Solange & A Space for Survival

In the heat of its cultural moment, 2016 was a time of unrest and uncertainty; in hindsight, it represents transition. Political campaigns characterized by conflict searched back through history to transform a dark, racist American past into a national plan for the future. It was in 2016, in this unsettled social condition, that Solange released A Seat at the Table. She too looked back into the past, not to resurrect atavistic notions of identity, but to revive a culture of strength and endurance. On the album, a magnificently coherent vision of self and community, Solange merges the domestic with the national, unites the personal and the political, elevates the vulnerable to the powerful. The album is masterful in that it is self-sustaining. It contains a woman and a community, it validates itself, it sifts through history to better envision the future. And above all, it carves out a space of beauty and power for her Black identity.

To take one’s seat at the table is to enter a discussion. And in its interest in the politics of identity, representation, and space, A Seat at the Table inserts itself as a postcolonial voice into the white mainstream discourse. For as much as a postcolonial approach criticizes imperial forces, it also seeks restoration and recuperation for marginalizedcommunities; it’s motivated by a rightful anger, but it also seeks to reclaim suppressed histories because it sees them as worth preserving and celebrating. This is where we merge with the album’s headspace: Solange has “got a lot to be mad about,” but she’s also searching for and reclaiming her “glory.” In her study of Haitian author Edwidge Danticat, scholar Nadège Clitandre provides a helpful framework for understanding the aims of a postcolonial critique. She notes that a postcolonial lens “critique[s] the impact of European hegemony in colonized societies,” “dismantle[s] various codes and strategies of imperial domination,” and rejects the “dominant discourses that continuously position the post-colonial subject into a denigrated, subjugated, and oppressed state.”

Such ambitions largely inform Solange’s own approach to contemporary American culture; she challenges a “hegemon[ic]” historical narrative, the quotidian maneuvers of “imperial domination”—now coded as microaggressions—and the systemic attempts to “subjugate” Black culture and expression.

It’s not uncommon for us to think of history as a narrative, as something “written by the victors.” But what it actually looks like for history to be a consciously written text is, albeit crucial within postcolonial discourse, remains more vague. The term ‘marginalized’—a helpful way to concretize the concept of a narrativized history—has recently found itself firmly set in the common parlance of the nation, but its mere prevalence has perhaps diminished the full effect of its meaning. Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid, in a 1996 novel, describes those who live on the island of Dominica as “the ones who…had long ago been reduced to shadows; the forever foreign, the margins.”

Under the shadow of centuries of French and British colonial rule, Dominica and its population exist for Kincaid on the “margins” of history. With this image we can better understand the relationship between history, story, and imperialism; for Kincaid, to be marginalized is to be “reduced,” to be deemed “foreign,” and to be excluded from the dominant white discourse. In utilizing the methods of a postcolonial resistance, Solange engages with an understanding of marginalization that is not limited to the explicitly colonial efforts of, say, the British Empire. A Seat at the Table, with its own oral history, reveals the extent to which the white American mainstream colonizes and excludes a Black experience from its own national story. The interlude “This Moment,” delivered by rapper and entrepreneur Master P, expresses this large-scale marginalization as a feeling of invisibility. He describes being lost, so to speak, in the system: “You know, when they come here, you invisible. You know, you don’t even have a number in the system. Nobody cares about you.” What he articulates—the image of total inconsequence, of being “foreign” to the government system and invisible in white spaces—is, at its root, an image of life relegated to the margins.

In many ways, A Seat at the Table is a journey. As she looks back through histories of family and nation, Solange stretches forward to a future of hope and power. Even the album’s final worlds conclude the work with a sweeping vision of history: “Now, we come here as slaves, but we going out as royalty and able to show we truly the chosen ones.” To encapsulate such a journey—from “slave[ry]” to “glory”—within a single album is ambitious, but Solange sustains her message of empowerment and transcendence with grace. The album is not just about one woman finding “her glory” and advocating “self care,” but is about an entire community and an entire experience emerging from the margins to assert its power. “Everybody always wants us to be packaged and ready-made and healed instantly from these instances and these traumas,” Solange herself comments on the transitional nature of the album, “And that was about me saying, “Hey, I’m working through this transition.”” It seems that it is precisely this liminal state that affords Solange her power; from such a vantage point, she can look back upon the past with knowledge and ahead to the future with hope. These comments suggest an awareness of space and time, and her own navigation of both, that allow Solange to so artfully articulate and celebrate her identity as a Black woman in 2016 America.

