Reading the artistic contributions of Nina Simone through Frantz Fanon
by Fezokuhle Mthonti
by Fezokuhle Mthonti
But the constancy of my love had been forgotten. I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning. So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put its machinery together again. What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands.
(Fanon,1952:106)
After Fanon, African criticism cannot feign ignorance of history. But neither can they plead captivity to its consequences. Fanon is our pathfinder in that ‘conversation of discovery’ whose mission is to gather the voices of history and common dreams into the work of the critical imagination.
(Sekyi-Otu, 2003:14)
Stacked to the side of an
old, rustic-looking glass and wooden cabinet is large pile of vinyl records.
Positioned in the corner of our open plan dining room, is this cabinet and
therein sits my mother’s prized gramophone. Each Sunday, as the pot roast was
thickening in flavour and the vegetables; coming alive to the steam of my
mother’s Hart pot was the scratching of the gramophone pin as it moved from
song to song. The room already scented with the smells of simmering rice and curried
meat would be transformed by the raw quaver and deep register of Nina Simone.
I wish I knew how it would feel to be free
I wish I could break all the chains holding me
I wish I could I say all the things that I should say
Say ‘em loud, say ‘em clear
For the whole wide to hear
(The Lyrics of I Wish I Knew How It Feels To Be Free: 1967)
As Bill
Taylor’s lyrics reverberated through the house in Simone’s melancholic plea for
freedom , a shift would occur in my then very young political consciousness.
“The explosion will not happen today. It is
too soon…or too late” (1967:1).
These words propel one into the multiple postcolonial
dramas that Frantz Fanon unveils to the reader as they move from one
devastating line to the next in his 1952 book Black Skin, White Mask. The opening gambit of this book is a
dramatic entry into a consciousness searching for self within the postcolonial
malaise. It is a consciousness launching its presence upwards and forwards,
hoping to access the universal.
Upon finishing Fanon’s Black Skin White Mask, I recognised that a similar shift had taken
place in me. I had yet again, encountered a stirring consciousness. A subject
who had dared to wonder about what the possibility of freedom might look like
in the post colony. There is a great
deal of confluence in the work of Nina Simone and that of Frantz Fanon. In the
following paper, I would like to explore these seemingly disparate figures and
tie them to a single project of emancipatory politics. I would like to place
Nina Simone in conversation with Frantz Fanon.
In order to do that
however, I think that we might need to think about ways in which we can
theorise about an emancipatory humanism. That being said, it is important to
recognise that “humanists know that no knowledge can ever be claimed as final
and definitive, and therefore no ‘ism’ is going to yield final answers and
bring heaven to earth”(Praeg, 2011:xxiv). It is important to consistently
cultivate new and alternative spaces in which we can reconsider our previously
held assumptions about politics and the sites in which political work and
political thought can and should be recognised. I would suggest
that a new kind of critical imagination needs to be developed wherein
creativity -and the kinds of conception of self and the world which become
available within that creative process - are seen to be instrumental in our
conception of freedom and emancipatory thought and politics.
Perhaps it might be useful to think about the
techniques one uses when theorizing. In a paper entitled Crafting Epicentres of Agency, feminist writer and scholar Pumla
Gqola employs a mode of critique which she refers to as a kind of ‘creative
theorisation.’ She argues that her “technique is motivated, firstly by [her]
conviction that creative space offer an ability to theorise, and imagine spaces
of freedom in ways unavailable to genres more preoccupied with linearity and
exactness”(2008:50). In placing the songs and words of jazz singer and Civil
Rights Activist, Nina Simone in conversation with the work of Frantz Fanon, I
too hope to open up ‘the series and forms of conjecture’ and produce ‘new
speculative possibilities’ in the ways in which we approach emancipatory
thinking. Further to that, I hope to make clear that political work and thought
as well as “theoretical or epistemological projects do not only happen in those
sites officially designated as such, but emerge
from other creatively textured sites outside of these”(2008:50).
More to that, I would
contend that through theorising about the works of the imagination, we are then
able to create possibilities wherein we can re-learn how to collectively
embrace critical thinking. In her book entitled A Renegade Called Simphiwe, Gqola argues that “this is akin to what
Barbara Boswell calls creative re-envisioning when she writes about Black South
African women artists in genre. Boswell defines this creative inclination as
the ability to re-envision or re-imagine what is possible to achieve in our
lifetime” (2013:144).
I would also propose that
this alternative method of theorisation can also generate new ways to read and
re-read elements of Fanonian texts as well as Fanonian praxis. Effectively, in
the following discussion I hope to make visible and bring closer the new world
that Nina Simone’s deep timbre pronounces into existence when she sings her
1971 hit New World Coming off of the Here
Comes the Sun album:
There's a
new world coming
And it's just around the bend
There's a new world coming
This one's coming to an end
And it's just around the bend
There's a new world coming
This one's coming to an end
Furthermore, in a book
entitled Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience
Ato Sekyi-Otu proposes that “we need to read [Fanon’s] texts and scenes within
texts dialectically rather than sequentially or as discrete entities”
(1996:22). Like Sekyi-Otu, I will be reading the works and the songs of Nina
Simone dialectically. I will be thinking through Simone’s oeuvre and the songs
therein as being constitutive of the different stages of the cultural and
political custodian that Frantz Fanon has referred to as the native
intellectual in his chapter On National
Culture in his seminal text, The
Wretched of the Earth.
