bossymarmalade

I watched this documentary on Netflix a few days ago. It was made by filmmaker Liz Garbus with extensive help from Nina Simone’s daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly. It featured a lot of interview footage of Simone herself, primary sources like the letters and journals she’d written, interviews of people closest to her.

The major, most profoundly unsettling flaw in this documentary is so perfectly articulated in The Irresponsibility of 'What Happened, Miss Simone?' by Tanya Steele that I won’t bother trying to rehash it here. Except to say that while I was watching, and they showed excerpts from Simone’s journals, I was frustrated to see that the pull-quotes inevitably ended right before the most powerful, visceral parts of what she had to say. About what she endured as a black woman, about what she endured as an abused woman. It gave an uncomfortable feeling of Simone being twice silenced.

But despite that, this is a documentary that gets under your skin. And not in any way that you’d expect. If you don’t know Simone’s music, if you like it casually, if you know it intimately, it makes no difference: you feel it like it’s replaced your heartbeat when you watch her perform. Her performance of I Loves You, Porgy under Hugh Hefner’s uncomprehending eye is pointed and yet resigned; her Mississippi Goddamn at the Selma march is defiant and incandescent as she turns from the crowd; her cover of Janis Ian’s Stars makes you stop breathing, makes you feel like this is the first time you’ve ever really understood anything so profoundly.

It’s a hard documentary to watch, for both the music and for Miss Simone and the hunted look in her eyes, the longing to be really and truly heard, the scorching desire to make a difference to her people in a way that would last, would matter. She’s not a sweet interview subject. The accounts of her erratic behaviour due to mental illness, the abuse she endured and paid back in turn, they complicate the portrait. It hurts to bear witness because it’s all so bare; I’m not saying I understand, completely, because I’m not a black woman and I never will understand completely. But it ripped me apart to watch it.

And perhaps that’s the point in the end, because everybody will regardless come away from this documentary wondering some variation on the question that Maya Angelou posed, that the film takes its title from. What happened, what happened. Why and how did it happen. What could we have done, what can we do now, why does it keep happening. Against all odds, you happened, Miss Simone.