Sex & Society, Body Parts & Emotion, Beyoncé & Warsan Shire
In 2016 Beyoncé released her visual album, Lemonade, to creatively send a message to her audience. While I’m sure Beyoncé was confident her songs would be a smash, did she expect all the attention and backlash the album received?
Each song of the album seems to connect to a larger story/message that Beyoncé has formulated for her audience. Throughout the album, there are several references to infidelity and the emotional/sexual abuse a man has the power to inflict on a woman, more specifically, a black woman.
After reading several literary texts I feel Warsan Shire’s, Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth, uses vivid imagery of body parts and sexual interactions to emphasize the different roles men and women have in society. Similarly, Beyoncé uses her visual album as an outlet to express her personal and ancestral experience with gender discrimination, infidelity and neglect.
In “Emptiness”, before Beyoncé breaks out into her song, “Six Inch”, she says:
“Tills the blood in and out of uterus. Wakes up smelling of zinc. Grief, sedated by orgasm. Orgasm heightened by grief. God was in the room when the man said to the woman, “I love you so much, wrap your legs around me and pull me in, pull me in, pull me in.” Sometimes when he’d have her nipple in his mouth, she’d whisper “Oh my God.” That too is a form of worship. Her hips grind. Pestle and water, cinnamon and gloves. Whenever he pulls out, lost.”
This introduction to her song, Six Inch (a song about a stripper), implies that women crave intimate connection and attention and that it has the power to diminish sorrow or anger that may consume a woman’s life. Intimacy and attention will “sedate” it.
By adding the part, “Tills the blood in and out of uterus… ‘I love you so much, wrap your legs around me and pull me in, pull me in, pull me in,” Beyoncé is inferring that men only need to say those three words, whether they mean it or not, in trade for sex and that their ability to make a woman bleed becomes a conquest and a victory.
Similarly, in Warsan Shire’s poem, Birds, she writes,
“Sofia used pigeon blood on her wedding night.Next day, over the phone, she told me how her husband smiled when he saw the sheets, that he gathered them under his nose, closed his eyes and dragged his tongue over the stain.”
This poem tells the story of a woman who uses pigeon blood to fake the breaking of her hymen, indicating she is a virgin. The woman tells her friend the next day how good it felt when she saw her husband smiling at the bloody sheets and taking them under his nose and mouth, feeling pride in his success to take his wife’s virginity.
The point Warsan Shire makes here is that woman feel the need to carry a sense of purity with them, that it is wrong for a woman to have given herself to more than just one man. Again, we see this crave for attention for a woman and the seeking of validation from a man. On the other hand, men owe it to themselves and their manhood to “conquer” a woman’s virginity and take pride in the amount of woman they have been with in the past.
Between Beyoncé’s visual album and Warsan Shire’s poetry, the difference in roles between men and women and sexual desires is prominent. Both sources utilize body parts and reference sexual terms to indicate the different meanings of intimacy for men and women.
Both Beyoncé and Warsan Shire express a sense of submission a woman has to a man in terms of lust. The artists use their emotions and experiences to depict the controversial roles in which they feel need to be addressed. Using intense imagery of the female body and the obsession a man has for sex, the two creators have successfully reached their audience and have begun an important conversation.
