oppressions, which is why the system attempts to erase Black women’s experiences at every turn. Black women threaten a system in which they “were never meant to survive,” in Audre Lorde’s words, because listening to Black women and their experiences exposes what the system cannot contain. And that’s why the citizenship contract between Black women and America relies on a perpetual forgetting, why America’s promises were always disingenuous. Beyoncé knows and names it. And to further reinforce it, she plaintively asks, “So what are you gonna say at my funeral now that you’ve killed me?” Once the lies of past and present are brought to light, America can’t have it both ways any longer. Is it going to be eulogy or accountability?
“Sorry” continues to foreground all the broken promises between Black women and America by returning the action to a plantation house. It’s also the only full segment of Lemonade filmed entirely in black-and-white. Apathy, with which the song is paired, is not just simple disregard. The word has etymological roots in “freedom from suffering,” and the lyrics name a refusal to apologize for demanding a freedom from suffering. The repeated call of “sorry” hauntingly bleeds into the rebuttal “I ain’t sorry” in the background throughout. Serena Williams, prominently featured on “Sorry,” is discussed in more detail alongside Sasha Fierce (see chapter 7), and the plantation house setting is obviously tied to the ways American history used slavery to secure profit, to bolster capitalism. All at the expense of Black humanity. As Beyoncé and Serena Williams move through a plantation house, they slyly work magic while opening up a critique of capitalism itself—one foregrounded in the emptiness of “6 Inch”—to further unravel lies of the past (see chapter 8). Beyoncé nods to capitalism as the overarching reason suffering thrives in America, especially along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Or, more strongly, that capitalism itself necessarily produces suffering along those lines—the very suffering from which she wants to be free—to insidiously ensure that the most privileged few straight white men can thrive.
Freedom from suffering also redirects the audience toward freedom itself in American history as a concept never equally applied or distributed. In American ideology, freedom references the absence of ties and bonds. But one can only be defined as free when bonds exist for others. If freedom were ubiquitous, the concept would undo itself. And so the idea of freedom lies at the heart of all America’s broken promises. The bonds of Black women and Black people in general (among various other marginalized groups) have been used to define freedom for white Americans as the norm. Consequently, the “freedom from suffering” inherent to the apathy that white Americans can indulge in continually highlights how freedom is contingent on the previous bonds, and ongoing suffering, of the oppressed, even when freedom is eventually granted. The promise of freedom for anyone but the most privileged straight white men in America—whose freedom was never in question, who have always been free from suffering—is conspicuously just another door leading to trap doors, a stairway leading to nothing. So freedom itself emerges in Lemonade too as just another lie—as the foundational lie—that needs to be reimagined.
Forward …
“Forward” is the bridge between “Sandcastles” and “Freedom” on Lemonade; resurrection is the bridge between the (complex) forgiveness and hope the other songs are tied to respectively. After Beyoncé names reconciliation as finally possible, “Forward” coaxes the narrative to its climax in a dissonant prayer. More of an interlude, the track is often overlooked, but the name itself marks its centrality and importance to the Lemonade journey. While black-and-white scenes have been shuttling between past and present, caught in a historical loop, “Forward” names its own direction and breaks out of the loop while resurrecting more ghosts simultaneously. James Blake sings the majority of the lyrics alone during the seventy-nine-second track. Beyoncé, in an unusual move, only joins him for harmony on one line at the end. Musically, it’s the darkest, most sonically discordant moment on Lemonade; visually and conceptually, it exists as artistic bridge between life and death, while a storm gathers on the horizon.
Beyoncé uses James Blake on Lemonade similarly to how she already used Jack White. He stands in for America, for the system. And as a white male alternative soul artist, and British to boot, his presence—again, heard but not seen—is another one of Beyoncé’s careful manipulations and reclamations. She presents a white voice that reenacts the violence of the British settling America; the white male power that represents America’s so-called original founders. The voice of genocide and displacement of indigenous peoples in the creation of a country, the voice of slavery as a foundational American institution. Blake-as-the-system sings about moving “forward” and acknowledges it’s “time to listen” in an ultimate confession of wrongdoing. Though much too brief to fully atone for America’s original sins (as if anything ever fully could), it’s symbolic release. It serves as a new point of departure from which Beyoncé resurrects Black women and Black women’s children prematurely killed, brings back previous generations—lost mothers and grandmothers and family lines. To clearly illustrate the resurrection, Beyoncé features some of the Mothers of the Movement, Black women who have lost children to police brutality or gun violence, during “Forward.” Gwen Carr, Sybrina Fulton, and Lezley McSpadden—the mothers of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown, respectively—all stare directly into the camera while holding photos of their children, as both celebration of their lives and condemnation of America for killing them too soon. These few stand in for millions more.
