In yesterday’s episode of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, chef and writer Eddie Huang spoke of his experience as an American man of Chinese descent, particularly about using food as a way of connecting with his heritage. He spoke of one particular experience where he had visited China as an American chef, and made a Chinese meal to a local audience and hoping for validation. Does this food taste Chinese enough or is my American background too much of an influence? The response he got, or his retelling it in this clip below, gave me goose bumps:

“You don’t have to keep thinking about whether you’re Chinese because you are Chinese. The diaspora is very important. Wherever you are, if you’re Jamaican or Puerto Rican, or Chinese, and you’re born in America… you’re part of it. You’re not disconnected. You can’t be disconnected. And whatever you do, it is Chinese. Or, it is Jamaican, or it is Puerto Rican. But it’s in your own voice.”


I found it relevant now as I’ve been thinking of the import of Beyoncé’s new visual album Lemonade which caught the world by storm a few days ago, and its relevance as a cultural phenomenon. I have seen the accompanying video to the album once, and listened to many of the songs many times. I have come to realise that as a robust and relevant work of art, it is way more than just an American woman’s expression of a range of emotions, a black woman’s embrace of vulnerability as a powerful virtue, or a woman’s documentation of marital tribulations as therapy. It is all of those things and more. It is an extension of a long tradition of strong (and yes black) womanhood that is not often found in the Western media.

What I saw, in Beyoncé’s ankara prints which she wore throughout, the cameos by scorned and bereaved black women, the imagery of the Yorùbá goddess Ọṣun all around the album, the costume, the deeply personal poetry, and the general black self-confidence that has pissed off smug commentators like Piers Morgan is a reclaiming of a lost space of black normalcy (and yes, occasional militancy directed at real or symbolic obstacles). But it is also an extension of the black experience which is not – as we’ve often believed – just an American variant. Being unashamedly black in this album, unlike how she’d been in previous ones, does more to connect her back to a tradition of black female strength and resilience very much alive on the home continent than it does to detract. I assume that this was her intention all along.

I find this angle in the artiste’s work more compelling than any other (including the rumoured infidelity). Has Beyoncé been trying to connect the African diaspora with the homeland all along? From the many generations of suspicion between descendants of slaves who became African-Americans, and descendants slavers and survivors many of who now run most of African countries, there have always been something cold and distant. What part of the African-American experience speaks the most to the African audience, and what parts should? If the guilt of our past and the violence that birthed it can be properly aired and then forgiven, can we share each other’s success as an extension of each other’s hopes, aspirations and disappointments?

We may have been asking the wrong question all along. The right question, which the album might help answering in its dizzying brilliance, is “isn’t a fuller dimension representation of the black woman in popular culture a long needed intervention in today’s media?”