“A bad joke”: The day Nina Simone fled from America to Liberia
In familiar conversations about the best musical decades, the 1960s are often painted as a capsule of pure, unmatched talent, sparking never-lived memories of times when everything felt palpable. In these dreamscapes, the music is a conduit for feeling your most alive, and while this was true in many corners, the rest, as Nina Simone once recalled, was nothing more than the marred symptoms of a fractured society.
When we think of Simone’s legacy today, reflections often cover how her political and societal views infiltrated her art, intertwined by the drive to voice issues for those who never had such pleasures. However, it’s sometimes easy to overlook how Simone was able to achieve such a feat when everything around her seemed to be falling apart. “The America I’d dreamed of through the sixties seemed a bad joke now,” she wrote in her memoir, I Put a Spell on You.
In Simone’s eyes, America was faltering under the leadership of Richard Nixon, and, in the music industry, disco had begun to replace the “black revolution”, erasing all its hard work with sounds and musings about far less-reaching sentiments. At the same time, things in Simone’s personal life didn’t seem to make sense either, leading to a crucial decision in the mid-1970s after a chance offer from Miriam Makeba brought her to Monrovia, Liberia.
According to Simone, the move was marked by immense curiosity, not just about how liberating it would feel leaving a broken America but the possibilities that faced her in a new country. This is evidenced by some of her more off-kilter musings in her memoir, particularly the part that saw her wondering about finding “some peace there, or a husband”, or, more simply, “Maybe it would be like going home.”
According to various reports and interviews with the singer, the move was akin to freedom and entrapment, with Liberia providing a haven that made her feel lighter and more connected than she could ever dream of feeling somewhere as limiting as America. America, which thrived on perpetuating its own racial prejudices with politics that showed no promising signs of catching up, had long disappeared, with Liberia matching Simone’s desires to live and exist in tandem with her own thoughts and feelings.
“I am keenly aware that I’ve entered a world that I had dreamed of all my life, and that it is a perfect world,” Simone uttered dreamily in a radio interview featured in What Happened, Miss Simone?, per Guernica. She said that America had become a “dream that I had and had worked myself out of because I toiled for so long in that place, in that prison,” adding, “And now I’m home, now I’m free.”
Simone’s euphoria stemmed from a sudden ability to shed herself from the weighty burden of living as a musician while being endlessly exposed to the good, the bad, and the ugly of existing in a system determined to destroy its Black communities. In Liberia, Simone could enjoy her own celebrity without these insidious characteristics and allow herself to indulge in the principles of belonging, without having to explain herself or hold herself a certain way to be seen.
As a result, her quest to tick three main boxes—peace, love, and home—paid off in her own ways, even if some chapters were tainted by a different kind of ambiguity, the kind rooted in immense hedonism and a mind at full capacity, brimming with new purpose in the haze of a fuller life. These challenges appeared more as manifestations of sudden erraticism, many far lighter than what America could concede, but nonetheless signals of a legend in metamorphosis, searching for a world that felt closer to her heart.