Reading
Fanon as a dramaturgical text: Linking Notions of Performance and
Performativity
I think that it is useful
to think about the ways in which Fanon’s work might constitute both a
performative and dramaturgical dialectic. In the prologue of Fanon: A Dialectic of Experience, Ato Sekyi-Otu starts to think quite
seriously about what might it mean to read Fanon’s work as if it constituted a “dialectical
dramatic narrative”(1996:5). He argues that “we shall encounter instances in
which seemingly privileged pictures and rhetorics are reviewed, renounced, and
replaced in the course of a movement of experience and language of which Fanon
is the dramatist, albeit in the role of a passionate participant and
interlocutor”(1996:5).
When one reads the varied works
of Frantz Fanon in relation to each other, one feels as if they are in the
midst of an unfolding event. It is a drama unravelling from one scene to the
next- through the intermission of declamatory statements presenting untimely
truths and then the quick retractions of a man who continues to consider the
existential dramas of the post colony. It is through this consistent ebb and
flow of thought that we become witness a to an ongoing performance. In
reference to this, Sekyi-Otu suggests that Fanon’s“ work is also unique in the
manner in which it marshals empirical detail, poetic language, and a
theoretical engagement with major metanarratives of human bondage and freedom
to fashion a critical account of colonialism and of the postcolonial condition”
(1996:5).
More to that, I would
argue that when one reads the work of Fanon, they become witness to the immediacy
of presence and an unravelling of truths. Black
Skin, White Mask and The Wretched of
The Earth were dictated to by Fanon whilst, Josie –the woman who became his
wife, transcribed each word. This means that we as the readers, encounter Fanon
directly. In the pages of Black Skin,
White Mask we encounter a man pacing up and down and gesticulating
frantically. While in The Wretched of The
Earth, we encounter a man shouting declamatory statements from the coils of
his death bed.
This in many ways, was an unorthodox
approach to writing. That being said however, this approach does allow for a
number of possibilities for this paper in particular. It allows one to not only
see the linguistic text that Fanon produced as that which can be dramatized
dramaturgically, but it also allows us to view Fanon’s work as being part of a
larger conversation about performance
and performativity. Further to that, this process meant there was no
mechanisation of ideas. Thoughts and ideas retained the same dynamism and
electricity that Fanon had delivered them with. What has been subsequently been
compiled into a book is the live recording of an event.
“People used to make
records,
as in a record of an
event
the event of people playing music in a room” .
(Ani Di Franco, Lyrics to Fuel:1996)
In my later analysis about
the Concert As A Site of Political
Renewal, I will discuss how Nina Simone was able to transform her
performances into zones of serious political and philosophical contestations.
It was within these sites that she was able to create the kind of political
event that French scholar and philosopher Alain Badiou theorises about in his
book entitled Being and Event.
However, in this section of the discussion, I would like to discuss Fanon’s
work through a brief theorisation on the notion immediacy and the living
event.
Before I can do that
however, it may be useful to explain what Badiou’s notion of the event is. In Being and Event Badiou is concerned with how subjects maintain
fidelity to what he describes as fundamental truths. Badiou would contend that
these moments of truth are not available in the day to day situations of our
lives. Through these brief moments of political rupture, Badiou argues that we
are able to access truth and experience an event. He argues that “ a truth is
solely constituted by rupturing with the order which supports it, never as an
effect of that order. [He has] named this type of rupture which opens truth
‘the event’”(2006:xxi).
Fanon’s texts can be seen
to a series of political events wherein his sentiments in the book offer a kind
of political rupture with the colonial orders of his time. Truths avail
themselves in this moment of rupture and we see a sustained critique of the
malignant systems of colonialism and oppression from Fanon. Given my initial
conversation about the immediacy of Fanon’s presence within these books, we see
that this notion of event can even be rendered as a “living event.”
Ian Mackenzie and Robert Porter who have
co-authored a paper entitled Dramatization
as Method in Political Theory suggest that philosophical work and the
establishment of ideas and ideology can come to life through the act of
dramatization and performance. In fact they would contend that “the
dramatization of concepts is a method that enables access to the dynamic
spatio-temporal determinations (the differential relations) that constitute the
terrain of the Idea and, furthermore this method requires the creation of
difference within the Idea itself in order to capture the dynamics within that
terrain(2011:490). That being said, perhaps it might be useful to read Fanon’s
works - Black Skin White Mask and The Wretched of the Earth - as that
which is alive, mushrooming into performances documenting colonial truths and
emancipatory philosophies.
