Late in his book about Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein asks, ‘Why must the reader put up with the writer’s fantasies?’ (p. 162). Behind this sharp observation is a thesis that has been building throughout the preceding pages. An artist leaves the world their work to make of it what they will. When an artist has as powerful an impact and as lasting a legacy as Nina Simone, those members of her listening community who fashion themselves as writers—critics, commentators, biographers, and academics—do their best to make sense of it, to explain it to themselves and to others, to make their own smaller impact, and to hope perhaps that their interpretations will have some lasting effect. In doing so, they are as likely to reveal themselves as they are their subjects. What do such commentators project onto their subjects? How can we be sure that the truths posited by critics and fans about artists would be the truths the artists would posit? Can we trust biographers and scholars to be honest about the role of fantasy in their work?
Academia trains writers to remove themselves and their desires from their texts, to better focus on their subjects and to achieve that much-vaunted objectivity. When, as has increasingly been the case, they veer from that path to become more entangled in the foliage of intersubjectivity, they may face censure. ‘It is a curious thing’, Stein writes, ‘that academic writing often seems most self-indulgent at the moments it is being honest about its motives’ (p. 30). When I first encountered that sentence near the start of Fantasies of Nina Simone, it heightened a sense of defensiveness and justification that I felt had been haunting the introduction. In his brilliant opening pages, Stein had asked us to ‘listen for the ways Nina Simone signifies’, then laid them out for us with enviable panache. He’d already sold me on his approach, and I wasn’t seeking the subsequent justification for it. But I realised that this was also down to a recent change in my writing and reading practices and preferences, and no doubt my own fantasies of Nina Simone. Stein needed to cater for others less primed for his approach.
As Stein explains, fantasy is what ‘animates’ his study, fantasy as explored ‘by psychoanalysts, psychologists, and others in conversation with them’ (p. 5). There’s a rich array of additional theoretical and practical frameworks informing the book, including critical theory, affect theory, and critical race studies. Happily, Stein is a writer who is keen to make sure we follow the many strands he weaves together. His pages flow. He also engages with an impressive array of literature on Simone, something others in the growing field of Simone Studies would do well to emulate.
What are the fantasies in question? Some are Simone’s own fantasies, the existence and meaning of which may elude us, but which, Stein argues, are crucial to any attempt to do the artist justice. What was Simone searching for as she moved from the Great American Songbook to the new songbooks of rock and pop writers in the late 1960s, then to the rhythms and refrains of Africa and the Caribbean in subsequent decades? If Stein’s answer of ‘something’ strikes you as tantalisingly vague, you really need to read the deft ways he theorises ‘something’. The existence of, and search for, that something is more important than what it led to.
Acknowledging the existence of fantasies and desires as processes that an artist works her way through is similarly more important than pinning down definitive meanings. Such meanings are replete with the projections of our own fantasies, which is another strand Stein explores. All those articles, books, films, memes, soundbites, reissues, and accessories that have emerged in the two decades since Simone died – all that attention that we thought we were paying her – ultimately mark out the space of a collective fantasy.
Stein is interested in the gap between Simone’s fantasies and those who wish to speak about or for her. We may find her a motivational figure, but what did she have to motivate her fears, desires, and ambitions? ‘Nina Simone, in the wake of any number of significant personal setbacks, didn’t have among her historically available resources a Nina Simone T-shirt to help set and sustain the atmosphere of her mood’ (p. 28).
I’ve said that Stein is a good guide to the theories and fantasies he draws upon. One reason for the book’s dynamic flow is the innovative method of providing fragments rather than named chapters. These range from a paragraph to several pages long. Each is a thoughtfully composed miniature that builds on what has gone before and prepares the reader for what’s coming. I liked this style very much, finding it a convincing response to how one grapples with amorphous things like fantasy, making sense of a cultural icon, being open about one’s positionality, and trying to aim for an open account rather than a closing down, ultimately how one tries ‘to write [one’s] way into’ a topic (p. 30).
Stein is excellent at picking up tropes that recur in Simone’s songs and interviews (including the long one that provided material for her autobiography). He traces these across a wide and well-curated set of examples. There’s some really close listening (and viewing) here, and I came away from the book with many new ways of thinking about material I thought I knew well. Through Stein’s generous referencing of others, I also discovered work about Simone with which I was unfamiliar and which I look forward to exploring.
Stein observes that ‘the shelf of books about Nina Simone grows heavy’ (p. 3). I feel that the shelf isn’t heavy enough! But even if Simone Studies has well and truly taken off, it is undoubtedly richer for the addition of this book. Any serious work that follows it will need to grapple with the questions it raises about who we want Nina Simone to be, what we want from her, and how we’ve used her to authenticate ourselves.
