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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Sophia

archive find #2: “with no immediate cause” in Heresies 1979

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This week I found a pretty late addition to my bibliography: Heresies, a feminist journal on art and politics based out of New York. I can’t confidently speak to why it wasn’t on my radar before now, but throughout my research, I’ve tried to focus on unearthing journals by black women rather than just pulling up more prominently circulating mass-media about them, so it’s almost comforting that the latter had been sitting on the back burner. Talking about black feminisms in publications that were, most essentially, predominately by and for white feminists, is a contentious issue, which was concretized as I flipped through the Michele Wallace issue of Ms. for the first time. Heresies, though significantly less glossy and more “academic” in its nature, faces much the same issue.
So I was surprised to find Ntozake Shange’s “with no immediate cause” sitting boldly at the front of the first issue I looked through. With for colored girls having made her somewhat of a celebrity in all feminist circles quite recently, it’s not as though they were featuring undiscovered black writers, but they featured Shange all the same. It’s also nice that the black man pictured at the bottom looks just as upstanding as the white men that surround him, and that the ratio of white to black men was not proportioned to favor the latter. Where I did have problems with the piece, though, is the editorial/cartoon pairing that followed it, which can be seen below. It features, in two pages and many windows with a variety of characters, exclusively white women –implying, consciously or not, that black women are not subject to male violence, or, if they are, they are not the victims of foremost concern. This is especially problematic considering that a black man was shown amongst the portraits of the imagined abusers. The editorial piece is fairly straightforward and unexceptional –focusing on gender and largely silent on race– but in a special issue specifically focused on women and violence, I feel that it is the responsibility of intersectional feminists (i.e. all feminists) to vocalize the unique subjugation of women of color.

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Reading Zake Week 2: “i talk to myself” from Nappy Edges

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i can’t quite remember how many questions or journalists or people have happened to me in the last year. i can’t even remember everything i’ve said. i know i tried to convey my perceptions of the world, of men & women, music & language, as clearly as i cd, but poets who talk too much can trip over their own syllables. can become absurd. like the time i told this woman that the most important thing that ever happened to me was my tail-cutting party. or the time i started crying in the middle of a question cuz the person waz so nasty to me i cd no longer speak. he said i had no right to exist/ so i said/ go speak to a rightfully existing person, a white man, maybe. that’s not good press.

…

tz: well. how do you explain loving some men who write & some men who play music & some men who are simply lovable, when yr work for almost three years has been entirely woman-centered?

i can do a lot of things. we all can. women haveta. i waz not able to establish the kind of environment i that my work needed when i read with men all the time. you haveta remember there’s an enormous ignorance abt women’s realities in our society. we ourselves suffer from a frightening lack of clarity abt who we are. my work attempts to ferret out what i know & touch in a woman’s body. if i really am committed to pulling the so-called personal outta the realm of non-art. that’s why i have dreams & recipes, great descriptions of kitchens & handiwork in sassafrass, cypress, & indigo. that’s why in for colored girls…i discuss the simple reality of going home at nite, of washing one’s body, looking out the window with a woman’s eyes. we must learn our common symbols, preen them and share them with the world. the readings i usedta do with david henderson, conyus, bob chrisman, paul vane, ton cusan, roberto vargas & all the others at the coffee gallery, the intersection, & s.f. state were quite high, but the readings at the women’s studies center, with the third world women’s collective, international woman’s day affairs, with the shameless hussy poets, these were overwhelmingly intense & growing experiences for me as a woman & as a poet.

the collective recognition of certain realities that are female can still be hampered, diverted, diluted by a masculine presence. yes, i segregated my work & took it to women. much like i wd take fresh water to people stranded in the mojave desert. i wdnt take a camera crew to observe me. i wdnt ask the people who had never known thirst to come watch the thirsty people drink.

Shange, DeCarava, and the mundane

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I was very excited by our class visit to the ICP. I have practically no experience with either the technical or historical practices of photography, and it was incredibly special to be taught by someone who was clearly a passionate expert, and who integrated so much of his personal relationship to the medium into his instruction. I’ve never looked at an image with such love and intensity as I did this past Monday, and I am looking forward to getting to do so more often, and with more developed tools.

