In Zoe Saldana’s recent Allure interview, the Afro-Latina actress has once again stated that she is unconcerned with any backlash she receives for playing legendary singer and activist Nina Simone. In a perplexing statement, she compares her controversial casting as “The High Priestess of Soul” to Elizabeth Taylor playing Egyptian Queen Cleopatra VII in the 1960s.
“Let me tell you, if Elizabeth Taylor can be Cleopatra, I can be Nina — I’m sorry,” Saldana, 34, said unrepentantly. “It doesn’t matter how much backlash I will get for it. I will honor and respect my black community because that’s who I am.”
Who Saldana is may be clear to her, but her understanding of who Nina Simone was and from where the criticism stems appears to be minimal.
Saldana: Out of touch with African-American audiences?
Contrary to Saldana’s personal beliefs, the vast majority of observers who have weighed in on director Cynthia Mort’s decision to cast Saldana, from India.Arie to Nina Simone’s daughter, Simone Kelly, are black and view it as the ultimate show of disrespect. Not only because it is an aesthetically horrific choice that relies on blackface and prosthetics to pull off, but because Nina’s rich, dark skin, kinky hair and full lips shaped her life’s experiences, subsequently shaping her music.
Nina Simone would not have been able to conjure “Mississippi Goddam” and “Four Women” from the depths of her soul had she been born with more European features and straighter hair.
Further, it is both fitting and unsettling for Saldana to compare herself to Taylor. Cleopatra, whose black African heritage has been passionately argued for and against, has been described as both “tawny” by Shakespeare and a “negress” in some historical texts. For Saldana to claim that casting the extremely pale Elizabeth Taylor to play her somehow justifies her own misguided role as Nina Simone is a slap in the face of the black community she claims to represent.
Her history of ignoring racial history
And this is not Saldana’s first time brushing off criticism as inconsequential.
“What keeps me focused and what kept me from getting stressed from being hurt by the comments is I’m doing it for my sisters, I’m doing it for my brothers, and I don’t care who tells me I am not this and I am not that. I know who I am, and I know what Nina Simone means to me,” Saldana said in an interview with HipHollywood.com.
“I can only rely on that and maintain as much humility as possible, so that when I have to face the world and we have to then give the movie to the world to see, and share it with them, that if it comes back in . . . a negative fashion or positive, I’m gonna keep my chin up. And Nina was like that too. I did it all out of love for my people and my pride of being a black woman and a Latina woman and an American woman, and that’s my truth.”
Colorist privilege with questionable consequences
That curious blend of arrogance and accessibility seems to be the root of criticism aimed at Saldana. She is not embracing her community; she is saying through her dismissiveness that how we feel doesn’t matter. By ignoring the hurt of Nina’s family and the pain of black women who have been deemed too dark, too heavy, too ugly to be portrayed on film as anything other than maids, slaves, and whores, Saldana becomes part of the problem.
Nina Simone was authenticity personified; she would absolutely not appreciate being portrayed by someone willfully complicit in the erasure of black women in film and using Hollywood’s history of racist casting decisions as justification. And if she means so much to Saldana, one would think that the actor understood this. Racism, a battle that scarred Nina, caused her to seek artistic asylum in Europe where her talent would be appreciated and honored for the amazing gift that it was and remains today.
She didn’t get to use colorist privilege as a means to step in and out of blackness. She didn’t get to wear her complexion like a convenient accessory – nor did she want to. The fact that a black actress would assist Hollywood, in all of its white supremacist glory, to finally bend Nina’s image to its will — into something apparently more palatable for white masses — is far from an achievement.
In fact, it can easily be viewed as a failure.
Nina would not be happy
This is the reason why with every statement, pregnant with self-entitlement and self-congratulation, that Zoe Saldana makes, she alienates more fans and critics in the black community. Elizabeth Taylor playing Cleopatra was not viewed as something to be proud of and neither is the white-washing of Nina Simone.
When speaking on being denied entrance into Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music to train as the world’s first black classical pianist because of the institutionalized racism that so defined the United States, Nina Simone said with tears in her eyes, “Yes, I regret it. I think I would have been happy. I’m not very happy now.”
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of “The High Priestess of Soul” must be aware that Zoe Saldana is disrespecting her legacy by placing belief in her own talent above the visual authenticity necessary to tell such a powerful story. And I can easily envision Nina saying those very same words in response to knowing that the Afro-Latina actor cast to portray her is flippantly using historical Hollywood racism to justify the racist erasure of black women through colorist casting:
“I think I would have been happy. I’m not very happy now.”