Nadia – The Worlds of Ntozake Shange and Digital Storytelling

Next Steps: Domain Names & Personal Websites!

by Nadia on May 1, 2016 0 Comments

After completing 5 orisha inspired photoshoots in collaborative effort with Barnard student make-up artists, Simone Folasayo Ig, Annya Serkovic, Imani Bishop, and Ornella Friggit, and photographers, Dina Asfaha, Anta Touray, Ornella Friggit, Yemisi Olorunwunmi, and Valerie Jaharis, I had more content than I could fit into my final digital project. As a result, I decided to put the digital tools I learned at the ICP to use to create my own personal website: www.nadianaomi.com. In this blog post, I will breakdown how I made my personal website if anyone is interested in next steps after our year long class Ntozake Shange & Digital Storytelling comes to a close.

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Domain Names

Michelle Loo helped me obtain a domain name through www.godaddy.com. GoDaddy is a site through which you can buy your own personal domain name.

Screen Shot 2016-05-01 at 2.35.54 PM

Search for a name you would want to use for your personal website and see if it is available.
- A variety of domain name options will appear with different domain registers ( .com .org. us. .net etc. ). When picking my domain name and register, Michelle suggested knowing what I wanted ahead of time and selecting it right away because searched names get taken very quickly once they are searched and are resold for exorbitant prices.
Once you are happy with your domain name and register you can go ahead a purchase it.
- I purchased nadianaomi.com for the price of $11.99 a year. If you know you will be using your site for regular personal/academic/career/vocational use the investment may be worth it considering that the domain may only cost $1 a month.
Create a GoDaddy account and purchase your domain name.
- When your purchase your domain name you will need to create a GoDaddy account. This will allow you to maintain your domain name and apply to personal sites you create.

Personal Websites

I used Wix.com to create my personal site for FREE. You can create pages and add content pretty smoothly and format your content for desktop/laptop and cell phone viewing. Once you have created your site, you can go to your GoDaddy account to apply your purchased domain name to your site.

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Quiet As It Keeps: Social Media as an Academic Resource

Blogposts

by Nadia on April 6, 2016 1 Comment

I didn’t realize how big of a role social media played in my education until I began trying to cite sources from Facebook and Youtube. Social media is a pervasive source of communication, information, and education. By the time I graduated from high school, I had already learned to navigate social media platforms like Facebook with ease and it was the main source through which I got the news as opposed to my parents who primarily read newspapers and watched the news on television. The ability to share videos and articles as well as read people’s reactions to them made social media platforms particularly attractive. I find myself using wikipedia much less now than I did in middle and high school. Social media platforms today are a similar collective collaborative accumulation of knowledge with the added plus of news being updated and commented upon in real time.

As laptops are allowed in most classes, information is easily accessible as many students do wander onto social media sites instead of taking notes. The ability to access social media platforms via mobile devices makes information accessible almost anywhere at anytime. When introducing articles and Youtube videos into a paper or class discussion, I do what I did in high school by siting the original source and leaving out the fact that I first encountered the information through wikipedia, Facebook or Youtube. Based on my experiences, Barnard has not made explicit the type of media that is disallowed. As a Mellon Fellow I find that social media platforms are being transparently used to discuss and site social phenomena where on the other hand my intro Africana Studies courses focus primarily on written text such as books and published articles. However, as our world begins to digitize, I would be interested to see how academic institutions deal with the reality that students may be using social media platforms to get their information and the rules and regulations they may put around such usage.

Visiting the Archives at Spelman

by Nadia on March 16, 2016 0 Comments

During Spring Break, I went to the visit the archives to see the Audre Lorde papers at Spelman College. In Box 1.1.002, I found a card Lorde received from her daughter Beth for Mother’s Day. This object interested me because I am interested in mother-daughter relationships and I had already seen some of the cards and correspondences between Shange and her daughter Savannah in the Shange papers in the archive at Barnard.

If I had to write a caption for this object it would read: Read More

The Well Told Story

by Nadia on February 28, 2016 2 Comments

While talking to Professor Glover in my vision for my digital project, she gave me the term “interactive poetry book” as a descriptor. This helped me to conceptualize a digital space that pairs image and poetry in the same way that The Sweet Flypaper of Life and The Sweet Breath of Life does.

I did some browsing on the internet for sites that replicate the kind of effect I would like my digital space to have and I came across http://whiteboard.is/work/. I think this site works because it is user friendly and the transitions between images as I scroll are very smooth. Read More

Archive Find 1: “Cancer and Lorde’s work”

by Nadia on February 24, 2016 1 Comment

In thinking about my self-care project, I became increasingly interested in Audre Lorde’s life and work.

