In the following passages from “why i had to dance//” Shange speaks of the relationship between her dancing and her writing process:
this is a critical moment/ when i decided that dance was as important to me as writing/ that in order to write, i had to sweat/ to reach some endorphin high to get to the truth/ which was the word/ this would change over time// (56)
in my early adulthood/ politics and the arts were truly wed at the hip or thereabouts// (57)
our commitment to the movement meant that all our resources intellectual as well as physical had to be dedicated to the liberation movement/ which is one of the reasons i had to dance/ (57)
it is possible to start a phrase with a word and end with a gesture/ that’s how i’ve lived my life/ that’s how i continue to study/ produce black art/ (58)
First draft of “A Week-end in Austin/A Poet, the People, & the KKK” – dated 21 February 1983; labelled “not proofread” and “express property of Village Voice…”.
I am interested in evidence of Shange’s self-revision and growth in her papers. Much of her archived work includes edits in the margins–notes, highlights, scratches, and communication with editors and readers. These images represent just some of the many edits and revisions in the Shange Papers, and point to just a few examples of her growth as an artist. In particular, she seems to be focused on including more italics here, which may point to themes or language she is hoping to emphasize in this piece, or more broadly at this time in her artistic development. Read More
The Digital Schomburg has a number of digital exhibits that provide excellent models for our own digital storytelling. I want to highlight two exhibits hosted on the same page, titled, “Black Power! The Movement, The Legacy” and “Ready for the Revolution: Education, Arts, and Aesthetics of the Black Power Movement.” The exhibits are presented as pre-organized/ordered set of images and associated text. Users can also examine photographs/archival materials outside of the curated exhibits in the “Items” section. This is a simple, user-friendly storytelling model that is still comprehensive and intriguing.
Typed copy of Ntozake Shange’s (Paulette Williams) poem “They Are Safe for Now” published in 1966 in The Phoenix, the literary publication of her high school, Trenton High.
This piece interested me initially because the poem was typed on a browned sheet of paper and the bottom left corner was significantly ripped off. I noticed the date, 1966, and the authorship, Paulette Williams. I recalled that there weren’t many pieces in the Archive that were taken from this time in Shange’s life, and I also hadn’t seen any using her name assigned at birth. Read More
who’s hair isn’t done / let me get in that head honey / the day is lace and crinolines / curls, satins, and layers of beauty / who’s mama wouldn’t be proud / who’s eye won’t be turned when / i saunter outta this room where / the magic is and become it – The Sweet Breath of Life
And they has a party every Saturday night / usually not no big party / Just neighbors and home folks…But it’s nice to young folks all dressed up going somewhere–maybe to a party. But it’s sad if you ain’t invited.
The Sweet Flypaper of Life
A number of continuities exist between Shange and Kamoinge’s The Sweet Breath of Life and Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life, including authentic representations of black families and neighborhoods, and the power of pairing image and text.
One could also say that racism is toxic, so by metaphorically refusing an all-American diet of meat and potatoes, Yvette and thousands of others refuse to swallow what will, in fact, poison them: self-hatred. (Shange 91)
Recognize that land and food have been used as a weapon to keep black people oppressed …Recognize also that land and food are essential to liberation for black people. (Curtis Hayes Muhammed via Soul Fire Farm)
In If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, Shange celebrates food and farming as a global black experience, while pointing to the disregard of black life that informs American food policy. In this way, If I Can Cook shows that decolonizing our minds goes hand in hand with decolonizing our diets. Shange’s statements evoke principles of radical farming, which emphasizes solidarity with people marginalized by food apartheid and reverence of ancestral knowledge of the land.
In fact, we knew something about the land, sensuality, rhythm, and ourselves that has continued to elude our captors (Shange 41)
Soul Fire Farm, a family farm committed to the dismantling of oppressive structures that misguide our food system, partners with Project Growth, a restorative justice program in Albany, in order to continue the literal work of “eluding our captors” via ancestral knowledge of the land and ourselves. The initiative brings convicted teenagers to the farm, both as a way for them to earn money to pay their restitution and “heal relationships with their communities, the land, and themselves.”
By understanding food as both a weapon of oppression and an essential tool for black liberation, we can more fully claim our pasts and envision radical systems today.
Shange’s piece in The Black Sexism Debate “is not so gd to be born a girl,” makes me think of how black girlhood is described in slave narratives, particularly in Harriet Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”. Jacobs writes:
When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own. (119)
Jacobs writes that slavery is worse for black girls because of their added gender and sexual oppression. Notably, her messages about the sexual violence that enslaved black women and girls experience are written to appeal to white women abolitionist audiences. This is evident in the following passage, as she appeals to the sympathy of the white woman reader:
Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another…Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others. (86)
Jacobs is hesitant to reveal her lived experiences, so that even the introduction to her narrative is written to convince Northern white women to accept her story, despite its “indecorum.”