Nina Simone: Performer and Native Intellectual
In the subsequent
discussion, I will be addressing the production of political and social
histories, particularly in the context of the colony where a regeneration of
self, space and place is crucial to an emancipatory politic. I will be looking
into how Simone’s role as songstress and performer reconciles the histories
that have been eroded over a few hundred years with a humanising cultural
praxis. Further to that, I will be
arguing that Nina Simone assumes the role of both performer and ‘native
intellectual’ - a role described by Fanon in his discussion On National Culture. In an attempt to
define the notion of a’ native intellectual,’ Fanon argues that “inside the
political parties, and most often in offshoots from these parties, cultured
individuals of the colonised race make their appearance. For those individuals,
the demand for a national culture and the affirmation of such a culture
represent a special battlefield. While the politicians situate their action in
actual present day events, men (sic) of culture take their stand in the field
of history”(1967:168). It is on this ‘special battlefield’ of history that I wish
to ground the sites of struggle through which Simone navigates through her songs
and performances.
That being said however, I
think that it may be useful to chart the three different stages of evolution
which native intellectuals and writers go through according to Fanon. I think
that there are some significant parallels which characterize Simone’s artistic
journey and that of the native intellectual/ writer. Although I have tried to
segment Simone’s career into three definitive moments, I am aware of the fact
that there is no exact science in one’s artistic trajectory and series of
overlaps and disparate phases in between, are likely to occur. “In the first
phase” Fanon writes, “the native intellectual gives proof that he (sic) has
assimilated the culture of the occupying power. [Their] inspiration is European
and we can easily link up these works with definite trends in the literature
(music) of the mother country. This is the period of unqualified assimilation”
(1967:179) Owing her initial introduction to music to the church, the then
Eunice Waymon developed a keen ear for music from a very early age. Author of I
Don’t Trust You Anymore: Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960’s, Ruth Feldstein indicates that “Simone started
tapping piano keys when she was three years old and was soon playing hymns and
gospel music at her mother’s church. By the time she was five, and as a result
of local fundraising efforts on the parts of whites and blacks in her town, she
was studying classical music with a white teacher”(2005:1354). Nina Simone, who
aspired to be a classical pianist, developed an appreciation for not only
listening to, but also playing the likes of Johann Sebastian Bach, Brahms,
Chopin, Schubert and Beethoven. Deeply immersed into that which was considered
high art, Simone unquestioningly reproduced the musical sensibilities of a
racialised civilisation that saw itself as inherently superior to that of her own. Simone saw herself as an
African American classical pianist who was able to not only mimic all the
cultural greats of European music and culture , but she was also able to match
their talent and their fervour. She, as Fanon would suggest, was ‘assimilated’
in a system that was not entirely her own. This phase accounts for the very
early years of Simone’s artistic and political life.
In “the second phase,”
Fanon argues, one finds that “the native is disturbed; [they] decide to
remember what [they are]…past happenings of the bygone days of his childhood
will be brought up out of the depth of [their] memory; old legends will be
reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed aestheticism and a conception of the
world which was discovered under other skies” (1967:178) This secondary phase
of native intellectualism is, for Simone, a phase in which she transitions from
classical music and classical piano into the playing and singing of jazz
music. In a documentary entitled Madame Nina Simone: La Legende by Frank
Lords, Sam Waymon who was Simone’s eldest brother says that “she changed her name, she became
Nina Simone because she did not want her mother to know that she was playing
what she called at the time, the devil’s music”(La Legende Documentary). Nina
Simone made a name for herself through the singing and covering of popular jazz
hits of the day. This to some extent, can be understood as the
‘reinterpretation of old legends’ which were penned in skies that were separate
from her own, as is suggested by Fanon.
It would be estimation that this stage was
first brought into existence when Simone’s first encountered what she perceived
to be an act of racism when she was rejected from the prestigious Curtis
Institute of Philadelphia. Simone maintains that she was rejected from this
institution on the basis of her race. Further to that, Simone says that: “my
experience was so first hand and so deep, so intense. The rejection was so was
unequivocally wrong that I still haven’t gotten over it yet.” (La Legende:1992)
Simone was faced with the challenge of redefining herself. Although she was
reticent at first, jazz music became the tool with which Simone used to articulate
what she called ‘a black classical sensibility’. She was able to infuse her own
idiosyncratic style of performance into the realm of the popular and was thus
able to punctuate ‘the old legends’ with her own versions of history.
“Finally, in the third phase , which is called
the fighting phase, the native, after having tried to lose himself in the
people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people”(1967:179).
