Father Figures
Warsan Shire’s is an award-winning poet who has inspired Beyoncé in many ways. Warsan Shire spoke many of the poems in Lemonade, alongside with the countless of poems that she has written. Amanda Hass from The New York Times writes “Lemonade.” which credits Ms. Shire with “film adaptation and poetry,” may catapult her to a new level of pop-culture fame, but she is already known to many as a compelling voice on black womanhood and the African diaspora — one particularly resonant in the digital age.” During Lemonade Warsan Shire say “My father’s arms around my mother’s neck, fruit too ripe to eat. I think of lovers as trees … growing to and from one another. Searching for the same light”. I feel as though this has to speak about abusive or abandoned fathers which is something both Warsan Shire and Beyoncé talk about.
For Warsan Shire, she wrote a poem titled When We Last Saw Your Father. This poem is four lines, but these four lines speak very deep pain and sorrow. Within the four lines, Warsan Shire writes “He was sitting in the hospital parking lot — in a borrowed car, counting the windows — of the building, guessing which one — was glowing with his mistake”.
This poem reminds me a great deal about Beyoncé and her father. She sings about her fathers in her song titled Daddy Lessons on the Lemonade album. In this song, she shares the inside to her relationship with her dad. It seems as though her dad left her and her family at a young age. She sings “He said take care of your mother, watch out for your sister, and that’s when daddy looked at me, with his gun, with his head held high, he told me not to cry, oh, my daddy said shoot”.
While watching the music Video for Daddy Lesson I could not help but notice that in one of the scenes Beyoncé is riding a house with her dads’ help as a child. As the video goes on Beyoncé is then an adult riding the house alone. She is now able to take what her dad taught her to ride miles away and be free.
Considering how much Warsan Shire has influenced Beyoncé’s writing, I think that Daddy Lesson is inspired by When We Last Saw Your Fathers because of this missing father figure. I feel as though Beyoncé and Warsan Shire are speaking about fathers who abandon their loved ones such as family and children. This amendment can be physically walking away and never looking back or losing their life too soon. However, the two are also a different type of abandonment from a father. Beyoncé makes it sound as there his dad left knowing that he was never coming back, and Warsan Shire makes it sound as though there was no other family to go back too. Yet, I still consider both of them to stand next to each other with strong passionate emotion towards a father figure.