Archive Task #2

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I went to the Schomburg to find the January 1979 copy of Ms. featuring Michele Wallace on the cover that inspired my project. I found it in box 6 (call number MG 739) of the Michele Wallace papers.
I wanted to revisit the document because I had only really glanced at it during our first class visit, and wanted to 1) capture images of the feature article on Black Macho, and 2) peruse the issue for any and all other mention of black women. It was absolutely as interesting as I’d hoped, as it included a review of a poetry collection by Audre Lorde, a national list of black female groups/alliances, and a small list of black women who had suffered as a result of the cutoff of federal funds for abortion. The work was fairly visually compelling to me from the perspective of editorial design, but I really would’ve liked to see some ads featuring black women, which were not included in the issue. The employees at the Schomburg and I had a slight difficulty accessing the finding aid for Michele Wallace’s papers, and then the boxes were mislabeled, but otherwise the process was fairly easy. However, I did spend quite a while searching for her letters about the Ms. coverage and didn’t find anything, and it’s frustrating to not know if I somehow missed something, or if they’re in some other box somewhere.

decolonizing the diet

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The first chapter of If I Can Cook / You Know God Can addresses the effects of food’s presence and absence. When there is a shortage of food, the first efforts made are simply to nourish —in any way possible, as soon as possible. Efforts made to eliminate food insecurity, whether within in the United States or outside of it, almost always move away from native culinary traditions, as the cultural associations that they carry are intimately tied with infrastructures that created and propagated the insecurity in the first place. In other words, attempts to eliminate hunger inevitably lead to the elimination (if merely inadvertent) of culinary traditions personally associated with it. That it is inadvertent is critical; the pain of hunger is urgent, fundamental, and quickly becomes a matter of life or death with the passage of time. The general condition of food insecurity carries with it its own urgency; even if not hungry in a given moment, there remains the looming possibility that one might be thrust into that life-or-death-condition at any time, and be dramatically inhibited from meeting the demands of daily life —the meeting of all of which and more are necessary for the removal of one/one’s family from this position of precarity.
So with this in mind, no one —those who find their home in ‘American food’ and those who don’t— thinks to consider the health lost in the abandonment of native food traditions, and the possibilities of food beyond essential daily calorie replenishment and into realms of spiritual healing, unity within and across cultures, and ritual acts of decolonization. Shange wonders
“if the move to monolignualize this country is a push for the homogeneity of our foods as well. Once we read American will e cease to recognize ourselves, our delicacies and midnight treats?” (5)
Food serves a deeper need than physical nourishment, even when focusing on physical nourishment is all we can afford. Just as African-Americans in Philadelphia hesitated to celebrate the American Declaration of Liberation while the Fugitive Slave Act was in effect, they especially hesitated to do so with potato salad and golden or blanched flesh melon.
In support of the contemporary social justice project to “decolonize your diet,” Native American activist Winona LaDuke emphasizes that
“The recovery of the people is tied to recovery of food, since food itself is medicine—not only for the body but also for the soul and spiritual connection to history, ancestors, and the land.”
In this way, as Shange articulates,
“black-eyed peas and rice or ‘Hoppin John,’ even collard greens and pig’s feet, are not so much arbitrary predilections of the ‘nigra’ as they are symbolic defiance; we shall celebrate ourselves on a day of our choosing in honor of those events and souls who are an honor to us” (6-7).
Even those who are fed —the slaves no longer slaves— are provided food historically tied to victories of their oppressors. Even those who are fed are still hungry for food whose history and semiotics is their own.
She quotes Bob Marley’s “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)” to explain this.
“Dem belly full, but dey hungry/ A hungry man is an angry man.”
The popular interpretation of this is a warning against allowing Jamaica’s poor to go hungry —which is certainly not untrue. But here Shange uses it to better articulate the deeper hunger that remains even after the little Hatian girl eats every one of the cookies in the red-lettered American box. The song asks the listener to forget their troubles, sorrows, sickness, and weakness through dance, which, like cooking, is a personal, pluralizing, and culturally-motivated strategy by which to reclaim the body.

