The Night Beyoncé Spoke To Me
Sipping Malbec in my American Apparel onesie on a cool summer night, reading writers I admire and it is just now, in this moment, that I realize I have been a writer for 30 years. The journey began at age eight when my first piece was published in the school newspaper - a dazzling haiku about an apple that still hangs on a wall in my parents' home. From there, I continued stringing words together to form longer poems and moved up to writing journal entries when I realized the thoughts and feelings reeling inside of me had to get out somehow. Then music grabbed a hold of me and I dreamt of becoming a songwriter and a music journalist, even landing an internship at a well-known publication. The wild ride forged ahead as I started a few blogs and took jobs where my main function was to create content for organizations and now, I am an essayist who is dabbling in fiction and narrative nonfiction. Writing is that one thing that is constantly running in the background of my life.
I enjoy the process of writing - coming up with an idea and having it nudge me and follow me until I am able to shape it into something that moves me and hopefully moves others. A myriad of emotions have attached themselves to the aforementioned writing expeditions. Wanting to pull readers in with my writing as much as I am pulled in by the writing of others, I have felt Kanye-sized confidence just as much as paralyzing fear about putting myself out there, winding in and out of being self-conscious and on the constant verge of giving up. There are times when my craving to write is insatiable and I find myself fueled by some invisible force, and then there are times when I am unable to even crack the spine of my notebook.
Self-doubt is consuming and suffocating.
Questions beating in my head like, Am I good at this?
What if I offend someone?
What if this is dumb?
But recently, something happened that shook me up. As vivid and as real as watching my fingers write these words, Beyoncé spoke to me in a dream. This was after an intense night of creative outpouring that left me so giddy I could barely calm myself. Trust me, these two things are related. Beyoncé, the great musical genius, capable of bringing visions to life in the most spellbinding ways. The woman creates SHIFTS, y'all - within the music business and within ourselves. I have gleefully watched her transform from just a pop star to a luminary who seems to have found herself and is resting in the comfort of the woman she has become. She is speaking to Us through her music and her art, and it moves me. In the dream I watched as she danced in the grass, surrounded by others just as carefree as she was. Her long black dress trailing her movements and those long blond locks framing her face, she stopped, looked at me and sang, "Make black music like they used to."
whoa.
It felt like I was in one of those 1960s psychedelic movie scenes where the camera zooms in and the actor's voice echoes. I'm not a musician so I took her statement to mean art in any way that it can be created - musically, the written form, visual...whatever. Just make it Black. I search for Our voices everywhere. When combing through literary journals at the bookstore, I look at the masthead and within the pages and choose those that feature Black editors, writers and artists because I do not want our stories to be "the Black version of...".
I just want them to be.
I am reaching back to my mother's era to see what Black authors she was reading and curating reading lists for my 11-year old daughter so she can see herself in this world. I want to get better at my craft. I can't stop writing and reading and reading about writing. I crave those spaces where I have a chance to explore myself with my people.
I am overjoyed by the telling of hip-hop and the story of the Black women who made shit happen at NASA, Moonlight, Director Ava DuVernay and Executive Producer Oprah's series Queen Sugar, and Donald Glover's show on FX, Atlanta. I am engrossed with books and essays by and about Black people - Cree Summer, What Andre 3000 Taught Frank Ocean, Another Brooklyn, and The Underground Railroad. And I am thrilled with the music we were blessed with over the last year - Sampha, GoldLink, Solange, Anderson .Paak, Frank Ocean, Maxwell, KAYTRANADA, and of course, Beyoncé. I want to create pieces that describe where I am, where I've been, where I want to be and stories that carve out a space where we can dream, get away, or dive deeper into who we are. The stakes are much higher for me now. I'm knowing and I'm clinging to something I feel was gifted to me.
I have been told writing is not a real profession, that my poetry can not be made into lyrics nor my lyrics made into poetry. I have been told that writing is nothing more than a hobby. I have been told to punctuate my prose when I didn't see the need for it, and that I need to speak in a specific tone for a particular audience. But writing is like freedom to me. Freedom to be me, to raise my voice and break silence in any way I please, scribing within and outside of structure, and freedom to be unlady-like and write about subjects that are completely inappropriate if the mood strikes. I feel like I'm coming into my own, much like Beyoncé as she journeyed from Dangerously In Love to Lemonade.
And I will keep this shit going because if I don't see this thing through, my conscience will nag me worse than any momma could ever do. Writing is that one thing I will do whether I am paid or not and whether the ideas take flight or remain stagnant. Whether you fuck with it or not, I will still write for Me and for You.
“I write for the Black voice and any ear which can hear it. As a composer writes for musical instruments and a choreographer creates for the body, I search for sound, tempos, and rhythms to ride through the vocal cord over the tongue, and out of the lips of Black people. I love the shades and slashes of light. Its rumblings and passages of magical lyricism. I accept the glory of stridencies and purrings, trumpetings and sombre sonorities.”