Despite the theme of this post having to be about Beloved, I feel like not mentioning some of the connections I found between this work and Lemonade would be doing it a disservice. While I understand that there are many people who believe that both Beloved and Lemonade are stories meant for black people alone, to me, miss the entire point of what their mission is in the literary world
Stamp Paid's internal monologue on page 234, to me represents one of the main struggles that Beyonce sings about during lemonade - the conflict of fighting against racism and racist ideals. Black people, according to Paid, have been seen as metaphorical "jungles" to white people, who more often than not liken them to animals or monsters. As a result, as Stamp describes the phenomenon, "the more coloredpeople spent strength trying to convince [white people] how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human ... the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside." That is to say, the more black people try to justify and humanize themselves, the more people view them as rebellious and angry, halting any form of progress towards equality; perception is reality when it comes to race for many people. However, the imagery in Lemonade evokes a need to break through this harsh reality by providing meaning to anger. While it can be argued that the imagery of Beyonce smashing cars on the street is meant to symbolize the rage that black people feel against society, other imagery, such as the underwater mansion, the train car with the black girls in face paint, and the clips of Blue Ivy with her grandfather, equally show black people under stress, feeling isolated, and having empathy, effectively giving definition to why black people are angry with society: these feelings and more are the feelings that go unnoticed by people. Activist groups like the Black Panthers and the modern day Black Lives Matter movement are viewed as baseless or destructive by both the media and the public because no time is taken to define why these feelings are expressed instead of how.
The empathy crafted by both Beyonce and Morrison in their respective works is what ultimately breaths life into them, and makes accessible to everyone and not just black people. Emotion's key role in storytelling is to give meaning to a character's motivation and make it understandable to anyone. Lemonade and Beloved were never meant for a single group of people - they were meant to showcase the internal and external struggles of African Americans to the masses.
This was an interesting insight into the purposes of both Beloved and Lemonade. It also ties into the discussion our class had about who the audience of Claudia Rankine's Citizen.
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