The Ashtanayika Guide to Lemonade (Part 4)
- Jun 16, 2016
- 2 min read
KHANDITA NAYIKA
One Who is Scorned
HOLD UP
I smell your secret, and I'm not too perfect To ever feel this worthless How did it come down to this?
What's worse, looking jealous or crazy?
Or, like, being walked all over lately
I'd rather be crazy!
Hold up, they don't love you like I love you Slow down, they don't love you like I love you Back up, they don't love you like I love you Step down, they don't love you like I love you Can't you see there's no other man above you? What a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you
Noted Black feminist scholar, bell hooks, was infamously critical of Lemonade in her recent essay "Moving Beyond Pain." According to hooks, Lemonade is essentially "embedded" with "many mixed messages" including the "celebration of rage" in the song "Hold Up." This deceptively upbeat song, with its hushed tones of calypso and contemporary reggae, is strikingly offset by its biting lyrics and violent imagery. In the film, Beyonce - clad in "her golden garb," armed with a baseball bat dubbed "Hot Sauce," and flashing a mischievous smile - struts down a street and smashes almost everything in her path!
It is important to note that hooks is correct in warning us that "violence does not create positive change." In fact, it reinforces a "prevailing cultural sentiment" that it is "acceptable to use violence to reinforce domination, especially in relations between men and women." However, what hooks (and a host of other music critics) failed to recognize were the overt references to Orisha-Ifa, the religion of the Yoruba people in West Africa and the basis of Santeria among Afro-Caribbean peoples, that elevate the violence in "Hold Up" to fantasy and high art. In the song's opening sequence, Beyonce deliberately invokes Oshun, the radiant, impish, playfully seductive, and sometimes spiteful orisha of love, female sexuality, fresh water, and fertility.
Yet, hooks reduces Beyonce's powerful depiction of black femininity and spirituality to a "sexy-dress street scene" in which "violence is made to look sexy and eroticized." As a result, she dismisses what seems to be a natural expression of anger in response to betrayal for many women across many different cultures. In fact, Indian aesthetics recognizes the healthy expression of anger as an integral part of the healing process for the heroine in love. And this is the essence of the khandita nayika in all her shades of fury! "Hold Up," in particular, beautifully captures the transition of our heroine from the bewilderment of "Pray You Catch Me" (see Part 1) to the first real stirrings of rage.
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