Jennell Strong

Until very recently, I had been invested in naming and defining every aspect of my identity I had access to. I’d say I was a Black, first gen, cis- women loving woman. Now, besides declaring proudly the content of my natal chart, I could care less about listing off a bunch of markers that say little about my humanity. Likewise, I’m less inclined to wear any political identities on my sleeves. However, I will say my political and social beliefs are anti-racist, anti-misogyny, anti-xenophobia, abolitionist, queer, and womanist. I care about the lives of the most marginalized, the most forgotten, and the most at risk for being oppressed. As a black woman, my feminism will always center black women, it will always be diasporic first. It is also transnational. The things I want for myself (safety, access to life-saving resources, mobility, choice) I want for others everywhere. I am critical of white supremacy. I am critical of heteronormativity. I am critical of ideologies whose origins are inherently anti-me and whose effects shape my sense of self. My feminism is invested in dismantling every system or institution that robs humanity of all its love and joy.

I would describe the activities of the women from the 1970s-80s as radical in theory and on the page. I don’t know if the women whose works we have read have participated in any grassroots organization. I feel their activism lies in their thought provoking, cultural shifting critical analysis and prose. Their work are also undoubtedly feminist in nature. Despite Wallace denouncing any association of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman with feminism, her writing is black feminist at its rawest. Lastly, at the core of these women’s beliefs and politics is the goal of liberation, for women, for folks of color, for everyone.

For all the uproar and criticism Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman garnered after its release, I don’t find it to be as inflammatory as I was lead to believe. Reading Michele Wallace’s account on the relationships between black women and men in the 1970s, I wonder how her words have been inside my mouth for as long as I was old enough to say and really feel that “A nigga man ain’t shit” (15). Honestly! How is it that her words feel so eerily familiar as if my mother co-wrote it. I recall very clearly my mother saying in one of them disapproving black women voices how black men flock to white women because they see them as symbols of success, of moving on up the social ladder. Even still, I can retrieve without much effort from my adolescent memories, a friend of my father explaining to me that in the U.S. black men and white men were polar opposites in terms of power; that they were the opponents in the great American struggle. Everybody else, white and black women, were in the middle of it all. Although young and without the words and courage to counter him, I was disgruntled by his statements, feeling that his hypothesis was blatantly ignorant. Women can’t just be passive pawns in the battle of male power.

Wallace’s book is centered around the myths of the Black Macho and the Superwoman. Within a eurocentric society whose gender binary consists of man and woman, black people, by virtue of being descendants of an enslaved people, don’t ascribe to those “normal” gender categories irrespective of their aspirations to do so. It seems that the opposite of dehumanization is overestimation and in the case of black folks we can either be subhumans, close to the monkeys, or the hyper– a black man whose masculinity is defined by his virility and aggression or a black woman whose femininity is also defined by an exaggerated sexuality.

Wallace writes the black woman is “really more of a woman in that she is the embodiment of Mother Earth, the quintessential mother with infinite sexual, life-giving, and nurturing reserve…she is a superwoman” (107). What are the implications of such a myth? Black women being so strong that 1) they can withstand the sexual violence of the slave master 2) serve as guinea pig for early gynecological procedures 3) be ignored by doctors when experiencing pain during pregnancy and risk fatality and 4) endure the bullshit that black men put them through on a daily basis. These are but of few examples of how black women’s real and imagined strength and longevity has been used to justify their abuse. To the last example, think of all the black women celebrities whose personal love lives have made public scandal. What’s the message of Beyonce’s Lemonade? Yeah she’s been heartbroken and cheated on, but in the end she stood by her man through the pain and everyone’s like wow Beyonce’s so strong. What good has this myth of the superwoman brought black women?

Thinking of the superwoman brought to mind my generation’s #BlackGirlMagic movement. The phrase and concept strives to celebrate black girls and women. Odes to melanin and curl patterns make up much of the rhetoric. It affirms our powers. But of course, every seemingly beneficial thing can be criticized. In a 2016 Elle magazine, Harvard professor Linda Chavers wrote a piece disapproving the BGM movement, claiming it was an iteration of the very myth Wallace explains. Chavers assures herself that she has heard “black girl magic” somewhere before:

“The “strong, black woman” archetype, which also includes the mourning black woman who suffers in silence, is the idea that we can survive it all,that we can withstand it. That we are, in fact, superhuman. Black girl magic sounds to me like just another way of saying the same thing, and it is smothering and stunting. It is, above all, constricting rather than freeing.” Black girl magic suggests we are, again, something other than human.”

Although, I see how chanting black girl magic can sneakily affirm the old as (colonial) times idea of a black superwoman, but I think it’s much a stretch to equate it to what Wallace is describing.