Fanon says that “instead of according the people’s lethargy with an honoured
place in his esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence
comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature and a national
literature”(1967:179). In the following discussion, I will be speaking to Simone’s
renewed political consciousness as activist and as Civil Rights performer. In
an interview with Frank Lord - director, filmmaker and writer of the previously
mentioned documentary entitled Madame
Nina Simone: La Legende, Simone
argues that “it was dangerous, we encountered many a people who were after our
hides at different times and I was excited by it though because I felt more
alive then, than I feel now because I was needed and I could sing something to
help my people. And that became the mainstay of my life, that became the most
important thing to me. Not classical piano. Not classical music. Not even
popular music, but civil rights movement music.”(La Legende Documentary: 1992)
Fanon suggests that “in
order to achieve real action, you must yourself be a living part of Africa and
her thought; you must be an element of that popular energy which is entirely
called forth for the freeing, the progress and the happiness of
Africa”(1967:166). He continues to say that “there was no place outside of that
fight for the artist or the intellectual
who is not himself concerned completely with and completely at one with
the people at the great battle of Africa and of suffering humanity”(1967:166).
Although Simone was not necessarily stationed in Africa, until much later in
life, I would argue that the sentiments remain the same- intellectuals and
artists had to be stationed within the realities of their respective struggles
first. It was through this intimate understanding of the struggle, that they
could then create the kind stories and songs which could inform change within
that context. Through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and the
Black Power Movement in the United States, I would contend that Nina Simone was
then able to establish herself as wholly a native intellectual as prescribed by
Fanon.
Simone was part of
tradition of artistic work which claimed
political resistance and political work against the systemic segregation
policies of the United States at the time. Lorraine Hansberry (playwright and
activist) and Langston Hughes (poet and activist) formed part of Simone’s core
friendships in the sixties. She was part of tradition which knew that it was
not enough to simply write a revolutionary song; they knew to fashion the
revolution with the people. Having lived through the segregation, prejudice and
brutality of the time all these artists were able to produce work collectively
that could speak to material circumstances of black in the United States. To be Young
Gifted and Black, a poem which was initially written by Lorraine Hansberry
was turned into political anthem by Simone. It was a song that was not only
dedicated to those who stood up for justice and equality, but also affirmed
them in many ways. As I have indicated before, the song soon became a national
anthem for black America and a song that was most synonymous with the Civil
Rights Movement.
You are
young, gifted and black
We must begin to tell our young
There's a world waiting for you
Yours is the quest that's just begun
We must begin to tell our young
There's a world waiting for you
Yours is the quest that's just begun
When you
feel really low
Yeah, there's a great truth that you should know
When you're young, gifted and black
Your soul's intact
Yeah, there's a great truth that you should know
When you're young, gifted and black
Your soul's intact
-Lyrics of To be Young, Gifted and Black
Fanon contends that “the
artist who has decided to illustrate the truths of the nation turns
paradoxically towards the past and away from actual events. What he ultimately
intends to embrace are in fact the cast-offs of thought, its shells and
corpses, a knowledge which has been stabilised once and for all. But the native
intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art must realize that
the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities. He must go on
until he has found the seething pot out of which the learning of the future
will emerge”(1967:181).
Simone’s songs became a
form of protest and a form of resistance. Imbued with all the political
histories of the time, Simone and her contemporaries captured some of the
anxieties that would colour the concerns of African American communities for
years to come. They became in many ways the grounding philosophies of Civil
Rights Revolution and The Black Power Movement. These songs sought to make visible
the struggles of those that had been maligned by white capital and white
domination. Civil Rights activist, Stanley Wise argued that “her music was just
more than powerful. It was more than music. It was a philosophy and a belief
that despite all of these problems- we will get through this. And not only will
we get through it, but we will survive and triumph in this” (La Legende
Documentary:1992).
In reference to one of
Simone’s other protest songs, Feldstein argues that Nina Simone “offered one of the many
political perspectives that people in and out of movements were developing in
the early 1960’s, well beyond the emphasis on interracial activism that
predominated among liberal supporters of civil rights”(2005:1350). She goes on
to say that “far more than as merely the background soundtrack to the movement,
and not simply as a reflection of the pre-existing aspirations of political
activists”(2005:1350).
Politicizing the Cultural Canon
In a chapter entitled On National Culture in his seminal text,
The Wretched of The Earth Frantz
Fanon suggests that:
“when we consider the efforts made to carry out the cultural estrangement so characteristic of the colonial epoch, we realize that nothing has been left to chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation and bestiality”(1967:169).
Given the stark ways in
which colonialism has augmented some of the social and political histories of
the subjects within its colonies, I would argue that there is need to facilitate
a kind of political intervention in which the stories of the oppressed are
claimed and archived as a form of resistance to the systemic erasure and
negation that typified colonial domination. Tied to this act of memory, is a
struggle for recognition and an indicator of presence. Leonhard Praeg argues
that “there can never be anything naïve about speaking about blackness. For
that, the Black-as Fanon would name them/us was always too late. Blacks come to
speak of themselves as a struggle” (Praeg, 2013:xix). “Blacks” he continues,
“don’t tell the world about lost ancient African civilisations because they are
interesting but because every act of recollection is an act of struggle that
seeks to make a point. It is a way of asserting blackness, of power asserting
itself as memory”(Praeg, 2013:xixi).
