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

Melissa

“As beginning dancers we have no ego problems” … a call to move!

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Dancing Shange copy (1)

If we are drawn for a number of reasons/ to the lives & times of black people who conquered their environments/ or at least their pain/ with their art, & if these people are mostly musicians & singers & dancers/ then what is a writer to do to draw the most from human & revealing moments from lives spent in nonverbal activity.

(Shange, Ntozake. Lost in Language & Sound 14)

 

From there, Shange calls upon us to syncretize all of our forms of creation. Writing and dancing are indispensable to each other as form of making, breathing with, moving to, listening to rhythm. Writing itself is a rhythmic effort that calls upon the body to breathe and move through sets of unrecognizable grammars until we can form our own language. Dance is a polysyllabic, multi-form, amalgamation of syncopated heartbeats – an effortful, physical calligraphy etched onto the living landscape of breath. Music somehow conveys all that we have always known about ourselves, the world, and each other.

Ntozake Shange has always insisted on calling upon all of her capacities to stir up joy to write, dance, and make music with her breath and body. I respond to Shange’s call to move and invite my fellow lovers of Shange to join me for a workshop on collaborative dance and writing through collective writing, reading, and movement. I hope this workshop will fit into the context of my peers’ work, picking up from where Michelle Loo started in her collaborative zine happenin’ Time to Greez.
My hope is that through movement, we will put together the fragmented pieces of our memories to create an embodied narrative that continues the legacy of Shange, and countless Black women writers, dancers, movers, and thinkers through the timelessness of the choreopoem.

 

Saturday April 30, 2016 

Studio 1, Basement of Barnard Hall 

10am-12pm

7pm-9pm

bring hydrated bodies, bare feet, and kind spirits 

dream fragments/ darling-honey-child/ dearest daddy [Archive Find]

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before starting her blood, she tends to break glass. she is washing dishes. there is a crisp sound of shattering glass. a shard will have found itself lodged in the flesh of her palm. crimson will trickle into the sink.

that night she dreams of water roaring evenly from glistening faucets of silver on every wall. fragments of bright light float across her body. brilliant flashes that spread across her flesh. crystallized patterns etch themselves on her skin. she holds a brown baby to her breast as she lays in a tub filled with clear, sweet smelling water. “darling, honey child”. in whispered incantations, she conjures protective shields. the child that feeds from her body, peers at her with soft, brown eyes. wet with love. there is warmth all over. as they are lulled in this gently moving water.

this is the spirit of Yemayá come to visit.

Dreams. We must tune in closely to the bits of news they bring us. They carry messages from the spirit realm. Grandmother has sent news. That her darling-honey-child must survive. Shange, a witch who, in her flesh, carries the spirits of mothers from centuries past, knows this. It must be the reason she noted  her dreams. Black women divine destinies and access the memories of our past selves through dreams. We know sleep isn’t only for resting. Our work begins with the darkness that descends upon our consciousness. We fashion our vulnerable bodies into altars. Sacred sites of divination. In our most humble state of peace, the spirits come. They bring us news. This darling-honey-child must survive.

Red-Gold Journal copy

i once asked my father/ in a childishly flippant manner/ about his mother/ where she was and/ why she’d never been to visit/ he looked at me/ with a great well of/ sorrow in his eyes/ and told me/ he was an orphan/ since then/ the helpless gesture he made/ has come to encompass the meaning of orphan/ palms facing upward/ in supplication/ or desperation/ or accusation/ gesturing to the gods/ as if to say/ they are the architects of this sorrow/ and they are the source of my solace/ and they hold all clarity/ and carry all understanding in/ the matter of pain/ in that moment/ i knew what god was/ and what loss was/ my father/ in his lumbering frame/ crisscrossing lines around his eyes/ evidence/ of an untethered inclination/ towards joy/ his booming joviality/ eclipsed/ i feared that i had killed my father/ with this utterance/ that i had caused him to drown/ in this sorrow/ that i had no name for/ and i wanted to know the woman who/ had been responsible for raising a boy/ who would carry authority/ in the aristocratic flare of his nostrils/ and i wanted to know how/ she had nurtured him to such a state of tenderness/ and i saw her pass/ underneath the warmth of his brown eyes/

