Honey by Imani Thompson (fiction published in 2026) and Magical Realism by Vanessa Angélica-Villarreal (National Book Award Longlisted essay collection published in 2024) both draw on the particular combination of music and academic texts listed below:
- Beyoncé’s 2016 album LEMONADE
- Saidiya Hartman’s 560-page nonfiction debut from 1997 titled Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
- Saidiya Hartman’s 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts”
The fact that these three atoms of Black feminist thought collided in two different works of literature makes me feel wonder. The confluence feels significant and special because how often do details like the ones bulleted below all line up?
- Two different women, both authors with PhDs, who are living in two different cities on separate continents decide to write a book filled with advanced academic theory and pop culture references for the everyday reader.
- The authors both write these books in the 2020s, and although they choose two different genres, many themes overlap.
- Somehow, the authors came to rely on the same combination of works by Beyoncé and Hartman to anchor individual elements inside their own works of literature.
Maybe alignments like this happen a lot, but being in the right conditions to notice feels rare. How I happened to notice was luck: Magical Realism was on my nightstand as my comfort reread and completely present in my mind the same week I picked up the fresh new serial killer novel Honey.
If you’d like to annotate all the Beyoncé and Hartman references in these books, get your pens and tabs out. I’ve listed the chapters and pages below.
ANNOTATION LIST 1: LEMONADE by Beyoncé in Honey
LEMONADE is directly mentioned in Honey by Imani Thompson once, but it’s alluded to several more times via the lemonade-flavored San Pellegrino that’s integral to Ysra’s first murder. The flavor choice is an allusion to LEMONADE by Beyoncé, and the man that dies by drinking the said lemonade in Honey happens to be a no good philandering professor. The LEMONADE allusion infuses the pages of Honey with the album’s likeminded themes of rage, betrayal, and violence.
What’s more, LEMONADE is a significant part of Honey’s origin story. In an Instagram Live interview on May 30th hosted by @thatreadingjawn (Dr. Symone), Imani Thompson explains the first conversation she had about the novel, which occurred at a cafe with her mom. Before mom and daughter began discussing ideas for the book and title, they had been talking about LEMONADE by Beyoncé. Thompson preserved that element of the conversation with the nod to the album in the first murder scene and again later by mentioning the album in another chapter.
Annotation List
- From the first line of the intro: “The bee found its own way to the lemonade.”
- Part I, Chapter I, p 26: “He sips a Sanpellegrino, lemon, and doesn’t acknowledge Yrsa’s existence.” & “Richardson, sip, sip, sipping his Sanpellegrino.”
- Part I, Chapter I, p 28: “The bee, smelling for sugar, flies to the edge of the Sanpellegrino.” AND “She knocks the bee into his lemonade.”
- Part I, Chapter I, p 29: “It had taken her by surprise at first, as he sat there and took that sip sip sip of his Sanpellegrino. She wasn’t sure if she’d drowned the bee. If its stinger would still be intact to sting!”
- Part I, Chapter I, p 33: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It is important for a woman to apologize as much as possible, but—the bee found its own way to the lemonade.”
- Part II, Chapter I, p 126: ““I mean Beyoncé’s Lemonade is all about this, no? Like, she explores her own marriage and Jay-Z’s cheating, but she does it through the legacy of enslavement—and she plays up to the stereotypes of the crazy, angry black woman.”
- Part II, Chapter V, p 157: “It’s lemonade hot.”
ANNOTATION LIST 2: LEMONADE by Beyoncé in Magical Realism
LEMONADE comes up profoundly in one essay of Magical Realism, and it comes up again (indirectly) in a different essay. See below.
- The essay “Volver, Volver” comes in 8 parts. The fourth part, which runs from p 212-214, focuses on LEMONADE by Beyoncé, starting with a quote from “6 INCH.” Villarreal focuses primarily on this song. For 3 pages, Villarreal refers to other aspects of the LEMONADE too, simultaneously analyzing the album as “speculative nonfiction” and speaking about her own cheating-husband story.
- Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance (a set list that had 5 songs from LEMONADE) and subsequent film Homecoming are mentioned on page 319 in the essay “The Uses of Fantasy” in the section titled “Ojalá.”
ANNOTATION LIST 3: Scenes of Subjection and “Venus in Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman in Honey
- Part I, Chapter III, p 48: Ysra and her advisor Syed talk about her dissertation, which we learn later interrogates aspects of Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection.
- Part I, Chapter VII, p 90-91: Ysra reads Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection in a cafe.
- Part II, Chapter II, p 136: Ysra reads Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” at her college library.
- Part II, Chapter IV, p 149: Ysra reads her advisers comments on her dissertation about revisiting an idea from Scenes of Subjection.
- Part II, Chapter XIII, p 239: Ysra thinks about the “grammar of violence” from Scenes of Subjection.
- Part II, Chapter XIV, p 247: Ysra reads what’s she’s written about Scenes of Subjection in there methodology document.
- Part II, Chapter XVII, p 297: Ysra considers “the terror of the mundane” from Scenes of Subjection.
- Part II, Chapter XIX, p 299: Ysra quotes from Scenes of Subjection.
ANNOTATION LIST 4: Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman and Venus in Two Acts in Magical Realism
- The first time Saidiya Hartman comes up in Magical Realism it is on page 36 in the essay “After the World-Breaking, the World-Building.” Villarreal introduces and explains “critical fabulation” from Hartman’s 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts.”
- Hundreds of pages later in the essay “In the Shadow of the Wolf,” Scenes of Subjection appears in the section of the essay titled “‘I’M REALLY SAD, THEREFORE EVERYONE MUST DIE’–SOLAS, PROBABLY.” The mention occurs on page 273.
Happy annotating!
Annotate With Sara 