photo/audio essays on Santería and Gullah/Geechee culture

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Audio: Sacred Rhythms of Cuban Santería
produced by Olavo Alén Rodríguez (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1995), 1 hour

On Contemporary Cuban Practice of Santería
Photographed and captioned by Phil Clarke Hill

 

Shadows of the Gullah Geechee
Photographed by Pete Marovich
Captioned by Jordan G. Teicher

looking further into Felipe Luciano’s “Jíbaro, My Pretty Nigger”

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“There’s a move to divide us. It’s being done by Afro-saxons and coconuts. People who would have us believe that there’s a separate gulf between two nations: Black and Latino. This is not the poem, y’all. I’m telling you there’s no difference between Buford, South Carolina and Ponce, Puerto Rico…Mambo is Black, merengue is Black, R&B is Black, joropo is Black, flamenco is Black, guaguanco is Black, bomba is Black, be careful. They will come to you and say be careful with those hoards of Spanish people. Fuck them.”

Felipe Luciano opens his appearance on Def Jam in this way. Audience members cheer as though the poem has already begun before he tells them that he’s just going off. In “To Make a Poet Black,” Wilkinson concludes that Luciano’s place in the Black Arts Movement “should serve less to conceal cultural nuances, but work more to convey a cultural milieu in which poetry by African Americans and Puerto Ricans shared a communal residence” (330). Whether or not this statement applies to his self-image and artistic mission is obviously impossible to glean without consulting him, but judging by this performance, he seems to be acting first and apologizing later –making a radical point by saying that Black and Latino cultures ought not to be divided or even nuanced, but are one and the same.

I speak only intermediate-level Spanish, but for those who don’t at all, I’ve translated his first four lines:

“Jíbaro, mi negro lindo
De los bosques de caña
Caciques de luz
Tiempo es una cosa cómica.”

Jíbaro, my pretty negro
From the cane forests
Chiefs of light
Time is a funny thing

Read about the modern connotations of “jíbaro” here

As was briefly discussed in “To Make a Poet Black,” the poem is about the Black/Puerto Rican/Nuyorican experience as single, fluid, and inclusive. The use of “jíbaro” and “nigger” as relatively interchangeable or at least cohabitating terms suggests a cultural history and relationship so familial that each group is permitted to reappropriate the other’s slurs.
The majority of the poem reminisces about a decolonized state, so outside the realm of present possibility that most of it takes place in the womb of a universal mother. The images he uses are commonly resonant: one set of “mother” and “father,” shared “ancient empires” that have since been lost, “thoughts of freedom,” interchangeable use of “black” and “brown,” “the foul bowels of the ship/That vomited you up on the harbors of a cold metal city to die,” referencing both the colonization of Puerto Rico and The Middle Passage.

It ends with an ardent demand for community, addressing the division Luciano mentions in his preface to the reading, in which everyone ought to live in fear and division, being “careful” of each other –which really translates to “Fuck them.”

Jíbaro, did you know you my nigga?
I love the curve of your brow,
The slant of your baby’s eyes
The calves of your woman dancing;
I dig you!

You can’t hide.
I ride with you on subways.
I touch shoulders with you in dances.
I make crazy love to your daughter.
yea, you my cold nigga man.
And I love you ’cause you’re mine.

And I’ll never let you go.
And I’ll never let you go.
(You mine, nigga!)
And I’ll never let you go.
Forget about self.
We’re together now.
And I’ll never let you go!
Uh’uh
Never, Nigga.

