Nina Simone: Poetic Hot Lava In Open Letter [View all]

[Kind of Blue]

A new film directed by a White woman who claims to be Nina Simone’s number one fan aims to achieve what America couldn’t achieve while Nina was alive - the total erasure of the Empress of Activist-Cool from her own Black image - an image so subversive and counter culture in its dark Negroidness that the challenge of living it imbued Nina with a justifiably rebellious and outspoken symphony of under-dog passions; all of it expressed through grandly operatic musical masterpieces, scornfully bold and unrepentant public truth-telling, beautifully Afro-sculptural body posturing, and most of all, Nina’s defiant love for herself and for her people’s political well-being. Nina Simone was no ordinary jazz stylist, woman or public figure. Everything about her was intelligence married to fire. She was charismatic, eccentric and Queenly. And above all else-she was the moving embodiment of raw cultured Blackness.

And because of that inability to see us, the image chosen to represent Nina becomes a mocking dehumanization, an erasure of Nina’s swarthy and robust Black victory. Everything Nina stood for while surviving in that Black body becomes whitened and desensitized by the cloying signature of dishonesty. But of course, White people are making this film for White people anyway.

Black American women are tired of the colorist Hollywood caste system. They love Nina Simone religiously. They know that Nina’s daughter Simone was not asked to be a consultant or even contacted to give her blessing. Imagine if they hadn’t rendered Nina invisible in her own story. With Viola Davis, Lauryn Hill or Yolanda Ross as Nina, it would have become a classic. http://www.ninasimone.com/2012/11/kola-boof-spits-poetic-hot-lava-in-open-letter-to-cynthia-mort/

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