Beyoncé sings only, “Go back to your sleep in your favorite spot just next to me,” and the word “forward” once. The word repeats in Blake’s voice, though, hauntingly modulated and remixed. The sounds of the past and future merging. The sounds of Beyoncé taking control, old bonds being broken. Lemonade moves forward through old slave quarters, plantation houses, and various other settings only to arrive at its ultimate celebration/confrontation on an outdoor wooden stage. Beyoncé stands motionless in front of an audience exclusively comprised of Black women and girls. The clouds that have been gathering throughout the film begin to part. Rolling drums, horns, and lush orchestration cut to deafening silence as Beyoncé starts to sing “Freedom” a cappella. As already noted, freedom operates in a binary with slavery. There’s no understanding one without the other. Freedom depends on the bonds of slavery, which also means freedom can only be bestowed by previous oppressors. That foundation has never been, and can never be, equal. Beyoncé sings for her life, not to beg for freedom, but to undo the very idea of it, along with its attendant unequal distribution, in order to move forward.
Sherley Anne Williams’s novel Dessa Rose follows Dessa, a Black woman who has taken part in a violent uprising and escaped from slavery, and a white woman, Rufel, as the two form an unlikely and often uncomfortable friendship in an elusive search to secure Dessa’s, and some of her friends’, freedom. Because Dessa is never truly free, no matter how many times she escapes the bonds of slavery. The novel highlights just how precarious and contingent freedom is, how Dessa and her friends need to ultimately rely on and trust Rufel to help them make their way north and west. Protection and hiding is contingent on benevolent white people willing to actively collude, take risks, or simply look the other way. As one character, Harker, says to Dessa, “Maybe there is some islands out there where black peoples is free, but we got to depend on strange whites to get us there.” She agrees, knowing from her own experience inside and outside a plantation and coffle, that there is no legitimate outside to the institution. “You could scape from a master, run away, but that didn’t mean you’d scaped from slavery. I knew myself how hard it was to find someplace to go.” Even once slavery was abolished, the control of the system merely shifted: the backlash to Reconstruction, segregation, the epidemic of lynching, Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration—and the list continues to grow.
What Dessa comes to describe is the overarching impossibility of freedom in a system that was founded on the practice of slavery. There is no truth in the promise of freedom. Yes, some could and did escape, and slavery was eventually abolished, but the very concept still festers at the core of America. Those who have been enslaved, either individually or collectively, are kept just shy of truly feeling free perpetually. Nina Simone, in a 1968 interview, named freedom as the near-impossible feeling of simply “no fear.” An absence of fear, an absence of the fear of suffering. Dessa testified to fear never going away, never dissipating, even while one is theoretically and technically free. The possibility for an absence of fear connects back to the apathy of “Sorry,” not referencing the “freedom from suffering” root this time, but its initial indifference, the complete absence of any feeling for something that feels nothing for you. No fear. A kind of critical disregard and contempt of the current system, in which freedom has never been free. Beyoncé’s “Freedom” echoes Dessa’s realization and instead tries to imagine a new social contract stemming from a different center, one that didn’t and doesn’t rely on the binary of slavery and freedom. That’s why she’s been resurrecting ghosts, that’s why she’s moved back and forth in time trying to reorganize the present. The promise of freedom itself is the fucking curse, already broken but not destroyed, and thus preventing forward movement.