That being said I would
argue that, Nina Simone’s music is instrumental in archiving the memories which
typified black life. More than that, I would argue that through her coverage of
an elaborate jazz oeuvre, which was not always concerned with the realities of
black life, Simone was able to insert self into a long tradition of
storytelling which documented human suffering, pain, love and existence. It
would be my contention that when one inhabits a character or a role, they are
not only able to present to the audience a living and recognisable account of
human experience, but they are also able to position their own presence within
that of human experience. Simone often performed to multiracial and multicultural
audiences and despite the particularity of being a black woman born in North
Carolina, Simone was able to access the universal through the enunciation of
the words on her musical sheet. Further to that, I would suggest that Simone was
able to bring all the complex idiosyncrasies that coloured her personal subjectivity into a larger place of common-
the bustling concert hall, the vibrant political rally or the smoky jazz club.
This remodelling of
history through song and performance is, for me, an attempt to humanize one’s
claim to presence within human historiographies and it also an assertion of belonging
within those narratives. It is in many ways, a resistance to the positivist
lens with which Western scholarship often refracts the real and lived experiences
of human beings. Haitian academic and theorist, Michel Rolph Trouillot accounts
for this in part by saying that “nineteenth century scholars influenced by
positivist views tried to theorize the distinction between historical process
and historical knowledge. Indeed, the professionalization of the discipline is
partly premised on that distinction: the more distant the sociohistorical
process is from its knowledge, the easier the claim to a scientific
professionalism” (1995:5). That being
said, I would contend that the performance of one’s own historiographies is an
act of reclaiming narratives about oneself, both in the past and in the
present. It is an attempt to displace positivist ways of knowledge making and
knowledge production and an attempt to activate a range of other ways of being
in the world. “As Hayden White reminds
us in his seminal study Metahistory,
there are always different ways of making sense of the same story and each
telling braids interpretation into the narrative.”(Gqola,2013:138)This
interpretation is an act of self-assertion into the narrative and the insertion
of black identity into the jazz, popular and classical oeuvre.
Like Simone, Fanon was
also able to reimagine history so that it constituted a hopeful present and future
for those that had been colonised. Sekyi-Otu argued that Fanon “credit[ed] the
imagination of postcolonial humanity with the power to relive the condition of
a mind unformed, the capacity to cleanse itself of the detritus of history and
to write for itself fresh destiny on a
tabula rasa. Such is the measure of Fanon’s generosity, but also of his
tenacious adherence to the principle of hope”(1996:239).
Discovering the Teachings of Fanon in Simone’s Songs and Performances.
In a paper which has been
briefly referred to already, entitled I
Don’t Trust You Anymore: Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the 1960’s, Ruth Feldstein begins her discussion by
recounting the moment which Simone first conceived of Mississippi Goddam which she subsequently referred to as her “first
Civil Rights Song”(Simone,1992:89). On September 15, 1963, Nina Simone learned
that four young African American girls had been killed in the bombing of the
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama” says Feldstein. She
continues to say that “immediately after
hearing about the events in Birmingham however, Simone wrote the song Mississippi Goddam. It came to her in a
rush of fury, hatred and determination as she suddenly realised what it was to
be black in America in 1963”(Feldstein, 2005:1349).
In Simone’s memoirs which
have been documented by Stephen Cleary in a book entitled I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone, Simone
admits that “I had it my mind to go out and kill someone, I didn’t know, but
someone I could identify as being in the way of my people getting some justice
for the first time in three hundred years…the idea of fighting for the rights
of my people, killing for them if it came to that, didn’t disturb me too much”
(Cleary,1994:89).However, after much discussion, Simone’s husband, Andrew
Stroud, convinced her that she was
better suited to writing music as opposed to taking up arms or using violence
to settle political scores.
Simone recounts the
consistent anxiety that came with being a black person in the United States. In
what she calls a ‘show tune for show that has yet to be written’, Simone is not
only able to articulate the “zone of nonbeing: an extraordinarily sterile and
arid region” which Fanon (1952:2) refers to in the early pages of Black Skin White Mask, but she is also
able to root this region of nonbeing of black political life in then
Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee. As
the tempo rises feverishly, Simone recounts some of her own experiences with black
racism and the ways in which black life was, and continues to be, devalued and
reified in some ways.
I would contend that the critique
rendered by Pakistani born and London based cultural theorist, Ziauddin Sardar
in the 2008 foreword of Black Skin White
Mask can, in many ways, be substituted for a similar critique of Simone’s Mississippi Goddam. Sardar suggests that
although “this is not simply a historic landscape, Black Skin White Mask is a historic text, firmly located in time
and place”(Sardar, 2008:vi) This song like Fanon’s seminal text, is a song which is rooted in both a temporal
and spatial context of repression. It is Nina Simone’s attempt to archive the
social and political historiographies of black people in the South in 1963.
