A strong addition to the Shange Mixtape, in my opinion, would be the Lady in Purple’s no more love poem in for colored girls. I offer this poem specifically because of it’s way of highlighting a certain vulnerability and humanity from the colored women along with Shange’s preoccupation with music and it’s connection to love. At it’s base the Lady in Purple is professing the most raw form of her love to a partner that saw her outside of her “tricks” and got to experience her as who she was. This is currently my favorite poem within for colored girls because of the stinging realness of lines like,

When Professor Hall gave us the directive to begin checking out the Ntozake Shange Papers in the archives, I had no idea what to expect. I had never been in an Archive center until then, despite being 2 and a half years into my college career. However, I went in with an open mind and little expectations of what I was going to encounter.

What struck me in my perusal of Shange’s journals and original manuscripts of poems that show up in for colored girls, was the way certain characters and her dedication to certain themes show up in her archive long before the publishing of the works that we affiliate these characters and themes with. Vani provided me with the language to reflect my perception of the way her archive and works to illuminate an active engagement with certain themes and characters throughout time. The word that she offered me to define this lineage in Shange’s published works and archive was “Intertextuality”.

Below, I’ve attached one of my favorite moments of this “intertextuality” that I found in the original chapbook of for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf.

What strikes me about this poem, is not only the appearance of Cypress outside of a Cypress, Sassafrass, and Indigo but the appearance of Cypress in relation to queer and dance based context. As a queer woman myself, I appreciated Shange’s choice in highlighting Cypress’ queerness and it’s relationship to dance in Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo. However this poem reflects Cypress’ encounter with queerness or non-cisnormativity in a very different tone, with Sarah: a cross-dressing man being the center of Cypress’ attention and engagement. The way Ntozake paints Sarah and Cypress’ behavior is reflective of the times in which this poem was written and published, where LGBTQ but more specifically trans people were the recipients of large ostracization and violence in this country and often created & flocked to their own communities. Her choice in ending the poem with Cypress’ rescue of Sarah from a beat down from a black male and “[taking] her dancin”, (note, Cypress’ use of she/her pronouns rather than referring to Sarah as a man for the first time here) not only illuminates a certain tolerance of LGBTQ people and hatred of violence from Cypress but more importantly illuminates a thematic connection between dance and queerness preceeding the publishing of Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo. 

I loved seeing the fact that Shange was thinking about and trying things with Cypress far before the publishing of her novel. This is one of countless examples of the way Shange’s publications and the Ntozake Shange Papers expand our conceptions of an archive as being a static or dead thing. She is consistently in conversation with her characters and her archive as a whole. It’s alive.

Works Cited:

Chapbook of “for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf; BC20-29 – Ntozake Shange Papers,; Box 4 and Folder 1; Barnard Archives and Special Collections, Barnard Library, Barnard College.

“for colored girls” at the public theater, 2019

Seeing for colored girls was one of the most special theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. I was initially nervous about sitting onstage and engaging so intimately with the material. I think if we’d gone to the show at the beginning of the semester, I probably would not have been able to do it. After this whole semester of getting to know Shange’s work, I feel more comfortable in engaging with these ideas. I have really started to realize the source of my original discomfort. I think there was something about for colored girls that made me feel helpless when I was younger- I felt that Black women’s pain was inevitable- at the hands of society and the government, at the hands of Black men we are supposed to trust.

Throughout the semester I’ve told my mom and some of my friends that it’s so frustrating for me to be taking this class now, just a year after Shange passed. As grateful as I am to have the opportunity to read her work at all, it often feels like I just missed her. I think that night finally showed me that for colored girls came right when I needed it. Being required to read (and finally finish) the choreopoem for this class finally got me to the incredibly important ending- Shange and the colored girls’ declaration that is just as much an imperative – i found god in myself and i loved her / i loved her fiercely.

For my last post, I want to briefly speak to the last suggested prompt offered, to nominate a short excerpt of Shange’s work for the “Shange Mixtape”. One of the Shange pieces that resonated with me the most was Sassafrass, Cyrpress & Indigo and I think that the book, in really concise and revelatory ways, reveals some of Shange’s central themes such as: creation, the creation of new worlds, the magic of music and the moon and “women”, community and communion and the ghosts that play in the shadows of our words.

Pages 27-34 constitute a really helpful excerpt. The excerpt would not need to be that long but the narrative encapsulated between those pages feel really full of the central concepts that I pulled from the book. Page 27 begins with a chapter in which Indigo is learning to pray with her fiddle. She “invit[es] the moon in” and lets the “holy ghost” pour out of her creation, as she makes life, goes wild. And her mother is exhausted by it, it is too much and too off kilter, too loud and unwieldy. Indigo may need to go elsewhere to create her music.

Later in the pages, she meets the Junior Geechee Captains Spats and Crunch and shows them another world with her music, blows them away, scares them a littl, even. Shange writes then “Indigo’s specialities were other worlds” with the places she goes and sees in her music. Her nickname in the group becomes “digo” meaning to say– to speak into the silence– and if that isn’t a lot to unpack, I don’t know what is. So I think that that excerpt, cushioned by a little context of the book’s narrative, would be a really helpful entrance to the larger themes within some of Shange’s work.

Cite:

Shange, Ntozake. Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo. St. Martins, 210.

Something that caught my eye upon one of my first visits to the archive was an edited draft of Shange’s “First Loves” (then called “First Love”) as a part of the early edits for Some Sing, Some Cry.  

Copy of “First Love” 2009 draft with edits.

Written in prose, this piece is not itself a work of poetry, but instead an exploration of her relationship with the art as she’s grown as a writer and as a lover. This piece caught my attention because I, like Shange, “always knew I liked poetry more than anything,” but seeing the piece beyond its first line forced me to rethink my rather privileged relationship to the English language. This draft of “First Love” made me interrogate how and why Shange’s mastery of the written word looks and feels so starkly different from other poets of her time. It became clear that this is no ordinary love story — Shange’s first love was one characterized by both hardship and liberation. 

“My mother, Eloise, had benefited from what were then called ‘elocution’ lessons privately given in the home of a striking yet demure Southern woman once removed to the Bronx. There she mastered Whitman, Whittier, Wheatley, Shakespeare, Dunbar, and Paul Laurence. This eclectic mix of word crafters were my lullabies, soothing rhymes, and demonstrations of slowly garnered memorization skills. This, I suspect, is where my love of poets began.”

Shange’s love is not for poetry, it’s for poets — the “word crafters” themselves. Shange’s use of the word “crafter” here is fascinating in that is suggests the need for action in reclaiming language. This allowed me to reflect on the scope of Shange’s own vernacular writing surpassing the restrictions of “‘elocution lessons’” and making language her own. This draft, and its published body in 2010 reinforced the notion that there is no correct way to speak or write, just as there is no single correct way to create art. Wheatley’s English was crafted for her, as was the memorized lexicon of Shange’s mother, Eloise. Shange, though, is the crafter — the lover. 

These word crafters were her “lullabies,” highlighting the role of the unconscious as an incubator for Shange’s language. When one dreams, their words are unfiltered and untouched by history and hierarchical social structures. Shange’s unfiltered love is her love for language, as she evolves as a subconscious poet herself. Given Shange’s own interest in and encounters with, not just psychoanalytic theory, but psychotherapy, this evolving romantic connection between poetry and the unconscious is vital in that it moves beyond the restrictions of language. When Shange wrote, “but mine was no constant love. I flirted with Baudelaire and Artaud because I longed for some immersion in dream,” she touches upon the deeply introspective nature of poetry — latent love residing in one’s unconscious.