In a series of intimate and heartfelt letters to her father, some in the postpartum tense, Shange expresses and explores conflicting sentiments of guilt, shame, loss, and deep sorrow. In these stream of consciousness addresses, I likened Shange’s voice with that of her deeply troubled and talented Liliane, whose traumatic encounters with the pain inflicted by sexist, racist, and patriarchal forces are explored through a psychodynamic lens. We see Liliane as a proud Black girl, and as we join her in the vast and lonely landscape of her youth, we too become the wounded Black girl who must contend with the raw and grotesque humanity of imperfect fathers, broken mothers, dead sisters, and the lovers who took their lives.

 

Works & Insights Shared by Professor Valdés

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During our meeting with professor Valdés yesterday, we discussed a wide range of topics that have shaped our projects and interests. Everybody took something truly transformative away from our discussion and it will be exciting to see how the shared insights manifest in our projects.

It is also worth mentioning that professor Valdés is very generous with her time and she has offered her support to everybody in the class. She extends an invitation to students who are interested in further discussion or have additional questions to email her. There is something for everybody so do take advantage of this opportunity!

Below is the list of works professor Valdés has suggested to us for further perusing/research.

 

On the sacred feminine:

Maureen Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey

Vanessa Valdés, Oshun’s Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas 

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves

On Mothers and Daughters:

Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born

Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering

Tillie Olsen, Silences

Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

On Dance and Embodied Knowledge:

Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé

Yvonne Daniel, Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance

Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repetoire

On African contributions to latinidad:

George Reid Andrews, 1800-2000 (a new edition comes out this year, I believe, where he extends his study to 1600)

About Toni Morrison and her Works :

Carolyn C. Denard, ed., What Moves at the Margin, (includes articles, speeches, and other shorter-non-fiction pieces)

Andrea O’Reilly, Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (short work)

La Vinia Delois Jennings, Toni Morrison and the Idea of Africa (to the question of diaspora)

Reading Zaki: Week 5

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It’s so magic folks feel their own ancestors coming up out of the earth to be in the realms of their descendants; they feel the blood of their mothers still flowing in them survivors of the diaspora.

Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo

In revisiting Vanessa Valdes’ Oshun’s Daughters, I have been able to re-engage with Afro-spirituality as it appears in Shange’s work, specifically Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo. Valdés illustrates the ways in which each protagonist is associated with a Yoruba or Dahomean deity, sometimes representing more than one entity at a time. These depictions of Afro-spiritualist deities are heterogenous in that they activate a range of traditions manifested in African-descent communities across the western hemisphere. Shange does not limit the characters’ embodiments of Afro-spiritualism to singular practices; at times, we see the Oshun of Santeria, the Gullah-Geechee Blue Sunday, or the different forms of Erzulie in Haitian Vodou. In this effort, Shange is honoring the transcendent quality of Afro-spiritualism, in its limitless iterations across communities and cultural contexts.  

to revisit old pains

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Our conversation at the ICP about the practice of imposing text on photograph to produce an image – distinct from the practice of photographing – to relay a story/narrative that is non-linear and moves in liquid form through more than a single channel amplifies my understanding of embodied knowledge.  Both Decarava/Hughes’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life and Shange/Kamoinge’s The Sweet Breath of Life are artistic undertakings that function through text and photograph to relay multidimensional images/narratives/stories. They attempt to render a full account of Black livelihoods via explorations of the extraordinarily mundane and familiar landscapes around which existence in kinship and individuality take form.

feminine imagination

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Womanspirit is a feminist publication that is made up of collections of short-stories, poetry, manifestos, and essays written by women who were part of a creative and political community that centralized spirituality in anti-oppression work. Their statement of philosophy emphasizes the interconnectedness of social justice, spiritual empowerment, and self-determination. Each piece in the publication is concerned with spirituality as a crucial component of structural anti-oppression work and interpersonal healing and community building. Women offer up spells and rituals in their writing as a mode of imagining new possibilities for collective liberation and as a practice of healing and tending to intimate concerns around relationships between women — which include mother-daughter relationships, romantic partnerships, friendships etc.