You can read the rest here: https://www.elle.com/life-love/a33180/why-i-dont-love-blackgirlmagic/

I find fascinating Wallace’s insistence that black people are mythologized in American society and that black people internalize these myths, believing them to be true of each other. I want to share a scene from the 1974 Afrofuturist film Space Is the Place which stars jazz giant Sun Ra. This is the era from which Wallace writes so it is especially relevant to see her subjects personified. Sun Ra is telling the young black folks that they aren’t real. We are a myth.

Watching this film years ago, this scene and his monologue stuck with me. I had never thought of myself as a myth. Now reading Black Macho I agree more and more that black people are myths. Not to say we aren’t human beings because of course. But Black People™ or African Americans or Negros or slaves are just socially constructed, as is anyone categorized into race, gender, sexual orientation, or class. We aren’t who we are. We are what we/they say we are. To say I am black is to attach to myself a list of concepts, connotations, qualities, narratives and histories that may or may or not be true to anything of who I am as a human. My blackness is perceived and conceived differently in the minds of every person I encounter, making me not who I am but who they say I am. The superwoman is nothing but others’ projection internalized and reappropriated. That is why it is imperative for black folks to be the ones with the power to define ourselves.

In all my readings on black feminism throughout the decades, present in every reiteration or rather continuation of the social, intellectual and cultural feminist movement within the United States is the recognition of and solidarity with oppressed peoples all over the world. Although focused on the plights of women, black feminism’s objective is almost always rooted in the protection and support of all humans. Black feminist politics is saturated with empathy and genuine diversity. The TWWA’s newspaper Triple Jeopardy and the magazine Conditions exemplify this ingrained attitude of multiplicity. These papers are inclusive of the narratives of Third World Women. Conditions for example published “work by women in other global locations as a form of information exchange” (34) Likewise, Triple Jeopardy operated centered their content beyond the borders, linking the injustices happening abroad with the internal terrorism against WoC in the States.

Ntozake Shange throughout all her works, carries strongly an expansive sense of self, an understanding of self as collective. Specifically in the poem Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography is the imagery of transnationalism. Shange, a Black American woman claims blood ties to folks in Africa, the Caribbean and South America. Not only is she saying that she has a diasporic family, but these people in Mozambique, Cuba and Salvador are her children. She has “made children of the new world”. As a mother, the urgency she has in protecting and fighting for them is stronger, I presume, then if she was simply their sister or cousin.

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 these lines, and the entire poem, Shange recognizes 1) the kinship throughout the diaspora 2) the nuances of experience and 3) the common oppressor of Black Americans and Third World black people. That is also how Triple Jeopardy and Conditions operated. Shange sees a commonality of oppression from racial discrimination in the US, South African apartheid and the social conditions of Palestinians. However, this commonality doesn’t translate to universality because she recognizes the difference in language, a note on separate colonizers. Still, regardless of the colonizer’s language they are all “the same men” whose “dreams are full of none of our/ children”.

This principle of solidarity that runs deeply through Shange’s poetry and the politics of TWWA reminds me of the civil rights movement of my generation: Black Lives Matter, a movement pioneered by queer black women. Every time some major social event occurs, there is always support from the BLM movement. An example of this is two years ago when the Dakota Access Pipeline was heavily trending BLM people were upfront about their support for Native Americans fighting the US government for autonomy of their land. Regardless of their name being Black Lives Matter, there is no hesitation or confusion about the inherent fact that all lives, especially the lives of the most marginalized and oppressed, matter. So of course black people, but really black women, would recognize the need to empathize and stand with indigenous folks.

I am always wary about ascribing certain affixes to blackness in order to attribute a trait to a nonblack source. For example, the Black Marilyn Monroe to mean Dorothy Dandridge or the Black Meryl Streep to mean Viola Davis. I recall a professor proclaiming Beyonce to be a modern Madonna. The audacity! The profanity! To me it reads just as shady as “you’re so beautiful for a black girl”. In the minds of many (incompetent)people, black will forever be stained with inferiority. Therefore, ideals and positive concepts such as beauty, talent or success is counter to what blackness represents. Blackness can’t stand alone, in itself and embody goodness. Viola Davis can’t just be her talented, groundbreaking Viola Davis self because that’s just incomprehensible in our society. She’s sooo (unbelievably) good that she is in the image of another great(er) talent.

I say all this to say, I would have never deemed Shange or any other black artist of her era as “bohemian” because bohemian is a term which I’ve always seen associated with whiteness. Black people, to me, are artists. We are innately artistic. When whites get into the arts and spirituality and wearing their hair down and “being free”, it’s considered counterculture because it’s counter to their culture. How I’ve always perceived it, black folks been spiritual and immersed in the arts and it was never a conscious decision to be deliberately transgressive. Black folks live and breathe creativity and our casual expressions are works of art. So no I don’t see Shange as bohemian if bohemian means relating to some movement. In the same way I detest the redundancy of “black hippie”. Isn’t it laughable that a black slang (hip) is appropriated by whites and then thrown onto black people to say this black is like us. Shange being free-spirited, being a traveller, being spiritual and magical and a poet-cook-mother-activist is in line with an authentic blackness that doesn’t need to be supplemented by bohemian.

