Header Image - The Worlds of Ntozake Shange
The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Michelle

Archive Find #2 : TWWA Gatherings

by Michelle 0 Comments

This second #Archivefind also comes from the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA) papers found at the Sophia Smith College Archives.

IMG_5601IMG_5713IMG_5715

I have selected a few fliers that speak to one kind of work that these Third World Women and People’s collectives did in the 70’s, which is materializing these collective spaces and making visible their organizing. One of the fliers calls for a picnic and the other two are about organizing for International Women’s Day.

The TWWA states throughout its mission statement and organizational goals that of primary importance is ensuring that all meetings and events account for the children of the women and organizers that come out to these events; which meant setting up a Committee on Childcare and ensuring all events are child friendly or has a sister to watch the kids.

These organizers were also adamant about making these spaces and the knowledges and ideas that came out of these spaces to be accessible.

I am reading these priorities into these fliers to be able to imagine the spaces they created and shared. While we can never fully piece together their full story through the archives and materials they left behind, we can learn and take away elements that resonant with us. In envisioning the spaces I hope to create in the gatherings for my project, I will be drawing from these priorities and literally taking from these fliers to create a collaborative zine.

 

Reading Zake: “A Scarlet Woman”

by Michelle 10 Comments

For the past few months, I have been going through the works of Third World Women and Peoples collectives from the 70s and this journey began with learning that Ntozake Shange contributed to the first anthology by Third World Women. Titled “Third World Women,” it was published by the collective, Third World Communications in 1972. The editors preface, “We recognize the necessity for Third World people to have accessible to them material written by and for them – we must be able to see, hear, feel, smell, taste portraits of ourselves”. With this mission in mind, Shange submits this poem, “A Scarlet Woman” to the anthology, and at first read, I loved it in the same ways that I loved her poem “We Need a God Who Bleeds Now” (A Daughter’s Geography).

The Well Told Story: Noel Coward at the NYPL

by Michelle 0 Comments

The New York Public Library has several online exhibits that are easy to navigate, well organized, and full of great content! For me, an effective website is one that feels intuitive in navigating and consuming information.

I chose to spotlight the exhibit, “Noel Coward at the NYPL,” because I find the layout helpful for understanding how we can organize our digital exhibitions.

Making Images vs. Taking Photos

by Michelle 1 Comment

Visiting the International Center for Photography last Monday for class was a truly inspirational and motivational experience for me!

It feels appropriate for me as I took Photography 1 last semester with the Visual Arts department at Columbia University. It is cool to contextualize the world of photography and understand the limited accessible spaces for dark rooms and film processing. I am excited to be able to use these facilities for our final project!

The presentation on photography was also interesting and reminded me of the ways in which we talked about art and photography in the art history classes I have taken. In fact, Bradley, with whom we will be working closely, concluded the presentation with works by Brooklyn- based artist, Lorna Simpson, an artist I have written about for the class, Feminism and Postmodernism in Art.

the slaves who were ourselves / the children who will have my dolls

by Michelle 2 Comments

Black girl magic is prevalent throughout sassafrass, cypress, & indigo in many different forms, perhaps the most straightforward are Indigo’s literal spells she writes for self-preservation and dream catching. She particularly draws on the power of her ancestor’s who were women.

When Indigo first started her menses, her mother sent her to the Pharmacy. In her mission to buy Kotex from the Pharmacy, Indigo experienced sexual violence by Mr. Lucas and had to quickly run home to engineer a spell that would rid herself of the evil.

TO RID ONESELF OF THE SCENT OF EVIL*

by Indigo

….

Take a piece of silk or cotton to which you feel attached & that bodes of happier times. Fill it with caraway seeds. Tie it with a ribbon that is your oldest female relative’s favorite color (30).

The ritual begins with repeating the offender’s name to bring the violent moment present, waving your arms and hands around you to clean the atmosphere, drawing a bath to cleanse yourself of the evilness, and ends with floating an object that is made from something that reminds you of happier times and of your oldest female relative. In the process of washing the evilness off, Indigo is also trying to draw in goodness for healing – for her, that is through channeling the happier times sentimental objects hold and perhaps some form of power or magic her oldest female relative has.

In addition to drawing on her oldest female relative, she also brings into the present (or connects the past with the present) her ancestors who were slaves. Twice she mentions, “the slaves who were ourselves”.

The first time she says this is when Indigo first joined the Junior Geechee Captains with Spats and Crunch. She rejected the idea of adopting a new name because she liked her name. She strongly identified with her name and liked that,

“The slaves who were ourselves knew all about indigo & Indigo herself” (40).

This is a beautiful sentence that seamlessly brings together the past and the present. In the first part of the sentence, “the slaves who were ourselves”, she plays with grammatical tenses in order to convey how slavery is both historical and present within her. She continues to draw on the presentness and history within her in the second part of the sentence, “knew all about indigo & Indigo herself”. She is making connections with the origins of her name, the indigo dye, a major plantation crop in South Carolina in the 18th century, and her present self, “Indigo”.

