Review

Culture

Music

Race

12 April 2024

6 min read

Beyoncé’s breaking barriers

Cowboy Carter sees the star crack her whip in the temple of the music industry.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Side by side, two rodeo riders on horses trot toward the camera. One is Beyonce, the other a cowboy

Beyoncé at the Houston Rodeo.

Beyoncé.com

I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat with flashbacks of one terrible swimming lesson at school. I had accidentally forgotten to forget my kit, so was forced to face not only the freezing water, but the spouting of ignorant prejudice from my teacher.

“Kandiah, you’re useless,” he said, as I heaved myself out of the pool at the end of the lesson. “Although I guess it’s not your fault you can’t float like the white children. Your bones are heavier. Look at the Olympics – you never see black and Asian swimmers, do you?”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, like the fish out of water I suppose I was, but inside I was seething.

Being told I couldn’t do something made me all the more determined to do it. Back in I jumped.

Last week, in another splash aimed at proving people wrong, Beyoncé’s magnificent album “Cowboy Carter” became the first album by a black woman to top the country charts.

On her Instagram feed she said: “the criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me.”

It was a brave move. Back in 2016, she had received heated and hate-filled reactions when she performed her song Daddy Issues at the 50th Country Music Association Awards with the country music group Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks. Many country music fans were outraged, calling it an act of cultural appropriation. One response on social media put it starkly: “SHE DOES NOT BELONG!!”.

But as a Texan who had been brought up around country music, Beyoncé disagreed. She would spend the next five years planning her response. Cowboy Carter proves her country credentials beyond all doubt. It’s not only about the music. It also does three important things that show the world what can be done when faced with barriers of prejudice and ignorance.

She honours the past

The album is clearly an act of tribute to trailblazing country artists before her. Beyoncé included notable guest appearances and feature tracks and took the unusual step of sending flowers to all who had inspired her.

Beyoncé sent flowers to Mickey Guyton, the first black female artist to be nominated for a Grammy Award in the Country category. She also sent flowers to K. Michelle and featured Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer and Reyna Roberts on the Cowboy Carter track Blackbird, a song that Paul McCartney wrote as a response to the case of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American schoolchildren initially barred from attending a previously racially segregated school in Arkansas. It took the direct intervention of then President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 to make it possible for these children to attend their school. She also included guest appearances from country music royalty Dolly Parton and Linda Martell, who both introduce songs on the album. Dolly’s introduction to Beyoncé’s reworking of Jolene is particularly poignant: “Hey Queen B it’s Dolly P”.

The song Jolene sticks faithfully to the guitar riff from the original, but the words and the tone of this song are completely different. Dolly’s original Jolene was begging another woman not to take her man from her. But Beyoncé will have none of that. She is full of threat and menace:

“I’m warnin’ you, don’t come for my man… don’t take the chance because you think you can.”

As Beyoncé pays her dues to the greats that have gone before, she also offers a very different picture. She can recognise the past, and yet not be imprisoned by it. She can appreciate those who have laid the foundations for a new era, unbound by cruel stereotypes.

She challenges the present

We don’t have to look far to see the way that western society is splintering. It is becoming harder to find common ground, harder to move from one tribe to another. Beyoncé’s album is political in that it is deliberately breaking down a wall and smashing a division. She refuses to accept that there are no-go areas for people of colour. The album feels like Beyoncé’s famous baseball bat from Lemonade, but this time it isn’t smashing cars, but preconceptions and prejudices instead.

There’s anger in this record. The first song is “American Requiem” and includes the line:

“They used to say I spoke ‘too country’./ And the reaction came,/ said I wasn’t country ’nough / If that ain’t country / I don’t know what is?”

Full of confidence and rage she asks over a bed of country music guitar chords:

“Can you hear me? / Can you stand me?”

Beyoncé does not disguise the ironies. The fresh anger and challenge weaves into classic forms and tropes of country music. The artist that some wanted to exclude from the genre tops the charts. The pop icon becomes an iconoclast. The smashing of divisions makes way for the building of something new.

