ABSTRACT
Ntozake Shange’s opening poem, “Dark Phrases of Womanhood,” in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, calls for the melodies, rhythms, dramas of a Black girl’s song to be born. Beyoncé’s sixth studio and second visual album, Lemonade (2016), answers this call as a lyrical and cinematic biomythography of Black women’s generational experiences of love and loss. Lemonade time travels through dimensions of Black southern culture and African Diasporic sacred wisdom to craft a creation story of sacrifice and healing. Something happened during Beyoncé’s live 2017 Grammy performance of Lemonade. Beyoncé emerges as an “uncontainable” icon who controls the penetrating gaze by crafting and creating Black counter-looks that reposition Black women beyond pejorative imaging and stereotyping in media and music. Beyoncé’s pregnant body, adorned in the golden splendor of a thousand ages, conjures the radical radiance and oceanic depth of the Black Feminine Divine across African Diasporic religions. Beyoncé crafts a glorious vision of a Black Mothering Goddess channeling the creolized cosmologies and composite energies of multiple deities, namely Yoruba orisha Oshun, Black Madonna, and Kali. This chapter interrogates Beyoncé’s embodiment of the lyrics “I Slay/ We Gon’ Slay” as belonging to the dark, ancient, radical, warrior Goddess tradition that celebrates erotic power and affect (i.e., anger, rage, fury, etc.) as moral virtues for self-awareness and communal wellness. The slay factor that Beyoncé unleashes in Black popular culture is akin to the mystery of the sacred—its witness cannot be wholly explained, but Black women know what it is and what it ain’t. Slay takes on a double-edged meaning as an outer display of sartorial grace and an inner quality for Black women who leverage their power (i.e. resources, talents, gifts, wealth, etc.) to command the moment. Utilizing the poetry of Lucille Clifton, the chapter argues that slay as a spiritual force is not a stranger to Black women, but spawns from within Black women’s body dramas and blood lineages.