The album’s consideration of such imperial forces from systemic racism in education, housing, and law enforcement to Western standards of beauty reflect Solange’s own keen awareness of the way in which her body and culture journey through the spaces of a white world.

The album is Solange’s recognition that her (hi)story has not been finished, and in that there lies the power to write it.

As she works through transitions and traumas toward a new narrative of a Black experience, Solange must negotiate her personal identity against a backdrop of a predominantly white America. The album is plagued by questions of belonging, or the lack thereof, and is thus deeply concerned with the politics of space. As A Seat at the Table traces a journey, it grows preoccupied with the everyday navigation through literal and cultural white spaces. On “Weary,” Solange cautions her listener to be “leery of your place in the world” and sympathizes with the feeling that “you’re leaving not a trace in the world.” Later, at the album’s midpoint, Solange opens up on the chorus of “Where Do We Go”: “And I don’t know where to go / No, I don’t know where to stay / Where do we go from here? Though the sentiments are shaped by uncertainty, they also reveal an awareness—of self, community, and the narratives that shape both. The Black community, particularly Black women, occupies a precarious position in American society; a dangerous disparity separates legal status and a discriminant social reality, and the rhetoric of inclusion is discordant with reality of existence without representation. The dominantly white spaces ofAmerican culture impose various forms of regulation upon the Black experience and the Black body. The album’s consideration of such imperial forces from systemic racism in education, housing, and law enforcement to Western standards of beauty reflect Solange’s own keen awareness of the way in which her body and culture journey through the spaces ofa white world.

While the policing of geographic, cultural, bodily spaces is the most immediate expression of control, the power of a dominant imperial culture resides in large part in the excess of its discourse—the ability to “know,” to talk about, and thus to represent the minority communities. When on “Don’t Touch My Hair” Solange asks again and again “what you say to me?,” she is confronting a white mainstream that constantly attempts to speak for and about her Black identity. Similarly, “Mad” challenges a girl who asks Solange, “Why you always blaming? / Why you can’t just face it? / Why you always gotta be so mad? / Why you always talking shit, always be complaining?” In many ways, the album as a whole is a response to this “girl” and the society she represents, a society with a pathological inability to allow Black women to be autonomous subjects with their own thoughts, feelings, and expression. Just as the stereotype of the “angry Black woman” demonizes her thoughts and emotions, the imposition of Western standards of beauty—on, in the case of “Don’t Touch My Hair,” Black women’s hair—is an attempted erasure of cultural expression.

Solange crafts a portrait of a Black experience that has been regulated so much that there exists nothing outside the purview of white control and criticism. This impulse to appropriate others’ culture and to silence divergent narratives is, at its heart, a colonial one. Nadège Clitandre later notes that “body and voice have been instrumental factors in the denigration and oppression of peoples of African descent. Because they are outward sites of cultural difference, the body and voice of Black people have been textualized as signifiers of Black barbarity and inferiority to validate the dogma of white colonizers.” Against a society that seeks to flatten any “difference”—whose melting pot ideal necessitates the merging, and thus the homogenization, of culture— Solange re-textualizes the “sites of cultural difference” in celebration. She does not repress the various modes of Black expression, but celebrates them; she does not reject her anger, but sublimates it. Solange is mad, yes, but what the album proves in its scathing century-spanning survey of American racism is that she indeed has “a lot to be mad about.”

It is in the face of this society that dictates what she is "allowed to be" that Solange carves out a space for the celebration of her identity and community.

“Don’t Touch My Hair” is an ode to Black beauty, but beneath this powerful acceptance of self is an assertion of autonomy. Her use of imperatives, here and on “Don’t Wish Me Well,” serves as a much larger reclamation of power. Specifically, her “hair” functions as a site of “outward…cultural difference” and thus a site which the dominant culture seeks to erase or, more accurately, seeks to mold according to a white Western standard. Solange recognizes that the pressure placed on Black women to reject their natural hair in pursuit of a Eurocentric beauty standard represents much more than an aesthetic choice—it is a fact of imperialism. A similar attempt at colonial control comes when the unnamed girl dismisses Solange’s anger and her right to be “mad.” But Solange claims ownership. Solange embraces her body just as she validates her right “to be mad.” She sees her body as her “glory,” her hair as her “crown,” and “the truth [as her] sound.” On his interlude, Matthew Knowles describes feeling “lost in this vacuum between integration and segregation and, and racism” during the 1960s. angry, very angry.” Solange too feels this anger, but A Seat at the Table allows her to sublimate it, for her father and for herself.

