Photo by Vernon Merritt III/Getty Images
On April 22nd, Nina, a movie inspired by — but not an accurate reflection of — Nina Simone will be released in theaters. Starring Zoe Saldana, a black Latina actress best known for her roles in Avatar and Guardians of the Galaxy, Nina continues to court controversy years after the project was first announced and filmed. Last week, after initial images of Saldana — in dark makeup and a prosthetic nose — as Simone appeared in the first trailer, the debate was not only reignited but doused in butane with a single tweet from Simone's official account (Simone's daughter was a little more diplomatic regarding Saldana specifically, though not the film). __
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Saldana initially hesitated to accept the role in Cynthia Mort's biopic. __“__I didn’t think I was right for the part, and I know a lot of people will agree,” Saldana told InStyle last year. However, she later added, “An artist is colorless, genderless… It’s more complex than just ‘Oh, you chose the Halle Berry look-alike to play a dark, strikingly beautiful, iconic black woman.’ The truth is, they chose an artist who was willing to sacrifice herself. We needed to tell her story because she deserves it.”
What Saldana chose to ignore was the very essence of Nina Simone’s identity in the public eye. Simone was neither colorless nor genderless. Her black womanhood informed her views about herself, the creation of her music, and her activism during one of the most fraught moments in U.S. race relations.
-=-=-=-Yes, Simone’s story needs to be told, but an inaccurate story is neither enjoyable nor necessary. A plotline in the film includes a fictional relationship between Simone and Clifton Henderson, Simone’s personal assistant in her final years, whom Simone's own estate points out was openly gay. Unable or unwilling to option the life story of Simone, the film’s creators instead optioned Henderson’s story as a method of telling a story, but not the story.
Though we've been talking this film for literal years now, the imminent release of Nina – and the flippant disregard for its casting and Simone's life story – still cuts deep. Inherent in our black bodies is beauty and possibility. Our limbs are those of purpose and strength. Although Zoe Saldana is charming and skilled, many fans rightly question the choice in casting her. Was she the best possible person for the role, or merely a reflection of Hollywood’s discriminatory views towards most women of color (and dark women in particular)? I’d like to think the former, but believe more strongly in the latter. I can name many women (Viola Davis, Uzo Aduba) who would better embody the role, who’ve proven to be adept at dense subject matter and made the parts that were given to them their own.
To deny an actress who is both capable and physically perfect for the role of Nina Simone is to deny the very viability of dark black womanhood that Simone embodied. It is also a slap in the face of her legacy and her struggles, known now to more people than ever before, thanks to last year's Oscar-nominated doc What Happened, Miss Simone?. She did not maneuver through the vile systemic prejudices of this culture only to have her very real and very explicit experiences be pushed to the side. What is art if not from the mind and body of its creator?
Nina was an activist. Her political beliefs were so intertwined with her music and her identity that to separate the three would make little sense. Subtly, she wove ideas about black womanhood throughout many of her most personal works. But she was explicit in her views about broader issues, most significantly the ongoing Civil Rights movement. She wrote “Mississippi Goddam" after the 1963 assassination of Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young black girls that same year. In 1968, she released “Why? (The King of Love is Dead).” Written by bassist Gene Taylor after he received news of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the song was first performed three days after his death. The original live version, nearly 13 minutes long, included Nina singing along with an ongoing monologue about the loss of Dr. King.
It seems like we have said this so many times now, but apparently it bears repeating: Simone performed with a reflection of her inner struggles and beliefs. Those truly paying attention to her life story would know this.
I think about the way my mother spoke about Simone as we drove back to my apartment in Chicago this past weekend. A certain level of ease washed over her limbs as she drove, her face settling into a place of comfort.
“She was ours,” she said, and I didn’t doubt her for a second.
History thus far has not been kind to women gifted with melanin, so the ones in the public eye who cut the deepest – most often the creators, so full of voice – ripple deep within us and shape the ways in which we navigate the world. It is a world that begins full of possibility and mutates into something cruel, imbalanced, and exhausting. It is an impenetrable force that wreaks havoc on the black woman’s psyche, or at least it tries to do so.
Later that night, my mother texted me the Nina songs that were the most important to her.
“Make sure you listen to ‘Four Women,’ and ‘To Be Young Gifted and Black,’” she wrote, as if this was only the first or second time we had discussed Nina Simone. In the back of my mind was the reality of how Simone’s visage and music wormed its way into my life much earlier, nearly a decade-and-a-half ago.
The car rides I took home with my mother were points of change. Because Simone was ours, the rhythms and lyrics of her music were meant for our ears. The ways in which we existed in the world – or rather, our choices within the world – were often predicated on the confidence and righteous arrogance of black women artists like Nina. Their mere existence was enough to inspire confidence. Their ability to create and share was the sort of fuel that could keep us going (and breathing and thriving) long past the time the world would ever willingly allow.
My whole life, my mother has been a source of reference. She points me to the people and words and sounds that can serve as a balm against the difficulties of navigating the world in this skin. If it was not Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye when my face was covered in scars of hyperpigmentation, it was the familiar cries of Mary J. Blige when tears flowed out of me uncontrollably as a young teen.
With Nina, I think about the first time I heard my nose was “too big.” I think about the first time I understood my body was not just something that was mine, but something that other people would claim (and decimate and disregard). I think about how all of those things overwhelmed and confused me, but also how I immediately knew that this feeling was not over, and would not be for a long time. That these insults came from another black girl I knew – one lighter, thinner, more “right” – was not lost on me, even at a young age. We attack the things we don’t understand just as much as we attack the things that hit too closely to home.
My mother and I were in the car then too when I told her what was said to me. She pulled over, looked me in the eye.
“I’ve got a big nose. Do you think I’m ugly, too?”
And of course I didn’t. Not my mother, who radiates an impenetrable amount of grace, beauty, strength, and light. Not ever my mother. “Nina was ours,” and my mother gave her to me, just like that.
Sometimes it takes people outside of ourselves to realign our own sense of self, to make us feel proud of who we are, to understand and even fall in love with ourselves. In a diary entry, Nina once wrote, “I can’t be white and I’m the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despite or have been taught to despise – if I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of the public all the time wide open for them to jeer and approve of or disapprove of.”
But then later, she wrote that she was “someone who has been brainwashed to think everything they do is wrong… someone who’s been robbed of their self respect, their self esteem… someone’s who’s been convinced they have no right to be happy. But then why haven’t I killed myself?” Despite knowing what this world took from her, Nina gave herself to her music; in turn, she gave to us.
In “Four Women,” where she detailed black female archetypes, Simone sings broadly, “My skin is black/ My arms are long/ My hair is woolly/ My back is strong.” And later, “Strong enough to take the pain/ inflicted again and again.” In these words, I hear both the reality of the world, its consistent brutality against black women, and also the promise of myself. My body is strong and capable even if I don’t want it to be, even if it is used and abused. My mere existence is a place of rebellion.
There are black musicians – black female musicians – and then there is Nina Simone. Troubled, profoundly talented, and immensely important, Simone embodied the triumph of the black woman in the contemporary America of her time. That her music as well as her words and her image remain viscerally-seared in the minds of young black women across the globe speaks to her legacy. She was not just a product and source of power for her time. No, she was a transcendental figure whose impact still resonates. Saldana’s casting — and the additional inaccuracies of the project as a whole — are not just about the colorism or even the flippancy of the minds behind the work. For me – for many of her fans – it is about Nina Simone herself, what she gave the world and what those gifts represent in the minds and hearts of those listening. We crave a representation of Simone that is as authentic as the woman herself.
