Black Power – Bitch Flicks

‘What Happened, Miss Simone?’: A High Priestess Speaks of Rebellion

Dispersed among the footage are archival glimpses into Nina’s journals, where we can read quick sketches of her own thoughts and feelings. And although the particular journal entries are chosen and shaped to fit the narrative Garbus is presenting, it only helps to give us a deeper understanding of the complexity of being a Black woman artist in racist America. Nothing has changed.

What Happpened, Miss Simone Netflix One Sheet — *What Happpened, Miss Simone* Netflix One Sheet

“How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”

–Nina Simone

Director Liz Garbus could’ve stopped the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? six minutes into its run time. Nina Simone steps onstage after a lengthy absence from show business. She takes a bow and then stops cold, stares at the audience for what seems like an eternity. Her eyes take in the scene but from my viewpoint, it looks like she is seeing beyond the crowd gathered before her. It’s like she can see the future, what’s coming up for Black people around the bend of time.

Her face is filled with long simmering rage, pain, insolent dark beauty, and unchecked defiance. Here stands an artist struggling to create timely, relevant, serious Black art in front of an overwhelmingly white audience outside of America. She remembers the feeling of isolation and hatred against her for being Black. Nose too big. Lips too full. Skin too dark. Daring to dream of becoming the first Black classical pianist. Denied entry into the Curtis Institute of Music after a short stint at Julliard. Then she sits down. Speaks a few words, and then starts her performance.

"I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I'Ve performed, I just want them to be to pieces" — “I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I’ve performed, I just want them to be to pieces”

This small moment, a few seconds really, told me all I needed to know. The documentary could’ve ended right there for me, the look on Simone’s face was that forceful and telling. I have seen that look before. In the eyes of my grandfather when I was little, in the eyes of aunts and uncles and older friends who have been through some shit in America. It’s the eyes of a weary soldier who knows the battle will be long and not finished soon enough.

What makes this documentary extraordinary is that we get to hear and see Nina Simone talk about her life herself. In her own words at the exact times she says them. This is not a typical documentary film where the artist is reflecting back, perhaps shading the truth a little because of time. Garbus uses film footage of Nina speaking, and we are allowed to be time travelers, visiting exact moments in Simone’s life as they are happening. Dispersed among the footage are archival glimpses into Nina’s journals, where we can read quick sketches of her own thoughts and feelings. And although the particular journal entries are chosen and shaped to fit the narrative Garbus is presenting, it only helps to give us a deeper understanding of the complexity of being a Black woman artist in racist America. Nothing has changed.

Nina Simone performing "Mississippi Goddam" in Selma during the historic March — Nina Simone performing “Mississippi Goddam” in Selma during the historic march.

What I enjoy about the documentary is that Nina is bold and Black with no filters, exactly as I imagined her to be. I started listening to her music with serious intent while in college after presenting a paper on protest music in a History for Teachers class. I wrote of folk singers, like Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Odetta, et al, moved into James Brown’s seminal “Say it Loud-I’m Black and I’m Proud” and “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself)” and introduced my professor and classmates to Simone’s “Missississippi Goddam.” No one had heard of the song or her. I dug into music archives, listening, learning, trying to imagine being a singer of righteous indignation in a world that only wanted Diana Ross and the Supremes type pop music from Black women. I wondered what Nina Simone thought about her work going against the musical dictates of her time. In this documentary, Simone lays it out there for me. And it’s a heartbreaking motherfucker to watch. I had to pause several times in my viewing to catch my breath and process Simone’s words. A reporter interviews Simone late in her life and Nina laments that all she wanted to be was that cherished classical pianist, and tears swell up in her eyes. I had to stop and cry for her too.

The High Priestess adorning preparing for a show. — The High Priestess adorning hersel for a show.

What Happened, Miss Simone filled me with a lot of anger. I’m angry a lot these days I confess. Angry at the overt racism she lived through, angry at the depression and undiagnosed bipolar disorder she suffered through for so long, and angry at her husband/manager Andrew Stroud. Angry that American racial baggage is still with us as I write these words. The footage of Stroud talking about his life with Nina Simone is a goldmine to have, because we hear directly from the horse’s mouth his adverse reaction to her radicalization during the Civil Rights Movement. In one journal entry Simone wrote:

“I don’t mind going without food or sleep as long as I am doing something worthwhile to me such as this.”

As for her husband’s response to her involvement with the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement, she wrote:

“Andrew was noticeably cold and very removed from the whole affair.”

"Now I could sing to help my people, and that became the mainstay of my life.' Nina on the Civil Rights Movement. — “Now I could sing to help my people, and that became the mainstay of my life.” Nina on the Civil Rights Movement.

