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You may not be Beyoncé...butt

Updated: Sep 28, 2018


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During a scrolling session up and down a well-known social media channel, I stumbled upon some footage from recent Beyoncé, Rhianna and Nicky Minaj concerts. The music that these artists put out into the world is not music I would often listen to by choice. Usually, it is blazing out of a shopping centre speaker or busking in the background of a doctor’s waiting lounge. But what surprised me most was not only that I was drawn to these short clips, but fascinated by them. Part of their appeal was their length, the fact that they were short and animated meant that just as one finished, the other begun, without even having to scroll or click on the next one. Their sexy and colourful outfits; the painfully precise dance routines; the confidence on their faces and the catchy tunes enraptured me. Then, as I was coming down from this impact to my senses, I began to think of the very obscene flabbiness of my own thigs and the way my little muffin top spilled every morning over my jeans. Without a second thought I called my nearest gym to ask about membership and waited as the chirpy voice on the other side went through all the options. She spoke about how timing was important, given the fact that the joining fee would be waved for all new memberships until the end of the week. She spoke about the importance of goals and that regular attendance would successfully see me reach them. I put the phone down without thanking her and didn’t pick it up when she returned the call a few seconds later.


I often find myself worrying at how these images may impact younger and perhaps more impressionable young women. Specifically as the focus is on the centrality and visibility of the black female body, an area in which I am not qualified to expand on.

Then another idea began to unfold in my mind. It is about power. It is all about power. The gravitational pull of the artist depends on the power they hold in the skill of their craft, their dedication, in the careful curation of their aesthetic signifiers as well as in their personal ability to engage us. Generally, when we are amongst an audience who is immersed in a performance, we don’t realise the thousands of cultural codes and signifiers that are at once being reinforced and broken down in our minds. And this brings me back to the centrality of power that artists generally possess in what they do. Because deep within us, they do something that we know we couldn't do exactly like them. Before going into any tangent discussions of "creative envy" I want to ask…where does this power reside?

Generally, for a dancer, actor or performer, power resides in the body, for a writer or a poet, in the intangible. As Wangechi Mutu says “to make things make sense, I have to make things up”. A body exists in space and time, it possesses a materiality that can be seen, experienced, felt. But words, apart from the materiality of the ink on paper or the recording in a microphone, are basically incorporeal. A lack of a tangible body doesn’t lessen their power to evoke memory, feeling and emotion from a seemingly ethereal place. It’s hardly a question of comparing the validity or level of skill of some arts to others, because doing this is useless. Every artform possesses its own genesis.


So, as I turn off my phone and come back down to the real world, I begin to accept the fact that I am not Rhianna but with enough hard work and goal setting, I might start to come closer to a flat belly. To console me are the wise words of Elisabeth Bishop when she speaks of poetry (and which I’m sure Beyonce has also considered more than once) “it takes skill to make it seem natural”.


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©2018 Latifa Elmrini Gonzalez. All rights reserved.

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