SOMETIMES REVENGE is the only first response to betrayal. Then comes the journey toward healing.
When Beyoncé’s husband, rapper and music mogul Jay-Z, cheated on her with the now infamous “Becky with the good hair,” she didn’t stay quiet. She brought her rage and vision to her 2016 visual album Lemonade.
And she didn’t stop at calling out “Becky.”
Beyoncé transforms through her grief into new power. She starts by jumping from the rooftop of a building into a baptismal pool in “Pray You Catch Me,” where she’s reborn as Oshun, the Yoruba orisha or goddess who rules money and fertility and rivers. Oshun may be able to offer the good things in life, but if you cross her, she’s vengeful. She’s known to laugh when she’s sad, and cry when she’s happy.
In the most buzzed-about video, “Hold Up,” Beyoncé’s clad in a yellow Roberto Cavalli dress and gold jewelry to represent the goddess’s favorite color and element, smiling as she smashes car windows to the delight of onlookers.
Beyoncé’s Lemonade has been praised as a work of bold Black feminism. Widely regarded as a revolutionary production, the film creates space for Black women to feel pure joy and pure anger. Black women—like the mothers of the murdered Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner all featured in the film—are given room to grieve unimaginable losses.
Beyoncé samples Malcolm X’s “Who Taught You to Hate Yourself?” speech to convey some facts plainly: “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” Beyoncé has the platform, and she’s using it to demand that people respect, protect, and pay attention to Black women.
And when she embodies Oshun in and her subsequent visual album, , she’s saying that she will
