Overcoming Grief: Beyoncé and Toni Morrison’s Blueprint For Moving Forward From Trauma
Darby Vojtko & Jacob Meyers
Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade tells a deeply personal story about infidelity, ancestral roots, and the realities of Black women. Beloved, a novel by Toni Morrison, is about a dysfunctional, formerly enslaved family faced with a painful past in the form of haunting. Although seemingly different, both works heavily focus on the generational trauma of the black experience through black women feeling a true range of emotion.
Each main character, Beyoncé and Sethe in Beloved, unravel their own traumas and are able to let go of their past through what we consider an abstract process of the stages of grief.
In Lemonade, this is exemplified through each “chapter” of the album as Beyoncé learns she’s been cheated on, identifies this generational “curse” of her ancestors, and learns how to heal herself and her marriage.
In Beloved, Sethe is haunted by her trauma through the character Beloved, the physical embodiment of her daughter that she murdered eighteen years prior to escape being sent back to slavery. Beloved’s behaviors mirror the stages of grief, which symbolizes Sethe letting go of her painful past
What Are The Five Stages of Grief?
In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross released a book titled On Death and Dying which first introduced the idea of five stages of grief. Kubler-Ross studied patients who had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and monitored their mental processes and health over the following weeks/years. Kubler-Ross noticed a pattern in which most patients moved through a linear method of processing their terrible news. She was able to categorize this pattern into what is now known as the five stages grief. While originally conceptualized as a reaction to death, these following stages can apply to any unexpected or unwanted reality:
Denial: A state of shock, numbness, or disbelief in what has happened
Anger: Toward others, oneself, or the situation at hand
Bargaining: Trying to change the past and asking “what-ifs”
Depression: Sadness, longing, and emptiness
Acceptance: Learning to live with what happened
The 5 Stages of Grief in Lemonade and Beloved
Stage 1: Denial
Lemonade:
Beyoncé starts her journey through grief in denial that Jay-Z’s cheating will actually disrupt her life. In the “Denial” chapter, Beyoncé sings lyrics like “Hold up, they don’t love you like I love you.” She is upset that Jay-Z is cheating, but they don’t love him like she loves him, right? He would never actually go all the way with a mistress right? Beyoncé is driving herself crazy by the prospect of Jay-Z cheating, but overall she is still in denial of the full scope of his cheating.
Beloved:
We see denial in Beloved before the physical character even appears. There is a ghost haunting Sethe and her daughter Denver’s home, 124 Bluestone Road, which we later learn is Beloved, the daughter that Sethe murdered eighteen years ago. Sethe is in denial that this ghost is truly evil, telling her old friend Paul D that the ghost is “not evil, just sad.” This symbolizes her denial of her baby’s murder that led to the isolation of herself and her daughter from their community.
Stage 2: Anger
Lemonade:
In The next chapter of Lemonade — Anger — Beyoncé starts off with a monologue about removing the mistress’s skin and wearing it on her body. She then goes into her song Don’t Hurt Yourself, which includes lyrics like: “Tonight I’m fucking up all your shit boy,” “When you hurt me you hurt yourself,” “This is your final warning,” “If you try this shit again, you gonna lose your life.” Beyoncé is clearly very angry at both Jay Z and the mistress who he cheated with for having betrayed her and is discussing the things she will do to get revenge.
Beloved:
The reintroduction of Paul D into Sethe’s life leads her to recall the painful memories they shared as slaves together in Kentucky at Sweet Home. She remembers the trauma of being sexually assaulted, getting her milk taken, and even learns that her husband, Halle, saw the whole thing before “going crazy.” This quickly triggers the anger stage for Sethe, resentful that she went through so much alone. “Other people went crazy, why couldn’t she?” asked Sethe.
Stage 3: Bargaining
Lemonade:
In the next chapter of Lemonade — Apathy — Beyoncé is shown as having lost all cares that she once had. She is so hurt by Jay-Z’s cheating that she has stopped caring. She bargains with herself by arguing that she can have more fun with her girls, with lyrics such as “Headed to the club, I ain’t thinking ‘bout you. Me and my ladies sip my D’USSÉ cup,” but in reality you can tell that she is actually still deeply hurt by Jay-Z’s infidelity. Lyrics in the end such as “Today I regret the night I put that ring on. He always got them fucking excuses. I pray to the Lord you reveal what his truth is,” show that Beyoncé is, in fact, thinking about Jay-Z.
Beloved:
As Beloved’s physical character appears, her early relationship with Sethe represents the bargaining stage. Sethe begins to lose her sense of self through fulfilling all of Beloved’s requests. Truly thinking that Beloved has come back to be with her, she attempts to convince herself that she has made up for what she’s done. “Beloved, she my daughter,” says Sethe. “She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing.”
Stage 4: Depression
Lemonade:
For Beyoncé’s depiction of depression, she sings, in the aptly named chapter, — Emptiness — a song called 6 inch. In this song, Beyoncé and The Weeknd sing the typical lyrics of a trap/woman empowerment song about a girl working for the money. However, in the video, Beyoncé expresses nearly no emotion. This is typical of a depressed person, feeling a lack of emotion. While Beyoncé should be happy singing about gaining material things, she struggles to find the happiness in it. At the end of the song, it is clear why she is so “empty.” She just wants her husband to “Come back” which she sings as her voice breaks from the monotone for the first time in the song. She is truly at rock bottom.
Beloved:
When Paul D finally decides to leave 124, Sethe enters the depression stage. She reminisces on the two happiest times in her life; the 28 days after her arrival at 124 before the murder of her baby and the few months of living with Paul D, Denver, and Beloved. In her sad new reality, she stops working and devotes herself entirely to Beloved who treats her with anger and resentment. Sethe grew tired, “eyes bright but dead, alert but vacant, paying attention to everything about Beloved.”
Stage 5: Acceptance
Lemonade:
After the rock bottom of the “Emptiness” chapter, Beyoncé begins to regain her emotions and come to terms with the situation she is in. It is only when she accepts the multigenerational aspect of her situation, and that others have gone through it too, that she begins to piece her life back together. The process is long, as she uses the next 5 chapters to work through it, but by the end, you get a sense that Beyoncé is truly healed and ready to get on with her life. The penultimate song “All Night” shows Beyoncé back to being ready for the future, and proud of the magic that she holds inside of her. It is only after Beyoncé has worked through all five stages of grief fully that she is ready to finish the album with her single “Formation” which is the most typical “Beyoncé” song of the album. This closing on Formation shows that Beyoncé is back to her old self only after going through her journey in grief.
Beloved:
At the end of the novel, Sethe is finally able to enter the acceptance stage. With the help of the singing women in her community, the demon Sethe is facing (Beloved) is exorcised and her physical character disappears. She is finally able to let go of the ghost of her past, slowly learning to move forward. Ending with Paul D returning to 124 and finding Sethe in bed, he vows to move forward with her. “Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow,” he says.
Conclusion
Both Beyoncé and Toni Morrison use the five stages of grief in their works to discuss the path one must take to move forward from traumatic events in their past. For both the oppressors and the oppressed around the world, it is easy to want to simply “move forward” from the past and continue living life how it is. The problem with this approach is that with no self-reflection, it is very hard to have any growth. Beyoncé and Morrison use their art to promote a healthy way of dealing with a problematic past. They normalize the journey, not just the destination, and hope to inspire Americans to look within themselves to grow, instead of simply expecting those around them to do the growing for them. While the path may not be so linear for everyone, there are definite lessons to be taken from their depictions of the journey of overcoming grief.