While Simone stands on stage shaping her music to reflect the times she lives in, hoping to inspire and encourage young people to recognize they were young, gifted, and Black, in a world that wanted to crush the life out of them, Stroud sits on film stating with disdain, “She wanted to align herself with the extreme terrorist militants who were influencing her.”

Here was a Black man who was calling young Black radicals fighting oppression terrorists. Black People. In America. Getting their asses bombed, beaten, and bloodied in the streets of a country they built. Are you out of your cotton-picking mind?

No wonder Nina Simone left Andrew Stroud.

It wasn’t enough that he was beating her, working her to death, and dominating her life. He was disrespecting the work that she found meaningful which was making music for her people. I found it condescending and – surprise- sexist, that he believed Simone had no agency of her own to think for herself. He really believed that others outside of her own thinking mind were influencing her decision to write and sing radical Black music, to take up the cause of the Black Panthers and to question the utility of non-violence in the face of violent white Americans. Theirs was a complicated, volatile relationship, and I could only feel deep sorrow for their daughter Lisa Simone Kelley who was caught in between them. Lisa discusses how she later suffered physical abuse at the hands of her own mother after her parents broke up. (Side note: One of my favorite performances of Simone’s “Four Women” includes Lisa Simone Kelly. Watch it here.)

Nina Simone's only child, Lisa Simone Kelly. — Nina Simone’s only child, singer Lisa Simone Kelly. She is also an executive producer of the documentary.

Simone explains that she was responsible for the livelihood of 19 people who worked for her. The pressure, stress, and physical/mental fatigue made her suicidal. What happens when your soul can’t do what it needs to do? When the thing that you love doing, slowly turns into the thing that you dread and eventually hate? It eats at you and often your mind turns on itself. Another journal entry during this crisis has Simone lamenting, “They don’t know that I’m dead and my ghost is holding on.”

The documentary showcases the highs and many lows, and it gives the viewer an opportunity to glimpse the genius Black woman that Simone was. Her music catalogue and this documentary are like a grimoire for those of us who need to reach into it to conjure up spells of protection and invocations of remembrance. I had to watch it four times to revel in her magic.

Nina free in Liberia — Simone in Liberia, Africa. The only time she felt free in her life according to Simone in the documentary.

Near the end of the documentary Nina reflects on how singing political songs hurt her career.

“There is no reason to sing those songs. Nothing is happening,” she says. She is so wrong. We need her songs now more than ever. We need that bold, bruising canon of radical Black music. We are calling on old Black Gods during this Black Lives Matter Movement (and the racist, terrorist attack on the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina that ended nine lives, including that of a State Senator), and this High Priestess of Soul can show us the way.

I hear her influence in the recent works of D’Angelo (the Black Messiah album) and Kendrick Lamar (“Alright”) who are writing protest music for this generation. As writer/cultural critic Stanley Crouch says in the film, Nina Simone is the Patron Saint of the Rebellion. All praises due. The struggle continues. This documentary tells us that. Call upon her name. Nina. Simone.

Amen.

High Priestess of Soul and The Patron Saint of the Rebellion.

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Staff writer Lisa Bolekaja co-hosts Hilliard Guess’ Screenwriters Rant Room, and her latest speculative fiction short story “Three Voices” can be read in Uncanny Magazine. She divides her time between California and Italy. She can be found on Twitter @LisaBolekaja. Follow at your own risk.

What’s Happening Now in Ferguson and ‘The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975’

A film that does seem eerily relevant right now is ‘The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,’ a collection of vintage, montage documentary footage (shot by a Swedish television crew: the film is directed by contemporary Swedish filmmaker Göran Olsson) of the Black Panthers and other Black activists plus interviews conducted with other people, some prominent, some not, from the Black community in the 60s and 70s. Audio that plays underneath some of these clips includes insightful commentary about the events of the time (and sometimes about the footage itself) from Ahmir Questlove Thompson (of The Roots and the Jimmy Fallon show), Erykah Badu, Robin Kelley, Sonia Sanchez, Abiodun Oyewole (of The Last Poets) and Talib Kweli among others as well as surviving Black activists from the 60s like Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver.

Like a lot of people this past week and a half I’ve barely been able to tear myself away from Twitter, where I’ve read about and seen linked the latest video and audio from the protests in Ferguson, Mo. and the escalating and unconstitutional response from police, whose killing of an unarmed, Black 18-year-old for jaywalking–with no charges for or arrest of the white officer who shot him–sparked the protests in the first place. Today I was originally scheduled to review Freedom Summer, the acclaimed documentary about the nice, white people who, at the behest of Black activists, went into Black communities in Mississipi in 1964 to fight for civil rights. I may very well review that film in the future, but this week doesn’t seem the right one to do so, any more than a review of a film like Boyhood or Love Is Strange is something I want to read, let alone write.

