ABSTRACT
Social media outlets worldwide—BuzzFeed, Facebook, Instagram, Quartz, and Twitter, to only name a few—went into a frenzy celebrating, deconstructing, and evaluating Beyoncé’s depiction of African diasporic religions and spirituality. It was all the rage; all the (lemon) tea to sip! Adding to the extant critical reception bestowed on Lemonade’s portrayal of black women in the African diaspora, this essay aligns the global popstar with anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s scholarly work of archiving and illuminating the salient role of Southern black women’s complex articulation and connection with the occult. In an in depth exploration of the fecundity and profundity of orisha iconography in Beyoncé’s Lemonade, this study utilizes as its evidence an uncharted theoretical corpus: the sacred texts of Yoruba odú and their variety of proverbial meaning in the Afro-Cuban divinatory systems of dilogún and Ifá. To be clear, while this chapter narrowly focuses on Yoruba-based religion in Cuba, it does not in any way aim to position Afro-Cuban Yoruba cosmology as superior to other Central and West African religious practices in the Americas. To that end, by concentrating on Lemonade’s rich material and visual cultures, its narrative corpus (spoken-word texts recited by Beyoncé), and its lyrics (sung by her), this chapter demonstrates the various ways in which the presence of odú and female orishas—as cosmological and theoretical apparatuses—help us as spectators of Lemonade to extract a deeper meaning of how the visual album articulates Beyoncé’s African diasporic aesthetics and black feminist framework.