She opens a door for the future

It is within living memory of many that black people were prohibited from sitting at the front of a public bus or drinking from the same water fountain as white people. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is not just a smash hit it is a smash down of the boundaries of genre that had excluded her and others. With this boundary smashed the opportunity is opened for others too.

For example, there was a recent stand-out performance at the Grammy awards watched by millions around the world – the duet between the country star Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman. Luke, a young white man, is part of a new generation of country singers with a huge following. The legendary black artist Tracy Chapman recently turned 60. The joyful performance was particularly touching as the two of them looked genuinely delighted to be singing together. The video went viral and lead to a huge uplift in Chapman’s sales. The song Fast Car rocketed to the top of the charts some 36 years after it was first released.

Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé using her voice and talent to push back against prejudice and push forward to a new era. She is cracking her whip in the temple of the music industry. She is driving out those who have commandeered the space that rightly belongs to those from any and all backgrounds. She is righteously angry at the injustice. She is declaring that country music be reclaimed as a meeting place for all nations to enjoy.

When Jesus unleashed the whip against the tables of the moneychangers in the temple who were excluding the non-Jews the space rightly belonged to, he fiercely declared: “My father’s house is to be a house of prayer for all the nations.” He was not only breaking the barriers of the past but ushering in a new future, a future where everyone could gather together before God on equal footing. Jesus would eventually die on a cross to ensure this free access to God was available to everyone - wherever they were from, whatever they had done and whatever they looked like.

I welcome this album by Beyoncé in that spirit of challenging prejudices, breaking down barriers, and clearing the decks for a new future equally available to all.

If only I could have whipped myself into shape, I believe I could have been the Cowboy Carter of the swimming world forty years ago.

Beyoncé in her own words

“Ain’t got time to waste, I got art to make/ I got love to create on this holy night/ They won’t dim my light, all these years I fight.”

16 Carriages

“Say a prayer for what has been / We'll be the ones that purify our father's sins / American Requiem / Them old ideas (yeah) / Are buried here (yeah) / Amen (amen)

Amen

Review

Addiction

Culture

Film & TV

Monastic life

26 August 2025

5 min read

Mother Vera: from heroin addict to heroine helping the recovering

The horse-loving orthodox sister with a liturgy for life, and a dilemma.

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

A nun on a white horse, gallops across a snowy field, in black and white

Equine therapy.

She Makes Productions.

Across the arts, the recovery journeys of people with addiction and mental health issues are being re-narrated, giving voice to the navigators of their own personal transformation. In Mother Vera, the Grierson award winning documentary about a recovery community surrounding the Saint Elizabeth Monastery in Minsk, ritual and nature’s unfolding therapeutic power take centre stage.

From Sister Act I and II, to The Sound of Music and Black Narcissus, big screen depictions of women’s monastic life tend to be overwrought. But Mother Vera is different. Shot in black and white, Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson’s documentary visually pays subtle homage to Black Narcissus’ bell tower scene, with a nod to Citizen Kane here and a wink to Andrei Tarkovsky there, but the overall tone is sober, in every sense of the word.

At the heart of the film is charismatic Mother Vera, a horse-loving orthodox nun, whose story of heroin addiction and betrayal by her onetime partner is micro dosed throughout the film. Surrounding Vera are a team of world-weary men, who she organises into readers for the monastery’s liturgies, as well as directing them in caring for the community’s cows and horses. They declare themselves “snowed in” by the monastic routine of “processions and liturgies” and relentless rounds of physical labour: shovelling snow and ice, feeding and grooming the animals. But the recovery community also acknowledges the bounded routines of the monastery keep them alive, able to face down their longing for drugs and drink. The rhythm of the natural world is woven into the liturgical year as Christmas cribs are replaced with Easter celebrations, all linked by scenes of candlelight, prayers and genuflections.