Despite its fairly innocuous tune and its rollicking rhythms, I would suggest
that the truth and veracity with which this song is delivered, allows the song
to move beyond the confines of Mississippi in 1963. It becomes an important
political anthem which in many ways continues to provide it with contemporary
political relevance all over the world even today. In the foreword of Black Skin White Mask, Sardar continues
to say that “Fanon’s anger has a strong contemporary echo. It is still the
silent scream of all those who toil in abject poverty simply to exist in the
hinterlands and conurbations of Africa…this anger is not a spontaneous
phenomenon. It is no gut reaction, or some recently discovered passion for
justice. Rather, it is an anger borne out of grinding experience, painfully
long self-analysis, and even longer thought and reflection”(Sardar, 2008:vii). I
would argue that a similar claim can be made for Simone’s Mississippi Goddam.
The image of Simone’s slender
limbs, banging out the chords on her piano, almost hollering instead of singing
seem to typify what Sardar has called a “soul in turmoil.”(2008:xi) Simone attempts
to displace the lies which have been touted by the rhetoric of a supposedly
all-encompassing ‘American Dream.’ I would argue that she speaks (or sings,
rather) truth to power as she recounts the very real and lived horrors of black
men and women in Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi. As she sings about the
‘hound dogs that are on her trail, the school children that sit in jail and the
black cat across her path’- there is a very real and anxious indication from
Simone her that this day may be her last. Further to that these lyrics indicate
the tragic circumstances which colour black in the United States.
In a performance of [1]Mississippi Goddam in Holland in 1965,
Simone’s anger and frustration is palpable. Her body, rocking to and fro,
steadied only by her hands playing syncopated rhythms on the piano and her head,
jerking involuntarily, exposing a bloated jugular vein- seem ill at ease with the
very many ways in which black life is seen to be “the result of aberrations of
affect [and is] rooted at the core of a universe from which it must be
extricated”(Fanon,1952:2). There are two conversations which Simone seems to be entering into concurrently. The first one
is fairly obvious, it is a conversation through lyricism and song about the insurmountable
pressures that come with black subjectivity in the South. This signals a
linguistic discussion about what Fanon refers to as ‘objecthood’ or
reification. The second conversation that is being had here, is one that
articulates its claims and presuppositions through the muscle and cartilage
which frame her body. This body which is alive and writhing on stage seems to me,
like a body which actively seeks to free itself of the confines of its objectivity.
In his
chapter on The Fact of Blackness, Fanon
speaks to his own experiences of reification:]
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things. My spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others. Their attention was liberation, running over my body suddenly abraded into nonbeing, endowing me once more with an agility that I had thought that I had lost, and by taking me out of the world and restoring me to it. But just as I reached the other side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in a sense in which a chemical is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart (1952:82).
Fanon continues to explore
this Satrean concept of ‘thingification’ through what I will refer to as a
‘dialect of the body’. Embedded in this dialect of body, are the many ways in
which black bodies have to construct a ‘physiology of self’ in relation to a world
that sees the epidermilisation of blackness as inherently valueless and
inferior. When one is embodied in this way, they have no objective way of
asserting presence and self beyond the stories which mark the confines of their
racialised body. Fanon argues that “the elements that I used had been provided
for me not by ‘residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile,
vestibular, kinaesthetic and visual character, but by the other, the white man,
who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes [and] stories”(1952:84).
It may be useful to not
only place the following Mississippi
Goddam verse in conversation with Fanon’s notion of thingification, but it
may also be interesting to think about Simone’s 1996 song entitled [2]Four Women.
Can’t you see it?
Can’t you feel it?
It’s all in the airI can’t stand the pressure much longer
Somebody say a prayer-Lyrics of Mississippi Goddam
Simone’s song, Four Women is about the lives of four
African American women who depict different variations of the epidermilisation
of blackness on the spectrum of coloured identity. Each of the four stories
document the very unique experiences of these four women. That being said however,
the experiences of Aunt Sarah, Sephronia, Sweet Thing and Peaches all seem to
be held together by their collective experiences of being embodied in blackness.
They in very many ways, reveal the cultural myths that have been projected on
the bodies of African Amen women. Sealed into their blackness, these women
encounter and are encountered by their world through their epidermilisation.
My Skin is blackMy arms are longMy hair is woolyMy back is strongStrong enough to take the pain inflicted again and againWhat do they call me?My name is AUNT SARAHMy name is aunt Sarah My skin is yellowMy hair is longBetween two worlds, I do belongMy father was rich and whiteHe forced my mother late one nightWhat do they call me
My name is SEPHRONIAMy name is Sephronia
My Skin is tanMy hair is fineMy hips invite youMy mouth like wineWhose little girl am I?Anyone who has money to buy
What do they call me?
My name is SWEET THINGMy name is Sweet ThingMy skin is brownMy manner is toughI’ll kill the first mother I seeMy life has been roughI’m awfully bitter these daysBecause my parents were slavesWhat do they call me?
My name is PEACHES(Simone, Four Women:1996)
In the instance of Peaches
and Sweet Thing, Simone seems to speak to the varying ways in which the bodies
of these women are reified. Peaches by virtue of being a black female, was
co-opted into a system of slavery and servitude. Sweet Thing however, has a
different script written on her body. She is seen to be sexually lascivious, available
to men as a commodity. Both of these women, as Fanon suggests are found to be
objects in the midst of other objects. Super imposed onto their bodies is the
intersection of gender and racial oppression. These women embody a sense of
non-being. Apart from accounting for their physical features and the ways in
which their bodies can be rendered useful, we know very little about these
women. They, like Fanon are in many ways
seen to “responsible at the same time for [their] bodies, for their bodies and
for [their] race…[they] discovered their blackness, [their] ethnic
characteristics; and [they were] battered down by tom toms, cannibalism,
intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects [and]slave ships”
(1976:84-85).
So when Simone asks her
audiences if they can’t see or feel this burdened sense of embodiment , we
start to make sense of why she can no longer ‘stand the pressures’ that come
with being a politically denigrated and assassinated people. Simone
who is literally convulsing when she performs Mississippi Goddam, is for me, a body who is in active resistance
to the ways in which black bodies have been negated.
Nina
Simone’s Concerts: Sites of Political Renewal
In the following
discussion, I will be speaking to how Simone was able to construct sites of
political and psychological renewal through her performances. Simone was not
only able to use allusions to Christianity in order to do this, which I will
briefly elaborate upon, but she was also able to create space for collective
catharsis. In his chapter on The Negro
and Pyschopathology in Black Skin,
White Mask, Fanon argues that “in every society, exists - must exist -a
channel (sic), an outlet through which the forces accumulated in aggression can
be released”(1952:112). I will be focusing primarily on Simone’s role in the
Civil Rights Movement and the kinds of performances that she would have done
during that period-which for the most part would have been in big school halls
and concert venues. I imagine that these halls would have been packed to
capacity with a large number of black people who were victim to the segregation
laws of the United States. I will suggest that within these spaces, Simone was
in fact able to establish a site of collective catharsis. Through singing songs
like Mississippi Goddam, Pirate Jenny(1964),
To be Young Gifted and Black (1970) as well as I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free(1967), Simone was not
only able to tap into the collective suffering that these black communities shared,
but was also able to sing songs about the collective hopes for freedom and
liberation.
In her brief biography of
Simone, Ruth Feldstein says that Eunice Waymon’s mother (Nina Simone’s
biological name) was born to a “mother [who] was a housekeeper by day and
Methodist minister at night; her father worked mostly as a handyman. Simone
started tapping keys when she was three years old and was soon playing hymns
and gospel music at her mother’s church”(2005:1354). What is perhaps most
useful about Feldstein’s commentary is Simone’s Christian and gospel
background. Cultural and musical commentators have often linked Simone’s
performance style with that which is routinely associated with a performativity that
presides within the context of the church. Her exposure as a young musician
within that context allowed her to be referential of the teachings of the
church. Although most of her recorded work was rooted in the swinging notes of
jazz, I would argue that Simone- especially in a concert setting, would infuse
the chord progressions with her own unique blend of liberation theology.
In a paper entitled Liberation Theology: Its Origins and Early
Development, Eddy Muskus cites Peruvian Roman Catholic priest and
theologian, Gustavo Gutièrrez definition of liberation theology which is “a
theological reflection based on the Gospel and the experiences of men and women
committed to the process of liberation in this oppressed and exploited
sub-continent of Latin America. It is a theological reflection born of shared
experience in the effort to abolish the present unjust situation and to build a
different society” (Muskus,2003:30).
Simone was well known for
her improvised musical ad libs as well as for her breaks in her musical sets
where she delivered long and often informal speeches about the politics of the
day. Simone would infuse that which was political with some of the most
revolutionary ideas and images within the biblical context. As I have indicated
before, I believe that there was a kind of political education that was at play in these
performances. It was the infusion of the sultry sounds of jazz with biblical
scriptures, teachings of self-love and intellectual emancipation.
Given the fact that the
Christian Religion operates on one’s activation of faith, it may be useful to
understand it as an important imaginative tool. Faith is after all a belief in
that which is not yet material or tangible. To some extent, I would contend
that scripture becomes most useful when one can transform that which is imagined
into a definitive belief system - a way of approaching the world. In many ways
religion or the belief in something extraordinary can facilitate the renewal of
one’s mind. In interspersing her songs
with biblical imagery, Simone was able to politicize the role of Christianity
in the lives of black people. She was able to provide for a situational interpretation
of the religion. Simone was also able to locate a higher being into the context
of black peoples’ suffering and subsequently think through strategies in which
they could overcome their own mental enslavement with the affirmation of that
higher being.
