GRIEF ILLUSTRATED // Nina Simone in Her Feelings
GRIEF ILLUSTRATED // Nina Simone in Her Feelings
Earlier posts in the GRIEF ILLUSTRATED category—in which we reflect on visual, phonic and other-sensory expressions of sorrow and loss—include a look at collage, letterpress, and John Coltrane’s funeral.
“What feeling is grief?,” someone asked me last week.
”All the feelings,” I said immediately, instinctively, and sure.1
The answer continued to ring true, and as I sat with it, a million little filaments of memory and experience confirmed it.
Like, for instance, the video representation of Nina Simone at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. A few years prior to this particular iteration of the monumental concert series at the foot of the Alps, Ms. Simone had left her abusive husband, tried somewhat unsuccessfully to make a home abroad, and, importantly, began shifting to “prioritize activism in her music over radio-friendly fare.”2 Though her voice and her playing here are characteristically commanding, precise, and evocative, she was purportedly broke and alone, and, understandably, awash in all of it.
In this clip, singing the incredibly odd cultural artifact that is the internationally covered 1974 song, “Feelings,” she appears mostly to be feeling a lot of feelings—maybe even all the feelings.
What do you think?
I felt sure, yes, but I felt sure of my own read on it rather than, let’s say, some universal definition. After sharing my answer, I asked the person what feelings they thought were contained in grief and from there we went all kinds of other places together. The reason for this footnote is: I don’t purport to be an expert on much—and certainly not something as individual and intimate as grief.
Per Vanessa Okoth-Obbo in “20 Iconic Festival Sets” in The Guardian, July 2020.