As we consider Shange’s unapologetic expression of the lived experiences of black women and girls in “The Black Sexism Debate,” it is important to consider the historical context of her appeal. Shange is writing in 1978 to a different audience, but she is still in the position of highlighting the sexual violence black girls constantly face. Shange uses new language to describe this violence, language that Jacobs did not possess while writing her own narrative. However, their sentiments are fundamentally the same. Shange writes:
right now being born a girl is to be born threatened/ i dont respond well to threats/ i want being born a girl to be a cause for celebration/ cause for protection & nourishment of our birth-right/ to live freely with passion, knowing no fear/ that our species waz somehow incorrect.
& we are now plagued with rapists & clitorectomies. we pay for being born girls/ but we owe no one anything/ not our labia, not our clitoris, not our lives. we are born girls & live to be women who live our own lives/ to live our lives/
to have/
our lives/
to live.
In this passage, and throughout Shange’s work, she is responding to the historical legacy and trauma of black girl’s experiences with sexual violence, while naming her desires for black girlhood and black girl possibilities.
Our introduction to Shange’s Archives allowed me to theorize archival space and the process of archiving in new ways. Since our session, I have been pondering the significance of Shange’s collection — what makes the archive of a living, black woman, and Barnard alumna, so significant and distinct?
In pondering this question, I was struck by Shannon Miller’s account of the history of archival work and the etymology of the word “archive” from the Greek “arkhe” meaning “magistracy, office, government”. There is a historic relationship between the traditional practice of archiving and maintaining governance and control of access to information. Understanding this relationship is integral to recognizing the unique space and place of the Shange collection.
Shange’s work is rooted within the tradition of black women healing through art, speech, and togetherness. In Sister Citizen (2011), Melissa Harris-Perry writes about this tradition through an analysis of Baby Suggs, Janie’s grandmother in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God:
“Her words are the conduit of healing for an entire community of free blacks who are scarred by the world in which they find themselves. Rather than asking them to deny their pain or to bear it stoically in order to prove their strength, Baby Suggs encourages them to release it through song, dance, open weeping, and togetherness. She also asks the black people assembled in her clearing to embrace a new faith based on reimagining their own bodies as something beautiful and worthy of love.” (Harris-Perry 264)
For Colored Girls seeks to heal black women and girls from their pain through “song, dance, open weeping, and togetherness” as well, but does so in the form of the choreopoem. In “Black Feminist Collectivity in … for colored girls…” Soyica Diggs Colbert explains the significance of this choice: “The choreopoem creates collectivity based on the intertwining of bodies in space and words in rhythm in order to counter the displacement and dehumanization of black women’s voice, bodies, and experiences.” Not only does Shange write about black women healing through collective artistic expression, she also reinforces this tradition by placing her ladies in a physical and psychic collective and artistic space via the choreopoem.
The final poem in For Colored Girls, “a layin’ on of hands” demonstrates what this kind of space makes possible. After the lady in red says “i found god in myself & i loved her,” all of the ladies repeat these lines until it “becomes a song of joy” and “the ladies enter into a closed tight circle”. The voice of one woman, affirming herself and practicing self-love, is transformed into a collective affirmation and practice, through song. Their collective healing is then physically displayed by their closed tight circle. Diggs Colbert writes:
“The final piece, “a layin on of hands,” enacts a ritualized mode of performance that draws from spiritual practices and allows women to connect physically and on equal ground. The engagement of touch and speech offers a way to appreciate communal belonging that affirms black women’s humanity.”
Shange’s work, specifically in For Colored Girls, is so important because of what it adds to black women’s healing traditions and, ultimately, what it makes possible for women’s resistance. By affirming black women’s humanity through art, speech, and togetherness, resistance is made stronger and becomes an act of joy.
This week’s readings reminded me of the song titled, “Young Girls” by New York based Puerto Rican artist Destiny Frasqueri, who performs as Princess Nokia. The music video depicts a group of women of color leading young girls of color in a series of movements, dances, and songs. They are sitting in a tight circle, alone in a natural environment. The lyrics intentionally affirm and collectivize these young girls of color.
In understanding physicality as the basis of Shange’s art, I realize that she equates dance with both truth and survival. In “why i had to dance//” Shange calls attention to a critical moment in her development: “when I decided that dance was as important to me as writing/ that in order to write, I had to sweat/ to reach some sort of endorphin high to get to the truth/ which was the word/ this would change over time” (56). She recalls this relationship between sweat and truth in “movement/ melody/ muscle/ meaning/ mcintyre” as she elaborates on McIntyre’s work, committing dancers to “the rubrics of sound and sweat” and, by doing so, upholding a dance company “that does not lie” (62). These moments led me to ask, how does sweat lead to the truth?
Then, throughout the readings, Shange relates dance to the formation and maintenance of her afro-identity and consciousness, particularly in “a celebration of black survival/ black dance america/ brooklyn academy of music.” Here, she not only articulates how choreographers are addressing “the many ways we’ve avoided death, insisted on living,” (74) but also insists, “We must sing and dance or we shall die an inert, motionless, ‘sin ritmo’ death.” I have two additional questions: in what ways does Shange characterize truth and survival as “one”? What does Shange’s statement, “this would change over time” (56) add to our interpretation of truth and survival according to Shange?
Shange discusses her experience with dance, endorphins, and writing in the following video:
