To be Genuine, Uncompromising and Black

“I will tell you what freedom is for me: No fear” - Nina Simone from an interview in a recording session, 1972

On March 25, 1965, in the third march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, a temporary stage was setup and a line of singers performed for the thousands that gathered that night. From the nine musicians who performed only three were black. One of whom was Nina Simone, who sang her famous Mississpi Goddam to roaring applause from the audience.

Perhaps nothing speaks more to the impossibility of depicting an artist like Nina Simone than the many attempts to represent her life on screen. From a biopic starring Whoopi Goldberg to Nina (2015) that originally picked Mary J. Blige to star as Simone and who later was replaced by Zoe Saldana, and lately to Liz Garbus's What Happened, Miss Simone? The docudrama currently nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature 2016. The difficulty rests with the fact that the very struggles that Simone herself battled as a young musician and a black woman still hold and are still relevant eight decades after she was born. In last year alone more than two hundred black people were killed by the police and poverty rates among African American are almost 3 times higher than their white counterparts, somewhere between 22% of the black population is considered poor versus 8.8% among the whites. The community that Simone spoke of and sang to and fought for remains enmeshed in unprecedented poverty and state violence. It comes as no surprise that Simone's legacy and music is more relevant now than ever and yet how to “represent” a black genius seems to elicit such polarized views and reactions. Simone an artist who was always hyper-conscious of her blackness, her flat nose, big mouth, full lips, woolly hair, was made all the more aware because of her race. From growing up in a segregated southern state, North Carolina, to being denied a scholarship at the Curtis Institute (she believes that was she was denied because she was black – however the institute denies it was an issue of race but rather an issue of capacity). It is impossible to imagine that Simone would choose anything but to “be political” in face of a society and a system that systematically discriminated against her and her people.

It is then shocking and not so shocking that Liz Garbus would decide to portray Simone as the stereotypical “angry black woman”, who not only harbours murderous rage against society but who is a psychotic case who eventually destroys her career and her family. It is painful to watch Lisa Celeste (Simone's daughter) talk about her mother's mental disorder and struggles in such moralizing and naïve tone. It is understandable of course that one might not be the most objective of observers when it comes to one's parents, especially mother, which begs the question how Liza Celeste managed to be the executive producer to a documentary that makes her mother a more maligned genius than she already is.

My own introduction to Simone was thanks to the advent of the digital age. It was 1999, the formative years of the internet, the heyday of Napster (before it shut down for copyright violation) and I came across a cover of Jacques Brel's “Ne me Quitte Pas” by Simone. It was a coincidence that introduced me to the troubled genius. Although I long identified myself as a Jazz aficionado with its unpredictable patterns and syncopated beats suited my disorganized thinking perfectly, my Jazz heroes -or rather heroines- were mostly singers, female black singers, such as Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington and only came across Nina fleetingly. Available biographies at the time described her more as a “protest singer” and her involvement in the civil rights movement led me to mistakenly believe that her contributions were merely moral fodder for the movement rather than interesting musical repertoire.

Ten seconds into the song would reveal why Nina's music was so powerful. She rips the music apart with her emotional intensity almost making herself unintelligible (and endearingly butchers the French language along the way). It is a curious thing to hear, a voice the smolders with emotion and yet remains full and resonant creating a sonic scape that is indivisible from it. A characteristic trait of all of Simone's performance, the musical acumen, the intensity and the all-consuming emotion that transforms it into a quasi-religious experience. Her record company would refer to her as a 'priestess', although I think the term 'witch doctor' is more accurate.

Nina Simone or Eunice Waymon was born in the small town of Tryon , in North Carolina in 1933. Her mother was a Methodist preacher whose values and ideas would have a tremendous impact on Nina's upbringing. She relates, in her autobiography I put a Spell on You (1990), that one of her earliest memories is clapping to the rhythm of the gospel singing in her mother's church. Her mother would recount years later, that as early as two years, Nina would whistle off notes on music sheet. By the age of three she would go to play “God be with you” on the piano. And gospel music and the church revival music would have an enormous influence on Nina's musical delivery and method of performance. In 1966 interview, she would say that she was fascinated by the whole atmosphere of church music and singing and “the rhythm that went on for hours”, a unique characteristic that she would incorporate in her performing style till the end. However, as a musical prodigy she was not meant to become a gospel musician or preacher like her mother. She was offered support from some of her town's people to pay for her tuition and she was trained as a Western Classical pianist with the ambition to become America's first female African-American concert pianist. But when she was denied a scholarship to the Curtis Institute it completely derailed her plans and deeply affected her perception of racial injustice and discrimination. She would go on to play at bars and clubs around New York to make a living till she was offered a record contract and by 1959 would release her first album, Little Girl Blue, on Bethlehem Records. Simone would continue to record for the next three decades till her last released album A Single Woman (1993) by Elektra Records.

In 2011, on January 25 as I looked over the images from downtown Cairo and Tahrir, all I could think of was “stand up and be counted with all the rest”, as Simone sung in Mississippi Goddam. It was truly all in the air, the cries to end police brutality, the calls for social justice, the demand for freedom – all sounded as if they were taken from Simone's music. January 25th was a Simone moment par excellence. And although the third march for Civil Rights resulted in the Voting Rights Act, it didn't alter the structural racism of white America. By the same token, although the 18 days resulted in Mubarak stepping down, the revolution did not alter the structural injustice of our regime.