 

In a poem titled “Full Moon Ritual”, the author explores the concept of self-making through nature. The moon serves as a symbol of feminine power and as a source of light and energy. Divinity, nature, and womanhood are linked in their life-giving force; a force that fosters utopic imaginings of liberation and collective joy. The moon, in its cyclical rhythms and “distinctive patterns”, parallels the cycle of menstruation, symbolically linking the life-giving cycles of womanhood and nature.

 

Our power is for creation and recreation of our

lives, of the world,

of life as we live it day to night, night to day

Nature, in its fecundity, is the source of (re)creation and constant rejuvenation. The feminine imagination offers similar possibilities of (re)creation in its life-giving force. “We have the power to create a rebirthing of our own”. I take this to mean that in activating the feminine impulse through creation, we can attain a state of renewal. For me, this feminine impulse and imagination is not one that is bound to corporeal conceptions of menstruation and reproduction, but that also extends to the imaginative realm of creation. Shange’s literature utilizes this feminine impulse to create narratives that gives voice to our memories and hopes. Literature that mobilizes this impulse offer us the opportunity to imagine and (re)create the world according to principles of collective liberation and empowerment.

Creation is everything you do make something

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CREATION IS

EVERYTHING YOU DO

MAKE SOMETHING

With this compelling order, I set out to create a zine.

During my reading of Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo, I underwent a series of deeply personal transformations that I wanted to document. I became interested in creating a zine as an archival document. In it, I have included pieces of poetry and stories that I have written as well as pieces written by Shange herself. Creating a zine was a way that I could engage with the work in both tactile and spiritual ways and it illuminated some new aspects of what an archival process means. This archival process sometimes meant reading old love letters aloud. Or cutting out clippings from brochures I had been keeping as souvenirs from significant events.

My guidelines for creating a zine:

  • Everything you do: to walk, and speak, and touch.
  • Make something: rely upon the imagination, engage with memory, insert pieces of yourself into all that you do

The zine has come to life in its own way. It is an embodiment of places, things, memories. It is an ongoing project that I am using to explore different ways of creating literature, encapsulating memory, and fracturing the static notion of time. It has also pushed me to further interrogate the process of engaging with the personal as political and vice versa. How can my personal, intimate interactions with the world be mobilized as political tools?

This process of blending the personal and the political is a prominent aspect of Shange’s work. In this effort, Shange has often mobilized the feminine — imposing it upon the realms of art, politics, movement building and organizing. This isn’t merely a gratuitous mechanism aimed at making a “feminist” gesture, any feminist gesture, but a revelatory process. One that uncovers the deeply feminine impulses behind Black resistance, activism, and healing. These feminine impulses are situated in Black women’s knowledge and world-making practices. How we have learned to grow and survive relies upon the ways in which Black women have practiced knowledge and world-making through their crafting, cooking, singing, dancing, loving, birthing, mothering etc.

For me, a zine presents the possibility to build on the practice of creating and resisting via intimacy and the personal.

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This podcast, by BCRW Research Assistant Michelle Chen, discusses the radical (anti white supremacist, anti classist, anti racist) feminist ideology from which zines have emerged.

“The Power of Craft”

The power of  combining the mind and the body to create.

To do — to make do.

The power of the mind, the eye, the hand and the heart

To make the original connections. 

TO create what is needed: a fire, a pot, a hoe, a knife,

A cup, shelter, cloth, tools.

To grasp

The significance of the power of craft 

Is to be eager to create a whole life. 

 

I found this in a Womanspirit publishing that was released during the Summer solstice 1982 while looking through the Barnard Center for Research on Women archives. The piece describes craft as a process that often melds the spirit and body to the object being created. The crafting process diverges from professionalized forms of creating art and is intuitively resistant to mass-production and manufacturing, making it inaccessible to commercialist impulses of capitalism. “The mind and the hand of the creator is part of the end product — “the spirit” of a work is apparent because of these unbroken connections.” (25).