In her recorded version of
There’s a New World Coming, Simone
adds a spoken verse to Barry Mann and
Cynthia Well lyrics where she says: [3]
And then I saw another sign in heaven: great and marvellousSeven Angels having the seven last pledgeFor in them is filled up the wrath of GodAnd I saw it as if it were a sea of glass mingled with fireAnd then they had gotten the victory over the beast
And over his image (…)And over the sound of his nameStand on the sea of glass!Having the harps of God all around them
This verse is loose reference to the Book of
Revelations in the Bible. It can be read as a metaphor in which the oppressed
people within America had finally ‘gotten victory over the beast’, that was the
white imperial order of the day. As God had filled them up with wrath, these
individuals could now rejoice about an impending victory and a New World that
was promised to appear just over the bend. In an uncited video that was
released by The Nina Simone Foundation, Simone is also seen to be referring to
a scripture where she sings’ the bible says; be transformed by the renewing of
your mind’. This is a not only a reference to Romans chapter 12 verse 2 but it
is also a call to free one’s self of mental slavery.[4]
You know when to push and you know when to not. Nobody can tell you though, you have to feel it. In any situation between human beings. It what makes a groove!-An Excerpt from the documentary entitled Nina: A Historical Perspective (2008)
In speaking to the notion
of a concert being a site of catharsis, I would like to partly modify MacKenzie
and Porter’s claim that “[performance], even in common parlance is the process
by which a text or a situation is
brought to life such that it effects a
change in the emotional state of those involved (say, performers and spectators)”(2011:489).
Being the acutely intelligent performer that she was, I would argue that Nina
Simone was not only able to tap in the
mood and feelings of her audiences, but she was also able to affect change
within them. She was also able to
establish a place of common for her audiences. It was in this place of common
that these audience could have had their many frustrations articulated in the
slight quaver of her voice. Simone’s voice became symbolic of that which was
being collectively felt and thought about within the room. This in many ways,
was a sacred space and a site of renewal.
By Way of
A Conclusion
I’ll tell
you what freedom is to me- no fear. I mean really no fear. …It’s like a new way
of seeing!
-An excerpt from an interview of Nina
Simone from the documentary Nina: A Historical Perspective (2008)
The works of Nina Simone
and Frantz Fanon have been exceptionally important to me. In these works I have
been able to articulate the continuous angst that I feel about being embodied
in a black body. I have broken down, violently like Fanon at the fact that I
was a Negro and the world would encounter me as such. Sealed into my blackness,
I have wept at the sight of my wooly hair and all those around me who had their
subjectivities erased because of the texture of their hair. I have also found in Simone and Fanon, a need
to be militant about the pervasive social inequalities that characterise this
post-apartheid South Africa. Angered by the Manichean cities that pepper the
South African topography, I have also needed to shout Goddam!
However that being said,
in the works of Simone and Fanon I have also found an unrelenting optimism. I
have seen glimpses of the New World that Simone sings about. I have appreciated
the gift of being young, gifted and black and I have dared to critique and
theorise imaginatively and thus have met Fanon’s challenge to “work out new
concepts and try to set afoot a new man”(1967:255).
In closing, having
questioned why I have read the artistic contributions of Nina Simone through
the teachings of Frantz Fanon, I would argue like Fanon, that “every time a man(sic)
has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a
man(sic) has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, [then] I have felt
solidarity with his act.”(1952:176)
Reference List:
Badiou.A.2006. Being and Event. New York: Continuum
Brooks. P. 1968. The Empty Space. New York :Touchstone
Publishers
Cleary. S.2003. I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of
Nina Simone. New York :De Capro Press
Feldstein. R. I
Don’t Trust You Anymore: Nina Simone, Culture, and Black Activism in the
1960’s. The Journal of American History. Volume 1. (1349-1379)
Fanon. F. 1952. Black Skin, White Mask. Pluto Press:
London
Fanon. F. 1965. The Wretched of the Earth. New York.
Grove Press
Gqola. P.2013. A Renegade
Called Simphiwe. Johannesburg: MFBooks Joburg
Gqola.P.2008. Crafting Epicentres of Agency. Quest: An
African Journal of Philosophy. Volume 1 (45-76)
MacKenzie. I and Porter.
R. 2011. Dramatization as a Method in
Political Theory
Trouillot. M. 1995. Silencing
The Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press: New York
Videos:
·
Nina:
A Historical Perspective (2008)
Accessed on 20 July 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si5uW6cnyG4
·
N.
Simone. 1971.There’s a New World Coming.
Published in the Album- Here Comes The Sun
Accessed on
the 24 June 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFLoKN1y5A
·
Video
footage of Simone.N.1965. Mississippi
Goddam: Holland
Accessed on
25 June 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVQjGGJVSXc
·
Video footage of F. Woodlands. 1992.A Documentary: Madame
Nina Simone. La Legende.
Accessed 16 June 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfldXu90Uc4
[1] Video footage of :Simone.N.1965.
Mississippi Goddam: Holland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVQjGGJVSXc Accessed on 25 June 2014.
[2]Video footage of: Simone. N.1996.
Four Women: Harlem Cultural Festival.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf9Bj1CXPH8
Accessed on 26 June 2014
[3] N. Simone. 1971.There’s a New
World Coming. Published in the Album- Here Comes The Sun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFLoKN1y5A
Accessed on the 24 June 2014
[4] Video footage of Nina Simone in the documentary Nina: A Historical
Perspective (2008)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si5uW6cnyG4
Accessed on 20 July 2014
