Reflecting on Lemonade and Black Is King
Since starting Her Personal Curriculum, I have taken on several topics and expanded my thinking on womanhood through recent cultural happenings. This time, however, I wanted to look back by returning to the work of an artist who influenced an entire generation of women (and men) to reflect on and embrace their identity. This is about Beyoncé, and two of her seminal works, Lemonade and Black Is King, in conversation with each other.
Bigger.
Bigger means something to me.
In July 2023, I was living in the UK, having moved from the South to the Midlands for a fresh start in a city where I knew no one, but which was cheaper than London. I was applying for jobs, optimistic in the quiet, determined way you are when you have no real alternative.
I felt particularly confident about one application and was invited to interview shortly after. But as I left the building, a sinking feeling settled over me. Something the interviewer said (which might have read as a compliment to someone unfamiliar with the conversational undertones of British professional culture) made it clear that I had not managed the delicate, exhausting performance of making myself small enough while still demonstrating just enough competence to be considered safe.
The more I ruminated on it, the more a certainty of rejection washed over me in the summer heat as I stood at the bus stand trying to fight off the tears welled up in my eyes before the next bus arrived. It was in this frame of mind that I reached for my weekly playlist which was a rotation of songs I curated every week for commutes and walks around the city. Black Is King had been featuring prominently that season.
As the bus arrived, Beyoncé’s voice came through my earphones:
“If you feel insignificant / you better think again / Better wake up because / You’re part of something way bigger…”
By the time she reached “Life is your birthright”, something had shifted. I was okay.
I understood, with a clarity that only comes when you stop fighting a feeling, that the place I had just interviewed at was probably not right for me. The rejection, when it came, would not be a verdict on my worth. It would be a redirection.
The rejection was, in fact, freedom.
Two Roads, One Homecoming
What strikes me now, returning to both works with more matured and empathetic eyes, is how differently each one offered me something I needed and they both formed a complete portrait of what it means to come home to yourself.
Black Is King gave me kinship. Watching it again as a migrant in Britain three years after its release, far from the landscape and the people that made me, it offered what I can only describe as communal power: a reminder that identity is not something you lose when you cross a border. It is something you carry, and more importantly for me at that time, something that carries you. Its Afrofuturist visual language insists on the dignity and mythic grandeur of Africa and the African diaspora at a scale that feels almost corrective: a deliberate refusal of the smallness the world so often assigns us.
Lemonade, released in 2016, offered something different and more interior. On the tenth anniversary of its release (April 23), I was Beyoncé’s exact age when she made it and that fact lands differently than it might have a few years ago. When I first encountered the album, I did not fully understand the extent to which she was opening a window onto Black female interiority, or how much of what I saw there I would later be able to name in myself. Now, revisiting it, I see it for what it is: a blueprint for personal transformation, and a map of the long road back to yourself.
As a curator, programming them together in a double screening forms a kind of diptych: the interior and the exterior, the wound and the inheritance, the self and the lineage. Lemonade asks who broke me and how do I heal? Black Is King asks who made me and what am I carrying forward?
Together, they suggest that both questions are part of the same conversation and that we have always been the ones holding the space for it.
That is what we are gathering to do tomorrow May 16th.
The Viewing: Edition II — A Ritual in Image & Sound
Her Personal Curriculum presents an intimate screening experience: both visual albums, curated, in sequence, with a Nigerian snack board and a signature cocktail designed as part of the experience.
📅 Saturday, May 16th | 3pm (3.5 hours)
📍 Joydragger’s House, Lagos
🎟 click here to get your tickets at ₦12,000 ₦10,000 — all inclusive
Come ready to dance, feel good and celebrate yourself.