The controversy over whether Zoe Saldana should play Nina Simone in an upcoming biopic is really heating up. A story that first broke on the black entertainment blog Shadow & Act, many were shocked when it was revealed that Saldana had been cast in the leading role of the first film about the beloved jazz singer and pianist — a project with no involvement from her family.
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The contentious discussions that were spawned by the announcement ranged from debates over who should play the iconic Simone instead of Saldana (who many think neither looks like Simone nor has her musical chops), to whether critics are discriminating against Zoe for being “too light.”
In an essay republished on theGrio from our partner site, Clutch Magazine, Yesha Callahan writes: “Many people have written posts, tweets and blogs about Saldana not having dark enough skin, ‘blacker’ features, or resembling Nina Simone. Unfortunately, not everyone can be Halle Berry as Dorothy Dandridge. Just because she’s not in the latest Tyler Perry movie… doesn’t make her any less black than the next black actress.”
As radical as this idea may seem, Zoe has at least one fan who publicly agrees with this sentiment in the entertainment industry. In an interview with the black women’s web site Hello Beautiful, Jill Scott supported the idea that Saldana should play Simone, based on her acting abilities alone.
“Zoe is an incredible actress,” Scott told the online outlet. “I think that there should be some work done, like a prosthetic nose would be helpful and definitely some darker makeup. If Forest Whitaker can become darker in The Last King Of Scotland then I believe Nina should be treated with that respect.
“[Simone] was very adamant about her color, about her nose, about her shape and herself,” Scott continued, “and there needs to be some homage paid to that.”
Definitely true. But for this film, how homage is paid to Nina Simone’s image of beauty especially matters.
Symbolism is all-important in film. It is a visual medium; thus, the image on the screen, and the efforts that go into creating that vision, speak louder than the words coming from the actors’ lips or the reasoning in the producers’ minds regarding their choices.
Nina Simone stood for the celebration of the dark brown woman of African descent — a celebration that is all too rare. Thus, the selection of a lighter woman to tell her story could summarily negate both her message and the real history of the messenger.
Surely, Scott means well by making this suggestion. Saldana is a good actress. And she would not be the first to wear a prosthetic nose, as Nicole Kidman famously did in her Oscar-winning role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. But making a black actress look “blacker” to play a black woman raises social issues that Simone herself faced head on. This choice, if made by Nina’s biopic producers, would instead evade them.
Hollywood already prefers Saldana, who is a black Latina, when it comes to portraying African-American women. This became evident when she snagged the role of Lt. Uhura in the Star Strek reboot.
Yes, Saldana is talented and on that basis deserves the Simone role. But, the story of Nina Simone is not just fodder for a blockbuster. Saldana has been able to earn the star-status that puts her in the running to be cast, because she can draw box office dollars. This is directly related to our culture’s preference for lighter-complexioned blacks, and gives Zoe an edge over actresses who really look like Nina.
This has been going on in Hollywood since the days of Lena Horne. As much as we all love Lena, this unfair underestimation of black women of deeper browns is something Simone used her platform to decry.
Nina Simone famously sang a song about this devastating phenomenon, and how it crushes black women’s self esteem, called Images (Of a Wayward Soul). Her haunting performance is based on the lines of a poem called No Images by Waring Cuney:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A0QmQxrk8o
She does not know her beauty
She thinks her brown glory
If she could dance naked under palm trees
And see her image in the river she would know
Yes, she would know
But there are no palm trees in the street
No palm trees in the street
And dishwater gives back no image
Nina Simone once revealed that, “the song was for the West Indian servant women who had come to toil in America but who would never know their true beauty in such an oppressive society,” according to the poetry journal Beltway. Apparently, the injustice this archetypal black woman faced in a poem penned in the ’20s is just as virulent today.
Even the biopic of Nina Simone’s life may fail to reflect her accurate image, if the filmmakers and their apologists have their way.
Ideally, there would be a level playing field for all actresses of color, and these kinds of skin tone choices would not matter. The cold reality that dashes our dreams of parity is that a large portion of black people we see in media — especially women — are lighter-skinned, bi- or multi-racial, or not of African-American descent, like Saldana. Her Dominican ancestry likely includes a higher percentage of non-African genes than that of the average black American woman, making her more appealing to producers and mainstream audiences because she — however subtly — better reflects them.
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Simone was a warrior against this kind of discrimination. If Saldana needs to essentially wear blackface to play Nina in a movie about her life, the next film about Dr. King should include a scene of him conversing with “Amos ‘n’ Andy.”
Blackface was used in minstrelsy to demean and dehumanize blacks. The stereotypical caricatures portrayed by whites who became blacks with shoe polish and props was a form of racist entertainment that allowed mainstream audiences to mock blacks without actually having to look at them. It’s sad that many in Hollywood don’t want to look at darker-skinned black women today. That is exactly why echoes of this historic tool of oppression should not be linked to this black woman’s story.
Not only does it emphasize the chilling bias in entertainment against casting darker blacks that persists, it reminds black women that people can’t accept them the way many of them are — not light, mixed or foreign. Just brown with thicker features — just like Nina Simone. As blackface humiliated all African-Americans, darkening Zoe Saldana would be an insult to black women with clearly African features.
Something has got to change. We don’t want to play these reindeer games when it comes to skin tone. But, when first lady Michelle Obama had to spend the first part of her husband’s term plagued by images of her in Google search that merged her face with that of a monkey (until the site that hosted it took it down), it seems clear that society has not progressed very far in terms of accepting darker black women as equally beautiful.
Note that this did not happen for President Obama to the same degree. The monkey picture of Michelle was nearly ubiquitous. It came up at the very top of her image searches; it was used as people’s avatars. No need to remind you who is bi-racial and who is of duskier appearance.
Nina Simone continues to thrill audiences with her voice, her jazz sound and her Afrocentric style, partly because she achieved her artistic goals despite this kind of discrimination. If having chosen Saldana, film producers darken her tone in echoes of minstrelsy, they will be telling black women that a woman who looks like Nina Simone is not good enough to portray Nina Simone. They will be missing the point of Nina Simone’s life — a big part of what makes her life perennially compelling to a racial rainbow of fans.
If Nina Simone’s biopic producers are that ignorant of these ramifications, I would not trust the veracity of any story they seek to tell about her life.
Follow Alexis Garrett Stodghill on Twitter at @lexisb.