The descriptions of collective love with terms typically reserved for romantic love are particularly effective. I love the use of “baby’s eyes,” as it could be interpreted to literally refer to the subject’s child as well as the image of the subject as pure love-object. The self/other line becomes very blurred (very directly!), as Luciano begs the reader to “Forget about self./ We’re together now.”

shange, diaz, and gendered expressions of racial injustice

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The portion of Shange’s foreword to for colored girls that discusses the reaction of black men to its circulation reminded me immediately of a 2012 interview with Junot Diaz and the Boston Review, in which he dissects the same 1980s conflagration between male and female authors of color. 
“The brothers criticiz[ed] the sisters for being inauthentic, for being anti-male, for airing the community’s dirty laundry, all from a dreary nationalist point of view” (10).
Shange opens her discussion of the gender-wars with an essentially identical conclusion:
“The reaction from black men to for colored girls was in a way very much like the white reaction to black power The body traditionally used to power and authority interpreting, through their own fear, my work celebrating the self-determination and centrality of women as a hostile act” (11).
She soon ends with the simple assertion that black men were threatened by the reality that their bodies, stories and the powers that articulate them were not the locus of for colored girls’ narrative voice. It was “man-hating,” airing the community’s dirty laundry —a community which, with the through-line of for colored girls, was seen as effectively, publicly betrayed and dismantled. The issue with the reaction of these men is their inability to visualize subaltern communities with anything other than “a dreary nationalist point of view.” You cannot dismantle one portion of an oppressive matrix with one portion of the oppressed peoples; it must be dismantled wholly or not at all, with forces other than the master’s tools. 

expressions of mind/body in response to external voices

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“who is setting these priorities?” and “advice” revealed a facet of Shange to me that was almost more (or at least differently) vulnerable than her work I had previously read.

One of the most defining features of her writing to me has always been the confidence with which she makes art, defines herself as an artist, and transitions between mediums so fluidly that the lines between them are called into question. This, just as much as her characteristic syntax, has always been, as she named it in “takin a solo/ a poetic possibility/ a poetic imperative”, “the particular flow of [her] certain somebody.”

The syntax of “who is setting these priorities?” and “advice” immediately inform you that they will be something different than her usual descending stanzas. They look like prose and read more like a rant, inner monologue, or even a conversation, and deal with an anxiety about writing, performing, and simply living that the powerful self or extension-of-self that speaks in most of her work never questions.

The primary question of “who is setting these priorities?” is “What in the hell am I supposed to do with my body every day?”
The primary question of “advice” is “What in the hell am I supposed to do with my mind?”
They are both in response to external noise; in the former: media-noises and existential smallness, in the latter: the “them” of every artist –who make you feel like an alien and are always asking when you’re going to get a real job.

These poems investigate and meld the mind-body question that Shange is always responding to. “who is setting these priorities?” speaks of physical inhibition instead of physical freedom, which is another departure from what I perceive to be her typical approach. The poem is an anxious accumulation of maladies: “today the cosmos satellite fell down over uranium city”, “4 or 3 million american women who take the pill & smoke are 10 times more likely to have heart attacks than women who don’t take the pill or smoke”, “the wilmington 10 are still in jail. there’s only one woman’s survival house in brooklyn.” Instead of describing her physical self as a way to free her from these stresses, she implies that they build up in her –knots that can only loosen with itches:

“i like to fuck. i’m too nervous not to smoke. no one likes to eat pussy if you wear a diaphragm…i need a cigarette cuz this is just too much for me. plus there are women who actually find sex boring/ me/ i’m gonna have a heart attack.”

“advice” takes the opposite to the same problem; it speaks of body inhibiting mind rather than mind halting body. It opens and closes with the mention of the bodies of those who are giving her advice:

“people keep tellin me to put my feet on the ground i get mad and scream/ there is no ground”
“i am gonna write poems til i die & when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind & knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground”

In this case, her physical limitations are not the center of the conversation so much as the others’ are, who are have such tunnel-vision that they can’t acknowledge the preciousness of her lifeblood, and “[can’t] read or understand english anymore” to the point where it makes her feel like “the last survivor of a crew from mars”.

The response to the vulnerability in the two poems synthesizes why Shange must do her work. When everyone is telling her she can’t be a poet, her black body writes for her: “cartwheel and somersault down pages outta my mouth come visions distilled like bootleg whiskey” When there are too many problems, too much noise, and too many voices, she opens another show after the one that just closed, keeps fucking and taking the pill, and catching the 8:00am train.