Beyoncé’s not asking to be set free in the lyrics of “Freedom,” either; the actual grammatical construction of the lines in the chorus directs critique at the concept of freedom, doesn’t name a desire or hope for it: “Freedom, freedom, I can’t move / Freedom, cut me loose.” It can be read as direct address. She’s naming freedom as that which renders her immobile, captures her in a web of control. She’s asking to be cut free of freedom itself. The verses find Beyoncé taking deliberate action, crying out to defy freedom despite its constraints. She demands an uninhibited ability to walk, dance, cross borders; to move through the world without being stopped, profiled, searched, suspected, arrested, killed. She warns the listener that she plans to wade through water, riot at borders, march, run, challenge the status quo. She delivers the guttural and impassioned lines as a sermon and, invoking more of Audre Lorde’s words, forges on, “deliberate / and afraid / of nothing.” No fear, joining her voice to Nina Simone’s unique contralto that wafted across shots of a hallway during a pivotal interlude earlier in the Lemonade film, during the moments the kintsugi bowl first appeared. Simone said during that same 1968 interview that she had experienced a few fleeting moments of true freedom on stage in the past, but longed for more. Perhaps Beyoncé, from her stage in Lemonade, which is both future and past, is seeking to offer some of that fleeting feeling back to Simone, especially because Simone has become a consistent guide and inspiration for Beyoncé since she first referenced the older performer in 2013’s Life Is But a Dream.
The actual force Beyoncé’s singing about in “Freedom” is, more correctly, liberation. Taken, not given. But it also demands an entire reorganization of the way the history of America is seen and understood. It’s about foregrounding the lies in the cracks of the kintsugi bowl, not sweeping them under the rug and turning away. It’s looking to the experiences of Black women to better understand the ways power insulates itself through misdirection and manipulation. And smack in the middle of “Freedom,” when the lie of freedom itself begins to become undeniable, the Black ballerina Michaela DePrince takes center stage to perform liberation—she improvises without restriction or fear. DePrince herself endured horrors akin to slavery in her native Sierra Leone before coming to America at age four. As DePrince dances, the camera cuts to other scenes where the ghosts of slavery glare into the camera confrontationally, indicting at least part of the viewing audience as complicit with a violent system that has found too many deceptive ways to disguise itself. In “Freedom,” the critique is about bringing back and seeing the ghosts as an example of finally breaking the chains and constraints of freedom itself—the very chains featured in the first black-and-white scene of the entire visual album. Emptying freedom of its previous meaning. Freedom itself is a lie. Fuck freedom.
Finally, Beyoncé shares her own secret family lemonade recipe and Hattie White’s speech, now that she’s mapped the journey—described and prescribed—to a new social contract contingent on liberation of and through generations of Black women. A revised citizenship contract that refuses the forgetting Claudia Rankine named, and places the burden of the recovered painful memories back on America and all those that have devalued Black women, urged or required they forget simply to survive—whether intentionally or by default. Accountability as perpetual living memory. The last force Beyoncé calls forth in Lemonade is redemption with the song “All Night,” and not her own, because she never needed to be redeemed. She’s nodding to a wider redemption as possible, if her directions and example are followed. If America chooses to remember. Ensuring the exposure, destruction, and rewriting of the social contract becomes impossible to forget allows Beyoncé to turn her torturer into remedy, as she references in the lyrics. The final scenes of Lemonade all exist in color, and feature a diverse collection of faces and couples in an extended joyful photo montage, promoting love and new connection, whether through friendship, romance, or family.
“So we’re gonna heal / We’re gonna start again,” she says, having found and exposed the truth beneath the lies. When Beyoncé exclaims, “I’ve missed you, my love” at the end of “All Night,” it’s not a reembrace of what came before. It’s an embrace, for the first time, of an entirely new system for which she just laid a different foundation, along with Black women across time, along with those who became casualties of a violent system in one way or another. A love she’d hoped for, but that hadn’t yet existed. She’s standing alongside innumerable Black women who have written, spoken, theorized, performed, or simply survived. And the journey of Lemonade then throws itself forward into the future, “all night long.” The screen cuts to black, and “Formation” plays as the credits roll. Reaching back one more time. “Formation” prepared the world for Lemonade, but also provides additional instruction and directive as a newly situated epilogue to the visual album. It anticipates, extends, and lacquers it all together while highlighting the cracks. The time travel and historical loop of Lemonade performatively spin out from the album’s center to follow more ghosts and instruct the audience to cultivate a political lens that further and completely critiques America’s normative core. Now, Beyoncé implores, get in formation.