One cannot speak of any resistance and liberation movement the world over without acknowledging the pivotal role of women and the brunt that they carry time and again for the greater good of society. The female body and identity has been weaponized against liberation and has always been tied intrinsically to resistance. It is this very aspect that Nina Simone manages to capture and communicate in her song four women.

First, we must explore the character that is Nina Simone through the prism of artistic activism. Nina began her journey as a brilliant concert pianist and songstress in 1954 but it wasn’t until she dove head first into the civil rights movement that she began seeing that her platform was not her own but was a tool to make a change in the society she lived in. This is not to say she lived a life ignorant of the realities of "pre-civil rights movement America" but we see a definite pivot in her art as she began not only talking directly to power but also letting her music, now filled with political rhetoric and strong imagery, be relinquished to the graveyard of 1980’s stardom (during her career resurgence) as it opposed the status quo of the time. Radio stations stopped playing her music and she was rejected and barred from performing in certain places within the United States simply because her music now posed a threat to the powers that were and emboldened those fighting against them.

As if the strong political message was not enough, Nina began to realize the glaring intersections within which Black women navigate oppression. In an interview, she admits to having written the song four women over night but took her months to dare play. When one explores her hesitance parallel to the message in the song, one realizes how blaringly the message breaks the silence that kept many, including Black men, comfortable within the hierarchy of oppression of which Black women historically bore the brunt.

In the song four women, Nina transmutes the aspects and complexities of Black womanhood that were weaponized and used against the oppressed into shields and concepts of protection. She changes their pain to power. She takes them from the corners of whispers, extracts the vile poison they carried and brought them to the fore to display them as exhibitions of beauty and strength. Dynamics they had never embodied before.

In the song Four Women Nina uses poetic stanzas to communicate the lives, struggles and complexities of four Black women archetypes . A common theme travels through the whole song in this form. The stanzas begin with a description of the women’s physical appearance focusing on their skin complexion and their hair. She then gives a commentary on said woman’s social standing and history and ends off the soliloquy with a declaration of each archetypes personhood, as they too change their pain to power. I wouldn’t dare attempt to summarize Ms. Simones work but for the purpose of this article, I will share my interpretation of this phenomenal song. I do suggest you read this piece while listening to the song.

The stage is set for four charecters; Aunt Sarah, Saffronia, Sweet thing and Peaches. All Black woman archetypes living in the back drop of a pre-civil rights American plantation society;

Aunt Sarah is a dark skinned woman who is not generally found attractive due to her big motherly body shape and over-powering nature. She is the "mammy" character whose personality is generally stern and is used as a tool of discipline amongst the slaves. She is the slave closest to the white master family as she is mostly in the house cooking, raising the children and taking care of all of the masters domestic needs. The master trusts her and knows that everyone is terrified of her, including the men, therefore making her one of the greatest tools they possessed.

Saffronia is a yellow-skinned woman with long hair, a yellow bone (as referred to in Black colloquialism). She gives us a signal of the duality of her world by telling us that it is "between two worlds I do belong". Saffronia is telling us that she is of mixed origin, in that time she would have been called a mulatto. Mulatto children were conceived (most times through sexual assault) by Black female slaves and their white masters. These children grew up being despised by the master himself, the master’s wife and their children, yet treated slightly better than the other slaves. Saffronia speaks blatantly about the violence of her conception and existence in the line, “My father was rich and white, he forced my mother late one night”. Her story tells of the painful history of Black women being sexually abused by white men and the lived experiences of the children born of that violence.

Sweet thing is a light-skinned woman with inviting hips, a curvaceous body and fine hair. This description exhibits the conventionally accepted version of black beauty that is steeped in colorism, an ignorant notion that still plagues Black female society in 2024. She knows the extent and power of her sensual beauty. Her language and the way she speaks of herself displays how she has taken the power away from those who used her sensuality and beauty to hurt her and takes ownership of it. One may even go as far as labelling her a sex worker of the day based on the line, “Whose little girl am I? Anyone who has money to buy”, these are the words of a woman unburdened with shame. One who owns her actions and life because in a world where one had little to no control of their own life, the one thing she could control was her sexual activity and she does exactly that.

Peaches is the tough, rough and angry Black woman character. She has suffered insurmountable abuse throughout her life. The tone of her voice tells us she is not to be messed with right off the bat. She is afraid of nothing and speaks truth without fear or favor. There is no manner of abuse that she and her lineage has not endured. You can hear the pain in her gruff voice and threatening tone. Further to the this point of conjecture, Peaches’ name and true self are worlds apart. A juxtaposition of sorts that plays her against her own name, as she will never be a delicate, sweet and timid person as her name insinuates.

The setting of this song is on a plantation in pre-civil rights America but we would be remiss and lacking in greater understanding of the message if we failed to see how these women’s complexities, struggles and pains are still part of the fabric that makes up our society in 2024. Colorism still plagues us on a daily basis, how else would you explain the pandemic of skin bleaching being so rampant in communities of people of color. Legislation is being drafted on a continuous basis in various countries in a bid to illegalize skin bleaching products yet the black market sales of such products is growing at an exponential rate. Twitter is abuzz with debates on colourism so often that it exposes even the most conscious amongst us as ignorant to the realities most Black women face. Hashtags such as #MenAreTrash, devastating news bulletins of femicide and terrifying statistics have become a norm in our lives, women and children still suffer at the hands of rapists and sexual abusers. And as though that is'nt enough, studies show the disproportionality of the pay gap ALL countries in the world. Power dynamics between the races and genders are still lopsided and discriminatory to say the least.

Yet still, through all the perils and strife that the world has to offer, the spirit of Black womanhood endures in hopes of a new dawn.

Four women may have been written many years ago but one thing is for sure, we have to capture the spirit that Ms. Simone wrote this song from. I would imagine that the message she wanted to take forth through this musical art piece would be that we, Black people in general but Black women in particular, need to take revolutionary ownership of all our weaknesses, own the difficult context of our histories, own all our pain, own all the things that were once weaponized against us, cleanse them with a revolutionary fire so we can use them as a torch to raise future generations. Generations who need not endure what we and generations that came before us had to. When one wears their pain and truth as a necklace of pride, then no one can use to shame us.

Hue.