Early on in the film, Vera slips a puffa jacket over her black habit and gallops across the snow on a white horse. Without giving away too many spoilers, Vera’s desire for a life beyond the borders of the monastery grows as her story develops. Visits to her family show adolescent nephews and godsons growing into strapping maturity in her absence. Her mother relates the time Vera overdosed, 20 years ago, and doctors told her “to prepare for every outcome.” Vera reflects on how her charisma influenced “fresh faced girls” to become heroin users. For Vera, heroin went from being a portal of insight and revelation, to “showing its true face” which was diabolic. In monastery community meetings men praise how Mother Vera helped them to “reconstruct”.

Vera initially joined the monastery for a year, to wait out her partner’s prison sentence. Twenty years on, she has reached a new phase of her own reconstruction. Immersing herself in a river, her parting words are: “Let’s move on. Let’s continue. Amen.”

The community at Saint Elizabeth Monastery echoes the residents of W-3, the psychiatric ward in the American teaching hospital described in Bette Howland’s memoir W-3 first published in 1974, and republished four years ago. The author is admitted to hospital following an overdose, while she struggles to raise two children alone, on a part time librarian’s wage, while also trying to write. “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business; time to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life could begin. At last it had dawned on me these obstacles were my life. I was always rolling these stones from my grave.”

Howland positions the institutionalised rhythms of the hospital as the supreme life force, and ultimately more curative than talking therapy or medication. “For the sick in their beds were invisible. They were there only by implication. They must have existed, if only for the sake of this other life, full of importance – the bustling arms, starched coats; the carts, mops, ringings, beepings; the brisk comings and goings of white stockinged nurses.” The invisible, timeless guiding spirit of the hospital “as mysterious as a submarine”, would prevail regardless of what the medical staff or patients did, or resisted doing. Realising they were not the ones calling the shots, was the first step for Howland and her fellow patients to returning to life outside the hospital.

Accepting community and kinship, rather than superiority or aloofness, with others in recovery is also a key feature of Saint Elizabeth Monastery and W-3. “Nothing was original on W-3, that was its truth and beauty,” writes Howland. And continually telling and re-telling her story to fresh batches of medical students, under a psychiatrist’s supervision, eventually allowed it to be transcended. “It is not strictly accurate to say that these interviews were of no use to us. Because you would have to tell your story yet once more, all over again. And each retelling, each repetition, hastened the time when you would get tired of it, bored with it, done with it – let go of it, drop it forever – could float away and be free.”

In Mother Vera members of the lay community argue about accepting a new member, who may have been raped in prison, and is labelled a “downcast”. But the argument against allowing prison hierarchies to overshadow their new community wins the day, with the new member being integrated, and objectors accepting “you are no better than him.”

Contemporary approaches to mental health and wellbeing also pivot on an acceptance of shared humanity and imperfect day to day life with its relentless demands, as well as acknowledgement of a power outside human control. In the Netflix documentary Stutz, actor Jonah Hill charts his sessions with Hollywood psychotherapist Phil Stutz. Stutz counsels his clients there is no escape from pain, uncertainty and hard work. To try to avoid these conditions, whether through fantasy or substance or addiction, is to live in the Realm of Illusion. Progress and satisfaction can only be achieved by embracing the here and now, and doing the next necessary thing for life to continue. Stutz calls these actions the String of Pearls, urging his clients to be the one to put the next pearl on the string. The outcome of the action is immaterial, it is the self -belief fostered by taking real world positive action in support of self-flourishing, that is critical.

Stutz believes in a force for good he calls Higher Forces, and a malign force thwarting human growth he calls Part X. For Mother Vera her latter days at the monastery when she felt she could be of more service in the outside world were “tricking God”.

From a Minsk monastery to a Hollywood therapist’s office, to a 1970s hospital, an acknowledgement of the divine, together with an embrace of each other and demands of daily life, emerge as key tenets of recovery’s long road.

Mother Vera is released in the UK from 29 August.

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