Or 4 ways to Celebrate the 4th 😉

Featured Photo by Autumn Goodman on Unsplash

Here at Black Book Lady we will celebrate the queen’s birthday in 3 weeks! Want some ideas that don’t involve endless scrolling and perfectionism? Here you go…

1- Watch Black is King and find the layered narratives. #BIK is a reimagining of The Lion King, yes. But it is much more… Beyoncé is Kaleidoscopic. She is always telling more than one story. She is always asking us to look more closely and find different combinations. She does this sonically and visually. In this film, she is telling a range of stories that have informed Disney’s Lion King franchise. Beyoncé is saying that the African diaspora has many tales of royalty, destiny, ancestral hopes, and lions that warrant our attention. As the PhDiva, Khirsten L. Scott and I agreed a few weeks back, there’s the public Carter persona, the Gullah seaside survivors line, the lion of Judah story with connections of Black babies in danger back to Moses, and a bunch of blue lion myth threads I picked up.

2- Beyoncé is Kinfolk. Her love for her family and the people she comes from is a constant theme in her work. So one of the things I do is watch Solange do her thing. Solange’s visual game is breathtaking and these sisters love celebrating together.

3- Beyoncé is Knowledgable. I love her last ten years of explicit attention to literary arts, history, and Black diaspora experiences. I especially love knowing that she reads the work of Black womxn. Celebrate her birthday by doing the same. By 9/4 I’ll be deep into Deesha Phillyaw’s The Secret Lives of Church Ladies and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. Right now I am enjoying Tender. I can’t wait to hear what other folks are reading!

4- Adorn yourself and bask in your own beauty – inside and out. I keep a Pinterest board of visuals that remind me to enjoy the beauty of my existence. What do you do to remind yourself that you deserve the protection of all the knights, rooks, and bishops around you? What do you do to remember that in this chess game of life “the king is you”?

I am hoping to have so many pieces of news to share over the next month. In the mean time I’ll celebrate birthday season in my own household and keep thanking God for the many blessings in my life. What are you celebrating?