 

Indigo uses the phrase “the slaves who were ourselves” again just as she was about to submit herself to Mabel and Prettyman for disrespecting Mabel. She thinks to herself,

“The Caverns began to moan, not with sorrow but in recognition of Indigo’s revelation. The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness” (49).

In this moment, Indigo decides not to run away from Mabel and Prettyman and instead listen to her ancestors. She did not want to hurt Prettyman and Mabel; there were no malicious feelings between them, there was just a difference in interest between Indigo and Mabel and Prettyman. She realized this confusion through thinking about her ancestor’s confusions and thereby again, bridging the past and the present, paying homage to her ancestors who have done this before.

The first time Indigo thinks about younger generations rather than older generations is when she decides to put her dolls away in order to protect their youth. She decides that she would save the dolls for her daughters and her mother,

Hilda Effania couldn’t agree more with Indigo’s familial fervor. After all, she was devoted to her daughters. Now, Indigo, all of 12, was saving her more treasured possessions for the daughters to come (53).

In this scene, Hilda Effania is particularly proud that her daughter is already thinking about her own daughter in the future. This scene affirms the priorities and powers in passing things down intergenerationally. Shange includes a moment where the present is working towards passing down rather than just receiving from generations before.

As I was reading sassafrass, cypress, and indigo this past week, I was also catching up with the show, “Jane the Virgin”. Reading and watching this book and show side-by-side overwhelmed my heart with content on intergenerational love, mother-daughter relationships, support and love between women of color, etc. The show follows a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter working together to achieve their individual goals and overcome their individual problems. Jane (the daughter), just had a baby, and she problem solves heavily with her mother and grandmother on taking care of the child. In the scene below, Jane is delivering a Christening speech for her baby that was written by her grandmother and read during both her’s and her mother’s christenings.

“We Need To Talk About This Christening Speech From “Jane The Virgin””, Buzzfeed

“17 Times Jane the Virgin Filled Your Heart to the Brim”, Buzzfeed

We must always bury our dead twice – why we blog / archive / publish

by Michelle 2 Comments

In an interview with Steven Fullwood, Assistant Curator for the Schomburg Center’s Manuscripts, Acrhives, and Rare Books Division, Fullwood was asked about his latest book Black Gay Genius, an anthology of Joseph Beam’s Work.

Why is the observance of Joseph Beam’s life with an anthology important?

It is never up to mainstream culture to maintain or honor our dead; we must do that. I am specifically talking about black queer people. It is our duty. Joe Beam’s passion to learn, grow and provide an opportunity for others to speak their truths was inspired by the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. If you saw a need for something, you did it or you supported others that did. Beam identified the need and did that. Barbara Smith, writer, feminist, and co-founder of Kitchen Table Press, once wrote an essay about James Baldwin titled “We Must Always Bury Our Dead Twice,” which I took as a responsibility to make visible black queer life. In Black Gay Genius, Smith stated that “burying our dead twice, or three times or more means that we lift up their contributions, their legacy, their reputations and make them known in every way we possibly can” and I agree with her 100%.

This snippet pulled me to look into Barbara Smith’s tribute to James Baldwin. In “We Must Always Bury Our Dead Twice”, Smith describes her experience of attending Baldwin’s funeral on December 8th, 1987 at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Baldwin’s existence as a powerful black gay writer had always been important. For Smith, “Baldwin’s homosexuality was also a hopeful sign. If nothing else, it indicated his capacity to radically nonconform, to carve out his own emotional freedom, lessons that I myself would need to learn” (Smith 76). To her disappointment, the many tributes offered to Baldwin, including words from Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, did not mention the significance of his homosexuality.

If all of who James Baldwin was had been mentioned at his funeral in New York City on December 8, 1987, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, it would have gone out on the wire services and been broadcast on the air all over the globe. Not only would this news have geometrically increased the quotient of truth available from the media that day in general, it also would have helped alter, if only by an increment, perceptions in Black communities all over the world about the meaning of homosexuality, communities where those of us who survive Baldwin as Black lesbians and gay men must continue to dwell (Smith 79- 80).

Smith’s call to bury our dead twice is to honor all of who James Baldwin was because the larger community did not. Reading Smith’s second burial of James Baldwin reminds me of the significance of the work we are doing in Kim Hall’s Worlds of Shange class. In this class, we are studying the works and worlds of Shange in order to most justly work with the materials in her archives. It is important that we are blogging, juxtaposing her work with other media, including what reading her poetry and novels invokes in us as her work serves so many people in so many different ways. For Smith, we must always bury our dead twice for the “communities where those of us who survive Baldwin as Black lesbians and gay men must continue to dwell”. This archival work contributes to discourses on the Black Arts Movement, The Black Power Movement, perceptions of black girls, spaces of women of color, etc. We must continue studying and publishing because there will be remakes of for colored girls that do not honor our truth.

