Violence, Storm, and the South in Beyoncé’s Lemonade

Abstract

In the climactic hurricane scene in Zora Neale Hurston’s 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrator depicts southern black migrant workers waiting in silence for the attack of the storm: “The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God” (Hurston 160). Hurston’s 1937 depiction of a hurricane conjures up memories of other southern storms, especially Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Indeed, Keith Cartwright’s reading of Their Eyes suggests that Hurston’s novel “will be read with new poignancy following Hurricane Katrina’s destruction and the exposure of many of our old wounds” (741). Hurston’s black workers waiting for judgment bear an uncanny resemblance to those who were left in the deluge in New Orleans. The violent weather described in the novel completely eliminates a sense of time and instead makes visible the repetitive image of black bodies helplessly waiting “in company with the others in other shanties” (160). Linking Hurston’s hurricane to Katrina is especially relevant when we think of the unnatural aspect of natural disasters whereby southern black working-class communities are disproportionately affected, followed by failure and indifference of local, state, and federal governments in the rescue effort. Both storms expose racial aspects and the concentration of poverty unseen in these events’ public narratives, making visible the dead black bodies in the deep southern water. A similarly violent representation of a southern storm can be found in Beyoncé’s 2016 visual album Lemonade. The album and its complex imagery of southern water tell a stormy story of love, anger, and anguish over an uneven power relationship that can be linked to the larger social and cultural context of contemporary black experiences. While Lemonade is not the singer’s first attempt to create a “visual album” (her prior release Beyoncé is in the same vein), it achieves a breakthrough in its effort to visually weave a black woman’s psychological journey from loss and pain to redemption into a larger collective narrative. The fluctuations of the female protagonist’s flooding emotions arguably reflect the singer herself. However, Beyoncé links