Somebody almost walked off with all of my stuff

by Nadia on February 8, 2016 16 Comments

From For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf

Somebody almost walked off with all of my stuff

And didn’t care enough to send a note home saying I was late for my solo conversation

Or too sizes too small for my own tacky skirts

What can anybody do with something of a nobellier on an open market?

Did you get a dime for my things?

Hey man, where are you going with all of my stuff?

This is a woman’s tripping, I need my stuff to ooh and aaah about

Honest to God! Somebody almost ran with all of my stuff

And I didn’t bring anything but the kick and sway of it

The perfect ass for my man and none of it is theirs

This is mine…Phemelo’s own things…

That’s my name now give me my stuff

I see you hiding my laugh and how

I sit with my leg open sometimes to get my crotch some sunlight

This is some delicate leg and whimsical kiss

I gotta have to get to my choice

So you can’t have me unless I give me away

And I was doing all that till you ran off on a good thing

And who is this you left me with? A bad attitude

I want my things, I want my Oooh with a hot iron scar,

I want my leg with the flee bite, yeah I want my things

I want my calouse feet and quick language back in my mouth

I want my own things how I love them

Somebody almost ran off with all of my stuff

And I was standing there looking at myself the whole time

It wasn’t spirit that ran off with my stuff

It was a man who’s ego won’t drown like road ants shadow

It was a man faster than my innocence

It was a lover I made too much room for almost ran off with all of my stuff

And the one running with it, don’t know he got it

I’m shouting this is mine and he don’t , and he don’t even know he got it

My stuff is the anonymous ripped off treasure of the year

Did you know somebody almost got away with me!

Me! in a plastic bag under his arm, Me! Phemelo Motona!

Somebody almost walked off with all of my stuff!

The Things An Image Can Say

by Nadia on January 30, 2016 1 Comment

I was really blown away by Bradly Dever Treadaway’s presentation at the International Center for Photography. Last semester in the Shange course, I learned how text creates images and last Monday I learned images can create text! The images by Robert Frank Bradly showed us was a prime example of this. I found the image of the trolley in New Orleans particularly striking because of the way in which a simple, candid shot was able to say so much about the social hierarchies of the time and the linear space in which people lived.

Robert Frank | Trolley — New Orleans (1955)

The Daughter Identity

by Nadia on November 12, 2015 4 Comments

WGSBS For the past few weeks, I have been thinking about the concept of being a daughter and how that is a motif in Shange’s work. My understanding of the saliency of (what I call) “daughtership” was further developed through my reading of Sassafrass, Cyprus and Indigo and during the Africana Department event “Who’s Going to Sing A Black Girl’s Song?” A Conversation on Black Girlhood with distinguished Africana alumnae Asali Solomon ‘95 and Alexis Pauline Gumbs ‘04.

At the event on Black Girlhood, I asked the alumnae about the connotations the word daughter has. They said daughter denotes duty, great gifts, a claim a
nd aspirational dreams that are given to them by their mothers. These terms Asali and Alexis used are relevant to daughters Sassafrass, Cyprus and Indigo. They all have the duties. Indigo put away childish things, like her dolls, to step into womanhood and Cyprus and Sassafrass have to attract particular kinds of men as future husbands. They each have unique gifts as musicians, dancers and weavers and they all have to negotiate their mother’s aspirations for their lives and futures.

As I reflected back on each of the daughters’ their relationships with their mother, I realized that much of the mother-daughter relationship is dictated by their relationships to men. Hilda Effania’s letters to her daughters often include advice and warnings about men. Also, when one of the daughters gifts her mother with sexy lingerie, Hilda Effania comments on how their father would have come home more often if she owned this article of clothing.

In thinking about the role of men in mother-daughter relationships, Cypress’ dream made me wonder what mother-daughter relationships would look like if men did not exist – in a world where “there were only Mothers and Daughters” (185). I wonder if the fixation on men in mother-daughter relationships has anything to do with mother’s teaching their daughters about how to navigate relationships with men for their own survival and out of a desire to protect their daughters.

This brings me to a concept which I learned of at the Black Girlhood event which is idea of “mothering oneself” as well as daughters mothering their mothers. As each of the daughters in the novel enter womanhood, they begin to mother themselves through self-nurturing and self-care, especially when their actions and beliefs are contrary to those of their mother’s desire for them. While negotiating the limitations of the mothering their own mothers can provide as they become their own woman in the coming of age process, Sassafrass, Cyprus and Indigo being to take on the role of a mother in addition to that of a daughter as they care for themselves and as they look to have daughters of their own.