At its surface, the album is “an ode to self care” ; however, as Solange comes to represent broader places and populations, it also becomes a radical act of communal care. The album remembers past trauma—Master P’s upbringing in the Calliope projects and Matthew Knowles’ experience of Alabama’s desegregation—but such memory is precisely what allows for healing. The trauma of her community is intergenerational but so is the power. It is largely in such interludes interspersed throughout the album that Solange foregrounds a specifically Black history of America. Rapper Master P discusses his upbringing in the Calliope projects of New Orleans while Matthew Knowles shares his own experience of desegregation in Alabama. The album is a fundamentally polyvocal work, offering itself as a space in which numerous and diverse Black artists and thinkers can preserve their experiences. As if to locate the prime impetus for the inclusion of all these stories, Solange’s mother Tina Lawson at one point insists, “Well, all we’ve ever been taught is white history … That is to suppress me and to make me not be proud.” This tension, between history and pride, is a crucial one. The primary threat that looms over Solange’s artistic undertaking is not just microaggressions from the random white woman on “Mad,” but is rather a needless shame in oneself and the “suppress[ion]” and loss of an entire history.

A Seat at the Table not only lifts a suppressed history out of the margins of the American narrative, but also designates a space in which Black identity can be rightfully celebrated.

On “F.U.B.U.,” Solange seems to directly address her white audience: “Don’t feel bad if you can’t sing along / Just be glad you got the whole wide world / … This shit is from us / Some shit you can’t touch.” Notably, this is the only track on the album where the n-word appears, the use of which seeks to prevent white consumption. As the title suggests, “F.U.B.U.” is for a Black audience because it is by Black artists. Any feeling of exclusion experienced by a white listener is certainly purposeful, but—crucially—it is not belittling. This song encapsulates the album’s central point: to be different is not to be inferior. On “Tina Taught Me,” Lawson laments the fact that she is “not allowed to express that pride in being black, and that if you do, then it’s considered antiwhite.” She rejects the notion of “reverse racism” and insists that “because you celebrate black culture does not mean that you don’t like white culture or that you putting it down.” There’s a quiet radicalism in this sentiment. It disrupts a colonial logic of binaries, an “us versus them” attitude that divides the world into “White” and “Other.” Solange celebrates difference in a culture with an imperial proclivity for homogenizing and erasing any variance from the white “norm.” “F.U.B.U.,” as does the album

as whole,” explicitly distinguishes itself from “the whole wide world” of whiteness, and, in thus creating a space “for…and by” members of the Black community,” elevates a Black history, identity, and expression out of the margins and shadows of American life.

The album is hard to classify. Solange likes to maneuver within and manipulate all preconceived notions of how she ought to act and appear in the world. She likes to embrace her hair and channel her anger when the dominant white culture insists that she change her image and repress her emotions. The album itself is even difficult to classify, and that’s the whole point. The white imperial discourse is fundamentally one that categorizes, classifies, rationalizes, and Others. To be impossible to “know” according to the standards of the dominant culture is to resist erasure. With its combination of songs and spoken-word interludes, with its numerous collaborations, and with its mingling of funk, soul, R&B, pop, and hip-hop, the album transgresses boundaries and defies a typical understanding of an album. As each song flows seamlessly into the next interlude which merges into the next song, A Seat at the Table demands to be taken not only seriously, but as a coherent work of expression. The album transcends its individual artist and becomes an ode to an entire community. A Seat at the Table is a communal and polyvocal experience; it is selfsufficient, existing outside of white discourse and convention, and it is whole.

The track “Weary” concludes with Solange being asked “Do you belong?,” to which she responds “I do, I do.” The sentiment is simple, but there resonates in it a profound assertion of being. If A Seat at the Table documents a journey of an artist, a human, and a community from out of the margins, then the destination is belonging. For, in the face of a world that sees no space for her or people like her, the most radical act Solange can commit is to place her power and her identity into the cultural narrative. In the face of “the whole wide world,” Solange simply takes her seat at the table and offers a new story.