A film that does seem eerily relevant right now is The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, a collection of vintage montage documentary footage (shot by a Swedish television crew: the film is directed by contemporary Swedish filmmaker Göran Olsson) of the Black Panthers and other Black activists plus interviews conducted with other people, some prominent, some not, from the Black community in the 60s and 70s. Audio that plays underneath some of these clips includes insightful commentary about the events of the time (and sometimes about the footage itself) from Ahmir Questlove Thompson (of The Roots and the Jimmy Fallon show), Erykah Badu, Robin Kelley, Sonia Sanchez, Abiodun Oyewole (of The Last Poets) and Talib Kweli among others as well as surviving Black activists from the 60s like Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver.

Of course much has changed since the film was shot: the streets of Harlem are now filled with white gentrifiers displacing the Black families we see in the footage on stoops and sidewalks. But some of the film is startlingly current. Everyone who has called for “peace” in Ferguson this week should watch the interview with Stokely Carmichael in which he tells the cameras that nonviolence as a strategy (as the former Chair of SNCC he was well-versed in its theory and practice) doesn’t work if the oppressor doesn’t have compassion for those who are nonviolently resisting–and even though, as Abiodun Oyewole points out, “There wouldn’t be an America if it wasn’t for Black people,” the U.S., even now, doesn’t seem to have much compassion for its Black people.

Although he sweetly interviews his own mother in one sequence, Carmichael (who coined the term “Black Power“) in an infamous quote said the position of women in the movement should be “prone.” But some of the best moments in Mixtape come from women activists, especially Angela Davis, whom we see on trial for a conspiracy charge with flimsy evidence (she was later acquitted).

When asked about the “violence” of the Black Power movement Davis recounts the Birmingham church bombing which directly affected her family, because her mother was a teacher to one of the girls who was killed and a friend to one of their mothers. Davis’s mother accompanied this woman to the church after the explosion–where they both saw the body parts strewn all over the site. That night Davis’s father and other men from the community got their guns and formed a citizen patrol to protect their families. Davis concludes, her distinctive musical voice brimming with emotion, “When someone asks me about violence, I find it incredible. Because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what Black people have gone through… have experienced in this country.” Davis and others state that her trial was a deliberate attempt by the state to make her, as a prominent Black activist, an example to others: to either kill her (the crimes of which she was accused were death penalty offenses) or imprison her for a very long time, a telling detail now when 38 percent of the U.S. prison population is Black, as is 42 percent of those on Death Row.

The Black Panther party of the 1960s is largely vilified now, but the film reminds us that they were the ones who started the practice of giving children free breakfast, which the U.S. government, perhaps embarrassed by the efforts of a group it had demonized, co-opted and continues to this day–albeit with budget cuts from Republicans and so-called “centrist” Democrats. We see the need for this aid clearly in the film when a mother sends her children off to school (in clothes I recognized as similar to my own wardrobe in first grade) with only dry cereal to eat (they have no milk in the house), telling one of the younger ones it’s “like a cookie.”

The 70s fashions aren’t the only aspect that mark the film as a product of its time. Most of the activists in interviews speak of “revolution” as an inevitability, like they are expecting it to stop by the Monday after next, but just as with the feminist movement, the queer rights movement and the Occupy movement some things improved, some things got worse and a lot stayed the same. The big, radical change never happened.

Much of the film serves as a meditative time capsule. Drugs play a prominent part in the later footage, not the happy, white hippies of the ’60s taking LSD and smoking pot, but Black men drafted as soldiers who come back from Vietnam addicted to heroin, and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI letting drug traffic run rampant in the areas designated as Black “ghettos.” J. Edgar Hoover has been dead for a long time, but neighborhoods where most of the residents are black and brown people are still more likely to be affected by drug activity and the violence that comes with it. We also see confessional footage from a woman who was formerly a heroin addict, telling of her debasement while she was using. Like some recent films the Swedish television crew can’t resist, in this clip, presenting Black suffering as entertainment, just as the mainstream media has made available for public consumption countless photos of Michael Brown’s mother in anguished grief.

One thing has changed: the (white) crew during the 60s were free to film and stand without impediment alongside the radicals we see openly talking about “revolution”, even one, like Davis, on trial for serious charges. Now media trying to let the world know what’s going on in Ferguson are shoved, arrested, and gassed. What Erykah Badu says toward the end of the film about the past could also apply now: “We have to document our history. If we gonna tell the story, let’s tell the story right.”

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFWHNpfjByQ”]

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Ren Jender is a queer writer-performer/producer putting a film together. Her writing. besides appearing every week on Bitch Flicks, has also been published in The Toast, RH Reality Check, xoJane and the Feminist Wire. You can follow her on Twitter @renjender.