Kalamazoo author remembers Nina Simone in unique literary form

Nina Simone, one of the most arresting voices in 20th century music, is one of those people who are just impossible to capture in one dimension. That’s why scholar and poet Shonda Buchanan created a new approach for her book, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone. Buchanan, an Assistant Professor of English at Western Michigan University, joined Stateside to discuss how she blended poetry, memoir, and historical reflection in her pursuit of the internal spirit of Nina Simone.

In The Lost Songs, Buchanan uses poetry to tell the chronology of Simone’s life, starting with the singer’s ancestors and her childhood in North Carolina, and moving through Simone’s music career and her self-imposed exile to Liberia and Europe.

“I was always thinking about where she stood,” Buchanan said, describing her writing process. “The feet on the soil. And then from where she stood, where she was born, where she dropped, where her ancestors dropped. How do you make the music of that? How do you make the poetry of that landscape?”

Some of Buchanan’s poems feel like prayers, some like letters, and others like a conversation between the singer and the poet. In addition to time and space, the poems move through first, second, and third person.

“There’s a cacophony in the discussion,” Buchanan said.

Simone clashed constantly with the music industry, Buchanan said, especially when she felt that their commercial aims weakened her ability to be a voice for the civil rights movement. As an example, Buchanan described Simone being made to perform “I Loves You, Porgy” at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, surrounded by Hefner’s Bunnies.

“What a moment,” Buchanan said. “How is it that she got here in this moment where it’s acceptable for her to sing this song, which the industry loved and they championed? But they muted it by that moment.”

Buchanan has had her own clash with the music industry as a young journalist. She had convinced Simone’s manager to allow her to interview the singer in Paris. After scraping together the travel funds and finding housing with a friend, Buchanan arrived in Paris to discover that the manager would not return her calls.

“Three or four days before I was supposed to leave,” Buchanan remembered, “He calls me and he says, ‘Hey, can you meet me in the Latin Quarter?’”

In the Metro on her way to meet him, Buchanan could not stop thinking about Simone’s own distrust of everyone in her entourage. At the end of Buchanan’s conversation with the manager, he revealed that Simone was in fact in the south of France, and that she would require payment for the interview — something Buchanan’s small paper could not provide. Instead of an interview, Buchanan returned home with a somber reflection on the search for Nina Simone.

“I am under no illusion that she was a perfect woman,” Buchanan told Stateside. “But I would have been grateful to just glean the energy… This book is my way of saying: Even though I wasn’t physically in the presence of greatness, I’ve been following her.”

You can hear the full conversation, including a reading of two poems by the author, on the podcast. Shonda Buchanan will be reading from The Lost Songs of Nina Simone at Schuler Books in Grand Rapids on June 18.