It is natural to be perplexed by the musical legacy of Nina Simone. Because singing was never in her plans, Simone had the unusual freedom to experiment and explore as many styles as her music appetite could withstand. And her music palette could withstand a sizeable diversity of genres. She played and sang materials from children songs to ballads, to blues standards to hair-raising gospel chants. Yet Garbus's film does not offer much in showing the incredible diversity of Simone's oeuvre and repertoire. In the film we get to see that Simone started off as a promising recording artist, got sidetracked by the Civil Rights movement, destroyed her career and made an awkward comeback in the late 1980s when Chanel picked a song of hers as a tune for a commercial (My Baby Just Cares for Me from the album Little Girl Blue 1959). The clichéd notion of the self-destructive genius does not at all give justice to the complexity of Simone's music or its diversity. It rather obscures this musical ingenuity under the incredible pressure of being a black woman in America during the 1960s. Attallah Shabbaz (Malcom X's daughter) is shown saying exactly that in the film. In truth, Simone was not “distracted” by the Civil Rights movement, the racist politics of the time physically chased her. In 2009 documentary, her bassist Bobby Hamilton recounts how when they were giving a concert in Simone' home state of North Carolina in 1964 he was arrested for allegedly stealing the handbag of a white woman.

Simone had to intervene personally and stop the police from charging her musician with theft. It is difficult to believe that someone facing racism in all aspects of their lives, personally and professionally would not be compelled to want to get involved. And at the same time it is lamentably reductive to portray that for six whole years (from 1964-1970), the high tide of the Civil Rights movement, all that Simone did was “be political”. Which is not at all what Simone did. In those six years Simone produced over a dozen albums (15 albums to be precise) with two different record companies (Coplix and Philips) that covered all kinds of musical styles from folk songs, to Broadway ballads, to jazz standards,..etc all the while composing and singing protest music. It is astounding that such varied musical output was completely overlooked in the film for the sake of labelling Simone as “being political”. Or that she stopped doing any kind of music but protest music. Simone herself, would later say in 1988 interview, that the song that most represents her as a person is 'Consummation' (from the album Silk & Soul 1967), a whimsical ballad that she personally wrote and composed. It is nothing like her thumping, more agitational protest songs and is remarkable for its classically inclined and sentimental sensibility.

Five years after the 18 days, and 41,000 people are either detained, charged or sentenced according to Human Rights Watch.

“School children sitting in jail”, as Simone would sing

--in 2015, 200 high school students took their final exams in prison.

“All you have to offer is your mean, ole', white backlash”,

over a hundred died from torture-related deaths and over two thousand were tried in military courts.

The reality of what is happening now and what the revolution hoped would happen, and the disparity between what the Civil Rights movement hoped to achieve and the conditions under which the blacks live now, the very things that Simone sung about five decades ago are still the very things we are trying to change.

In her attempts to dramatize the appeal and legacy of Simone, Garbus comes a bit close to Simone's commanding presence and charisma. Even though it might be seen as sensational, but the religious fervour (influenced by the years she spent in the black church no doubt) that Simone brought to her performances and the ways in which she mesmerized her audience is undeniable. Simone herself described music as her religion, and said that when she is playing music, she is “as close to God as I know”.

There is an extended version of version of 'I Wish I Knew How it would Feel to be Free' (originally composed by Bill Taylor in 1963 but recorded by Simone in 1967, in Silk & Soul), that Simone performed at The Village Gate nightclub in New York in 1968, where she drifts into gospel-preaching and she stands and starts swaying ecstatically and you can see and hear the crowd responding to her ministrations. To an audience that has never seen Simone and has never seen her perform live, that is one of the few moments in Garbus's film that are not dramatized or reductive.

But how to represent a genius like Simone without falling into the usual traps? She was temperamental, violent and renowned for her royal temper (she chased a record producer with a gun in Switzerland demanding royalties and even fired a gun at boy who was making noise outside her house in the south of France). And by the 1980s she was diagnosed with a bipolar depression that caused lifelong psychotic episodes and frightening paranoia and hallucinations. It becomes a daunting challenge to portray a black woman who lived through a highly contentious moment, who constantly tried to stay true to her own artistic calling and whose genius and talent were never duly appreciated during her own lifetime. This is further complicated when her legacy becomes once again more pertinent and relevant for a younger generation who are bound to see it through the prism of those of those who knew her, i.e. her daughter, ex-husband, musicians,..etc.

Garbus definitely failed to show why Simone's artistry was exceptional (who else combined a Christmas traditional, 'Good King Wenceslas', with Broadway-like melody in flawless Bach counterpoint to create an instant classic -Little Girl Blue) or what it means to be a black woman in the 1960s or the challenges of living with a serious psychiatric ailment at a time when it such condition had no name. To add insult to injury, Garbus dedicates extensive swaths of her documentary to Simone's ex-husband, Andy Stroud who not only did not understand her condition but would go on and physically and sexually abuse Simone till she divorced him in 1972. Stroud would even go on to sue his own daughter over who owns the rights to Simone's estate. It speaks to Garbus's ethical position who she chose to give insight about Simone's life and how they spoke about it.

If the life of Simone tells anything, it is the price of being engaged, truly engaged in a way that is meaningful and in a way that does not superficially tackle the true structures of injustice and power – is an immense price. And she paid and paid and paid. From being disappointed by the results of the Civil Rights movement, to not being able to continue the artistic project she started, to being isolated by the perturbations of her own mind. She paid the price till the very end. And while she is now, barely, getting the recognition she deserves, her life encapsulates profound questions on artistic commitment, political engagement and the price of activism.

The life course of activism and in Simone's case particularly, is painfully reminiscent of our own. Five years down the road after 2011, and many of us are terribly disillusioned and justifiably embittered. But Nina's story also serves to tell that even after five decades of political stalling, state violence and media mind-washing in the US, her genuine message still rings true. Unless there is true equality and freedom the battle won't end. Neither will ours.