Jamilah Lemieux

Writer/Cultural Critic・@jamilahlemieux

To our beloved sister, Mary Jane Blige:

I’ve had the privilege of interviewing you twice; once, for a Facebook Live conversation in 2017 and again, in 2019, for a Self cover story. I’m not someone who gets starstruck or who is terribly concerned with the lives of celebrities, but you were–and are–different. I tried to share some of this in our second conversation, but I don’t think I quite had the words.
It’s entirely possible that you’ll never know just how much you mean to Black women. Sure, other folks have supported you throughout your entire career, but they can’t love you like we love you.

You belong to an elite club of sisters with voices who have provided soundtracks for the lives of Black women and girls spanning multiple generations, a list that includes the likes of Bessie, Billie, Nina, Ella, Aretha, Patti and Whitney before you, one that came to welcome the likes of you, Mariah and Toni at the top of the 1990s and would add Beyonce a decade later.

But for as much as we honor or even ‘stan’ those other sisters, what we have with you is unique. Special. Rare.

Mary, you’ve given us so much more than just music. Your transparency about the difficulties on your journey and how you have allowed us to experience your triumphs and your heartbreaks with you. The ways that your songs about joy, and pain, and love, and self-acceptance speak to us with the sort of intimate understanding that only a true sister friend can offer, and how you remind us--and the world--how Black women can be incredibly vulnerable and powerful all at the same time.

No matter what you accomplish professionally, you have never ceased to feel like one of us.

As you told me yourself, your concerts are like a form of therapy. We come together, we cry, we laugh, we sing and we heal, feeling blessed just to share space with the woman who has held a mirror to the most tender parts of ourselves for the past thirty years.

I pray that your 50th year brings you every bit of joy and peace you can access, and more than anything, that the love that Black women have for you surrounds you wherever you go. That you feel what we feel for you deep inside, that you recognize that we have your back always, and that you have literally given us life.

We love you always,

Jamilah Lemieux

Love Letters