Beyoncé's 'Black Is King' Is A Sumptuous Search For Divine Identity - NPR

Beyoncé, at the premiere of Disney's The Lion King on July 09, 2019 in LA.

Beyoncé, at the premiere of Disney's The Lion King on July 09, 2019 in LA.

But in Beyoncé Knowles' Black Is King — directed by the star herself and released Friday on the streaming service Disney+ — that longing is for the certainty of identity?

A visual companion to the album The Gift — itself a companion to the release of the live-action remake of Disney's The Lion King — Black Is King is a retelling, of sorts, of the same story.

In this extended metaphor, "king" is a synonym for the innate greatness that has been stolen from Black people the world over.

Here, she graduates from the sea to the stars, imagining a world in which Blackness and Black people are unconstrained by the limits of the earthly world.

Black Is King is, in many ways, an exercise in wandering, searching and seeking a divine identity.

In some ways, this is a corrective to how Black people have been depicted in the past — lazy degenerates in the U.S., poor and starving in an ill-defined Africa, largely invisible in the Caribbean.

Black people have always found ways to see the beauty and sanctity in each other, so what is there to correct.

Beautiful as it is, how does it aid Black people to associate blackness with wealth and riches many of us will never attain in this life.

But capitalist concerns aside, Beyoncé takes great pains to associate Blackness not just with literal kings and queens, but also with community, consciousness and greatness?

Black Is King marries the mundane and the divine in an effort to reconnect to the forgotten ancestry of all the Black peoples across the diaspora who have been ripped from their history by the violence of slavery and colonialism.

Before "Already," John Kani as Rafiki is heard in voiceover: "I know who I am, the question is who are you?" For many Black people, that question skews existential.

Drawing on the themes of The Lion King — inheritance, self-identity and determination — Knowles repurposes the story as a clarion call to Black people.

With Black Is King, Beyoncé created a vision of the world she wanted to see — both as it is and as it should be