In our work this year, I hope that we are “geometrically increasing the quotient of truth available” for black women, women of color, queer women of color, all readers.

deux “magots” or “maggots”?

by Michelle 1 Comment

In Éloge de la Créolité, Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant explains that, “‘Creoleness is not monolingual. Nor is it multilingualism divided into isolated compartments. Its field is language. Its appetite: all the languages of the world'”. They continue to explain how, “…the multilingualism of the poetics of Relation brings languages together without blending them, which is precisely what Shange does in A Daughter’s Geography; hence Glissant’s emphasis on creaolization as distinct from creoleness helps us to understand Shange’s shying away from actual New World creoles” (Spyra 789). I am interested in this idea of “bringing languages together without blending them” as we have been taught to think of America as a “melting pot”.

Narration through Poems & Photography

by Michelle 3 Comments

In For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, Ntozake Shange writes

but bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical

dilemma/ I havent conquered yet / do you see the point

my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of

soul & gender / my love is too delicate to have thrown

back on my face (45)

This passage towards the end of the choreopoem pulled me to think about the different ways that Shange has been able to narrate the complexities of being a black woman. She is able to convey pain, sisterhood, power, mundaneness, creativity, etc. through words and movement. While it is a different lady who narrates different situations, they all come together at several parts of the poem and interact with each other. This gives a sense of individuality (or isolation, the feeling that you are the only one experiencing these situations) but also discourse (the ladies form a sisterhood of shared experiences).

This form of narration reminded me of a photo series by Carrie Mae Weems. Titled “The Kitchen Series”(1990), the photo series also does an incredible job of narrating a scene with few props and sequencing. The photos take place at a kitchen table with a low hanging light, centering a black woman (Weems, herself) doing a series of activities in each photo. Many things remain constant in this photo series, such as the kitchen table, the tones of the photo, the angle of the shot, and the black woman. But each scene conveys a different situation through the small changes in props and people.  These subtle changes encourage the audience to draw connections between the photos but to also think about the person and the place in creative and different ways. Through this technique, Weems is able to narrate the complexities of black womanhood. Below are just a few from the series, but it highlights how Weems is thinking about the different aspects of being a black woman. Some photos highlight herself to be a partner (lover), a distressed self, a friend, a mother, a sexual being, etc.

I am interested in thinking more about Shange and Weem’s process of creating that has lead them to be able to accurately reflect and portray what they feel and see without reducing themselves or situations into tropes. Many of the scenarios and situations they present are familiar and shared but encourages the audience to think more about the complexities rather than reduce it to just that scene.

overwhelmingly beautiful you

by Michelle 0 Comments

Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled”–Post by Michelle Loo

“A strand of hair, a bit of forehead, a segment of an ‘overwhelmingly beautiful’ face glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train, may suffice to keep alive and strengthen the European’s persistence in his irrational conviction that the Algerian woman is the queen of all women” (43).

A strand of hair

a [bit] of forehead

a segment of an overwhelmingly beautiful face

overwhelmingly beautiful

glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train,

yeh you

may suffice to keep alive / strengthen / reinforce the European’s persistence / irrational conviction that the Algerian woman

the overwhelmingly beautiful you

is

the

queen of all women.

 

Breaking the quote into several lines emphasize the pace and flow of the train of thoughts. It begins with short observations, “A strand of hair,” “a [bit] of forehead,” a segment of an overwhelmingly beautiful face,” but then the pattern changes to no longer listing an observation but describing what about the observation, “glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train,” alerting the reader that the poem is ready to go somewhere. “yeh you” is the final scream at the reader to pay attention because the following lines are going to be quick and insightful. The next line explains the significance and violence behind the observations listed in the beginning of the poem. It does so in the longest line of the poem with slashes instead of line breaks to separate fragments in order to convey the overwhelmingness of this unraveling of thoughts. I added extra adjectives to this line because the explanation in this line is so important and I wanted the message to be clear, that the colonizer is persistent and aggressive. This is especially important since the tone in the following lines is no longer direct and straightforward.

I feel that including “the overwhelmingly beautiful you” at the end of the poem turns the poem’s observation [European’s persistence to save the Algerian women] into an action. It demonstrates the tactics they use to approach Algerian women, which is direct and flattering. The colonist is saying “the overwhelmingly beautiful you / is / the / queen of all women,” who wouldn’t want to join a movement that declares this conviction? It seems that Shange uses the rhetorical “you” in her pieces to do just this. It is a powerful tool to “show and not just tell” her point. By including “yeh you” towards the middle of the poem catches the reader off guard, insinuating that, “while you might not realize it right away, but I am talking about you, this is about you”, referring to the descriptors the poem begins with and what the poem is about.