“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”: Nina Simone’s Theater of Invisibility

To find another and truer sexual self-image the black woman must turn to the domain of music and America’s black female vocalists, who suggest a composite figure of ironical grace. The singer is likely closer to the poetry of black female sexual experience than we might think, not so much, interestingly enough, in the words of her music but in the sense of dramatic confrontation between ego and the world that the vocalist herself embodies…The Burkean pentad of fiction—agent, agency, act, scene, and purpose as the principal elements involved in the human drama—is compressed in the singer into a living body, insinuating itself through a material scene, and in the dance of motives, in which the motor behavior, the changes of countenance, the vocal dynamics, the calibration of gesture and nuance in relationship to a formal object—the song itself—is a precise demonstration of the subject turning in fully conscious knowledge of her own resources toward her object. In this instance of being-for-self, it does not matter that the vocalist is ‘entertaining’ under American skies because the woman, in her particular and vivid thereness, is an unalterable and discrete moment of self-knowledge. The singer is a good example of ‘double consciousness’ in action. We lay hold of a metaphor of commanding female sexuality with the singer who celebrates, chides, embraces, inquires into, controls her womanhood through the eloquence of form that she both makes use of and brings into being (emphasis added).

—Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words”

Masking is a play upon possibility and ours is a society in which possibilities are many. When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.

—Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”

I laughs too, but I moans too.

—Old Ex-slave Woman, Invisible Man

Let’s face it, Nina Simone is a marked woman. But of those “confounded identities” by which she is marked as she stands before her audience, of the “bizarre axiological ground” which would inhume her, she loosened the clay and fashioned masks to make herself a work of art, a “composite figure of ironical grace,” playing upon possibility in the drama that is American life—at home and abroad—and in so doing unburied herself as a tricky agent.¹ On the wall of her dressing room you will find hanging several costumes—that of “Peaches,” “Pirate Jenny,” “Little Girl Blue,” “Sephronia,” “Sweet Thing,” “See Line Woman,” “The Other Woman,” “Sister Sadie,” and “Aunt Sarah.” You will notice a sequined evening gown, a black turtleneck and slacks, a batik-print bou bou, a crocheted fishnet tube top, a kente cloth wrap, and a black cocktail dress. On the dresser will rest a row of mannequin heads with mod bob wigs—graduated, cropped, and flipped—and in the drawer a pile of head wraps from Senegal and Barbados, a beret from Paris, a wide-brimmed straw hat, a bottle of Sta So Fro, and a pick. In the other drawer hides several pairs of false eyelashes, a bottle of kohl, a tube of Maybelline in fire engine red, and a bottle of French perfume. A carved teak box from Liberia overflows with brass, gold, copper, silver, cloth, and beaded necklaces, bangles and earrings, new and antique, from four or five continents. With these props, she plays out “productive ambivalence” in phantasmagorically intoxicating and unpredictable spectacles, dramas that shine a spotlight on the interstitial black hole of black female subjectivity, indeed, enactments of double consciousness that Ralph Ellison might describe as “illuminating the blackness of . . . invisibility” and “[making] poetry out of being invisible.” ²

Called by Stokely Carmichael the “true singer of the civil rights movement,” Dr. Nina Simone is well known as a global icon of “protest music” whose anger and pathos carry hard-hitting critiques of injustice (Simone and Cleary 98).³ Without arguing against this characterization, I do want to pose an unconventional view that Simone’s performances are, in fact, significantly comic in nature, and that much of the...