Four Women, For Women

Abstract

In her essay “Selling Hot Pussy,” bell hooks writes, “Bombarded with images representing black female bodies as expendable, black women have either passively absorbed this thinking or vehemently resisted it” (65). Unlike Nina Simone’s 1966 first-person rendition of “Four Women,” in reaction to the unbridled racism and white supremacy of the civil rights era, Talib Kweli’s twenty-first-century third-person voice, in tribute to Simone, positions these same four black women— Aunt Sarah, Siffronia, Sweet Thang, and Peaches—squarely within the cultural iconography of today’s contemporary urban environment. And while his lyric is specific to each character’s individual physicality as written by Simone, different than her sparse yet powerful lyric, Kweli locates each of them to a particular encounter that he may have had in his role as a young, lyrically gifted black male. Same song; different use of language, music, and vocality; different approach to addressing the imagery around the black female stereotype.

I am wearing my womanhood from the inside out cause I met myself through the eyes of my ancestors my beige-bamboo to tree-bark dark daughters my sisters who mothered me, smothered me with the eyes of let there be peace …

—Debra Powell-Wright, “Woman … Just Be”