Regarding Nina Simone’s Bad Reputation

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How it pained me to see my mother


In all her grace and glory


Baited to make her angry


So she could fit into expectation


 


As long and lithe as Josephine Baker


As tall and muscular as Grace Jones


How you would fetish her anger


A proud black goddess magnificent


 


Black and magnificent was her nickname


Her bearing and conduct intimidatingly same


With a long black cape and a lovely choker


More gothic than any novel by Bram Stoker


Statuesque and dark skinned like Roxie Roker


She fought to stay whole and so no


Body broke her…


 


But her fight to stay whole had a price to it


A people saying she was not nice to it


Like Nina Simone, she stood moody, alone


Her mood having no artifice or device to it


 


My mother bemoaned her choice


A white man married two kids and divorce


My white father stealing her black voice


Black and magnificent was her nickname


She who called herself Krishna


Was one and the same


 


How hard it is to walk this land


A paler ghost of she…


Who holds her invisible hand


And tries to make her way through,


Win or lose…


And finds herself shod in Mama’s shoes


 


How thick and wide and fat I am, me


Cast inside your roles of Mammy


Escape we’d love to but, now can we?


I am too old and fat to run away


From the roles in which you have me enslaved


My mom was Krishna, I am Ska


But to your ass I look like Ma


 


A caricature in an Octavia Spencer movie


A nutcase like Stephen King’s Mr Toomey


I thought I was a horror writer


But it seems


I will only ever be


A sassy black woman meme


 


Your racism sewed up tight


Tattered at the seams


It holds up your privilege white


Makes black folks wrong


And you always right


 


Nina Simone is dead


but her bad reputation lives on


Bad for being a domestic violence victim


Who held her head up too long


Looked too strong


And showed too much personal


Pain


In her song


A woman done wrong


But like my Mama


She was Black


So you never see pain


Just drama