Zines embody the spirit of craft in these feminine, anti-capitalist intuitions.

movement and memories in the archival effort

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When we defined the archive as a space wherein materials could be preserved for their enduring value, I wondered how the imagination and vitality of literature as it is produced in the human body, spoken language, and patterns of sociality could be preserved in its full essence. For me, the question arose: what is the function of the archive and how does it mirror, encompass, and fall short of the world-making possibilities offered by literature?

I have been thinking about literature as an expansive concept, one that transcends linguistic bounds and regulations. I have also been conceptualizing literature per Shange’s notion of carnal intellectuality, whereby stories and histories are articulated and constantly re-formed via the body’s motions in concert with human imagination. Memories for example, are part of a reproductive effort by the body, and can lend themselves to the archival process.

In literature, I find that there are endless possibilities for struggle against normativity and linearity in our narratives. The fragmented pieces of history take shape in the imaginative realm of literature, allowing for the reconfiguration of our realities and conceptions of self. How then is the archival effort able to encompass literature, and its malleable impulses? Only in thinking of the archive as functioning within the body through motions such as carnal intellectuality, am I able to understand the ways in which language, movement, and the imagination produce archival knowledge.

Shange’s work brings attention to the ways in which the Black woman’s body is shaped by the labor of the archival effort. I found a clip of Ntozake Shange reading from a piece titled “What Does it Mean That Black Folks Can Dance”. The poem conveys the notion of the moving body as a carrier of knowledge, collective sorrows/joys, and the memories that make up Black historical narratives. Here, dance is “how we remember what cannot be said”. The body takes up motion and mobility to recall, to create, and to transcend.

crooked woman/okra meets greens in strange circumstances
the woman dont stand up
straight
aint never stood up
straight/ always bent
some which a way
crooked turned abt
slanted sorta toward a shadow of herself

Glissant’s Linguistic Analysis + Movement

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Part of the struggle against a single-axis cultural and historical narrative lies in the contestation of power via language, or the creation of a new language marked by struggle against hegemonic paradigms of knowledge and subjectivity. Glissant asserts that a national literature, borne of the “urge for each group to assert itself” (Glissant 99), is an enactment of this struggle. A community goes in search of itself and its subjectivity by creating a literature that gives voice to its beliefs, its memories, its pains etc. In this literature, a new language emerges from the colliding forces of orality – which are, in the case of the Caribbean, found in the phonetics of resistance found in Creole – and the written forms of European languages. Glissant acknowledges a “forced poetics” faced by the Caribbean speaker (specifically by the Martinican) in encountering the tension between French and Creole.

Glissant defines the basis of Creole’s orality as located in the body. Creole mobilizes the body’s reproductive functions that allow African traditions to persist and reappear in the context of the Western Hemisphere, where they are perpetually carried in the body and consciousness of the Caribbean speaker. This logic of reproduction imbues the Black Caribbean body with the power of resistance, which is deployed in the making of national literature. Describing the nature of Creole as conceptual, Glissant is able to illustrate the ways in which linguistic orality is and does as music, in that it embodies collective resistance and is carried across temporal and corporeal bounds. Glissant’s explanations offer insight into the workings of the literary impulse as an alternative to the fragmentation and chaos of Black subjectivities. In giving voice to these suppressed and undermined subjectivities, literature creates the conditions for the persistence and expansion of Black expression.
“Shange’s multilingual poetry puts languages in Relation in order to encourage people to connect in the transnational web of Relation that Glissant envisions.” (Spyra 793). Ntozake Shange produces a national literature that transcends borders by linking languages in the Western Hemisphere. Shange’s work, specifically the choreopoem, is described as “‘an ancient African form’ enriched with influences from European experimental theater and dance” (786). This allows us to view the body and its movements as an extension of language and literature. Thus in Shange’s work we not only see the body reproducing timeless resistance through spoken and language, but also enacting forced poetics in its breath and movement. There is a continuous link then, between knowledge, language, and corporeality.