Day 2: A Letter to Nina Simone

The following is a letter written to Eunice Waymon, better known as Nina Simone. It is inspired by her internal struggle between identities as portrayed in the Netflix documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?”

Dear Eunice,

I can’t help but wonder: can we maintain more than one identity? If we can, for how long?

Indeed, we cannot quantify identity as of the present, and answering this question is rather problematic. Assuming we all have one true identity, my first question can be rephrased as “can we maintain an identity that is not our own? “I suppose we all have had moments where we had to adopt another unpleasant persona to please a certain audience. Humans must have the capacity to adopt other identities.

Perhaps the answer to the next question partially answers Angelou’s question, “What happened, Miss Simone?”Your daughter said in your interview that the demons, part of your identity, would haunt you when you left the stage. Were you yourself when you performed? Did you start to enjoy performing less because when you did, you performed another identity? No actor can live every second of his whole life in character, so there must be a limit to our capacity to pretend. If performing another identity push you over the edge, when was the critical point? Can we predict that critical point? These are questions that I cannot ignore, but can’t answer either.

Best wishes, wherever you are,

Karen

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