The Personal Is The Political

by Nadia on November 12, 2015 1 Comment

In my Black Scholar readings and my trip to the Schomburg, I was confronted with the message that the personal is the political. The Black Sexism Debate states,

“We cannot solve our “personal” problems individually, nor by pretending they are not real. What is required is a collective struggle to change the social conditions that create so many “personal” and social problems.”

In thinking about my final project, I have been interested in mental health and mental illness in communities of color and how it is dealt with both individually and collectively. During the Schomburg visit, I came across an article written by Vanessa Northington Gamble which referenced mental health issues in the black community. For Gamble, her “personal” issues battling depression are political. When she was having difficulties at her job due to her depression she said, “I believed that my performance [work] represented not that of an individual, but that of a race.” This illustrates how mental health issues are political issues in communities of color because individual experiences get generalized to be representative of the whole race. As Gamble also writes about her mother’s suicide attempts and thus, her subsequent struggle with depression, there seems to be the idea that mental health issues are in some way generational and/or genetic.

Gamble’s article from the Schomburg archives

Gamble invokes bell hooks in arguing that the personal is political. When Gamble wanted to start writing about her battle with depression, her colleague criticized her for: “wanting to put her business out on the street.” However, she counters this by emphasizing that voicing our personal struggles is key to liberation. Gamble says,

“Telling our stories, hooks insists, is a crucial strategy for the self-recovery of black women because it allows us to acknowledge our pain, reach out for solace and find ways of healing. There is no healing in silence… hooks views personal transformation through a political lens. She sees self-hate, low self-esteem, and addiction disorders as reflections of a political system that devalues the lives of black people… Personal recovery, hooks argues, must go hand in hand with political struggles, because no level of individual self-actualization alone can sustain the marginalized and oppressed. We must be linked to collective struggle, to communities of resistance that move us outwards, into the world.”

In my readings and encounters with archival material, I was struck by how the two were in conversation with each other. It is my hope that through my final project that I can bring Shange’s experience and that of other black female artists’ to the forefront so that other women of color can be empowered with the knowledge that their “personal” is political.

Grappling with the “Postcolonial”

by Nadia on November 3, 2015 0 Comments

My Africana courses this semester have forced me to grapple with the term “postcolonial.” I have learned that this word is fraught because it describes a time period or phenomena which is defined or continues to be influenced by the traumas of colonialism.The Black World Editor’s Note summarizes this point well: “black people on both sides of the continent have very similar problems and a common source: that of colonialism and enslavement” (SOS 207). Even after countries have received independence, they still hold the burden of dealing with the effects of colonialism and, in many cases, watch a new breed, namely, neocolonialism, evolve.

Artists and writers have dealt with contemporary issues affected by colonialism in their work. In “To Make a Poet Black” Michelle Joan Wilkinson states, “the 1960s generation of Black Arts poets imagined themselves as black magicians making black poems in and for a black world” and “the new slogans included “art for people’s sake,” “art for survival,” and even “art for the revolution.” However, this type of activism through art does not only apply to the black community. Instead of allowing the postcolonial to be a divisive agent that separates people of different ethnic and racial backgrounds from each other, writers like Ntozake Shange (African American) and Victor Hernandez Cruz (Puerto Rican) display “diasporic consciousness and cross-cultural poetics” in their work, terms Ron Hernadez used to describe publications like Umbra magazine (Latin Soul 334).

Shange demonstrates her solidarity with those of the diaspora in Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography as a result of a shared colonial past:

there is no edge

no end to the new world

cuz i have a daughter/ trinidad

i have a son/ san juan

our twins

capetown & palestine/ cannot speak the same

language/ but we fight the same old men

the same men who thought the earth waz flat

In a similar way, Cruz’s writing reflects “a poetics of tensions between Spanish/English, rural/urban, and vernacular/literary cultures” (Latin Soul 335). This poem La Lupe illustrates the connection between Cuba and New York:

She embodied in gowns, capes,

dresses, necklaces, bonnets,

Velvets, suedes, diamond-studded,

flowers, sequins,

All through which

she wanted to eat herself

She salvaged us all,

but took the radiation.

Each time she sang

she crossed the sea.

From the Bronx

she went back to Cuba,

Adrift on the sails

of a song.