“Don’t let me be misunderstood”: Nina Simone’s Africana Womanism

I appreciated reading “Don’t let me be misunderstood”: Nina Simone’s Africana Womanism by Jasmine A. Mena. I think that this reading really helped me understand what Nina Simone was trying to say through her songs, as well as her emotions in it. I liked the fact that this article actually took Miss Simone’s songs and decoded them to hear her messages. I never knew that there was such technology that could decipher artist’s lyrics to retrieve messages, because I usually just sit and listen to the song, over and over again so I thought that was interesting to learn.

            Me personally, when I listened to some of her music, I couldn’t quite comprehend what she was saying because of all the metaphors, especially how they were used back in the day compared to now, so this helped me a lot to understand where she was coming from. My favorite part of the article was the actual decoding of which song carried a certain emotion. For example, Mena states “A variety of themes were identified that pertained first and foremost to love, oppression, psychological and emotional vulnerabilities, strengths, and Africana womanist perspectives.”- (254) Nina Simone incorporated so many types of stories of her life in her music, which is what made it so much more powerful.   

            The part that stood out most in this article would have to be the number of emotions they recovered in all forty-four songs. Nina Simone went from feeling in love, to feeling depressed, and feeling suicidal, which is a huge jump in emotions. It wouldn’t matter what she wrote about, it would always have some type emotion behind it, and story of her life. Not too many artists write about what their feeling nowadays, so I think that it is special for her to just come up with it easily.

            Now that I know what Simone’s songs were meant to put out, like for example, women empowerment, and oppression, it makes me enjoy her music much more, because like I stated earlier, I barely understood her lyrics and the metaphors she put out.