I want to share this quote by another Black Arts Movement poet that I think sums up how I feel:

Likewise, I wouldn’t read the sisters in Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo as bohemian but simply as black girls/women doing what is essentially black: creating. More specifically is the link between creation and survival that enables life for black women.

I remember wanting so badly to read Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo after seeing so many quotes about the magic of women with moons falling from mouths and roses from legs. But I remember being so disappointed in the cliche of living within a toxic love, where a man in his art is more important than a woman and she feels obliged to sacrifice because the man is so irresistibly talented. I am frustrated with this narrative because I am tired of black women characters’ storyline being incomplete without some man to inconvenience her greatness.

I have read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” at most three times, this last time being the first my highlighter glided across the page in fervent agreement. Now I understand what she means by the erotic, “the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered” (55). Although I don’t agree with her association of the erotic with a female identity, I understand how necessary it is for women to access the erotic. All humans possess the power to feel deeply, to revel in that feeling, and to harness the creative energy that is imbued in feeling. Lorde’s description of the erotic as being a creative energy brought to mind the Yoruba concept of ashe, which is the power to create. It is the ability within all beings to manifest.

Lorde states that the erotic functions through joy:  it is “that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy ” which “demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible” (57). This statement is so powerful and beautiful because it challenges us to aim for maximum sensation/maximum experience. Joy is unfortunately neglected in our society. Little attention is given to seeking joy and fulfillment in our lives. It’s all about survival and getting by. It’s always about security and stability. But what about the joy found in chaos and spontaneity or the chaos found in feeling pure joy? Why don’t we prioritize this feeling above the need to satisfy social expectations of self hate and self neglect?

Lorde connects the erotic to our passions in work saying that often we aren’t fulfilled in our work because we don’t do it out of pleasure. This relates to Shange’s poem “advice” where she writes about her confusion regarding people’s reaction to her being a poet. Poetry isn’t her profession, it’s her passion, her use of the erotic. It’s what gives deep meaning to her life.

Ending on the importance of joy, I’ve included a song by Pharoah Sanders which relate to this need to experience joy.

On Wednesday, September 26, four days into autumn, four days into Libra season, I sat down at a table where the incomparable and irreplaceable Ntozake Shange sat at the head, as the star, with her blond cornrows, pierced eyebrows, cerulean blue nails and eyes gleaming with wisdom and willingness to listen to young girls spill over with love and admiration. Questions about her life and her passions were asked, but two hours could not satisfy all the questions I had in me. I wanted to ask about her travels, the experiences of living in different cities, if she ever doubted the artist’s life, if she ever had extended bouts of writers blocks where language failed her and poetry was not an option. But I was in awe, I didn’t want to talk too much or say the wrong thing.

When I got the chance to sit and take a picture with her, I asked for a hug. But even when looking in her eyes, my tongue couldn’t summon from the back of my throat the gratitude I yearned to express. I wanted to cry and tell her how much her poems, like music, have been the soundtrack to the past four, five years of my life. Her words have reached inside and pulled out from the angriest, tiredest, most impassioned places of my spirit a voice and a vision that has blossomed into fulfilling experiences. My learning a new language, traveling to South America, becoming more invested in learning about and connecting to the Diaspora, has everything to do with Ms. Shange’s writings of other cultures. I remember living in Bahia and reading Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo and then being motivated to take an Afro-Brazilian dance class thinking what would Cypress do?

I wanted to express all these things, but all I could manage was a “thank you so much”, realizing that I’m one of a dozen other gaping girls, one of hundreds of thousands of colored girls around the world finding and losing themselves in the language and sound of Ntozake Shange’s poems.

Passion and rage, nurtured

Discovering beyond

The present, the self-hatred, abdication and denial

An era capable of redemption

Discovering beyond the present because

There is little to marvel at

Little to fall in love with/ to come to terms with

Delving deeper instead

Discovering instead a past of glory

The above poem is my attempt at rewording and rereading Fanon in a Shange-like manner. The excerpt I chose to poeticize was from the chapter “On National Culture” in which Fanon dissects the process of conjuring from an idealized past a “national culture” that the colonized intellectual is tasked with. He describes the resentment towards the colonizer and their hegemonic control over every aspect of the colonized’s life. Consequentially, the colonized intellectual must struggle internally with everything they have been indoctrinated with about their history. The colonized intellectual is consumed by trying to prove to the colonizer but especially themself that they aren’t inferior, uncivilized, less than. So they turn to the past, trying to dig up proof of their humanity. They however only end up idealizing and overcompensating their past. It’s this desperate and incessant need to define the self outside of the box that the colonizer has so meticulously built. Shange asks us in Lost in Language and Sound “where are we to go?” if we rid ourselves of the white man. “Having delivered ourselves no way of naming the universe outside of the English language, where are we to go?” It’s the same dilemma of decolonization that Fanon expresses; the conscious colonized person struggles to conceptualize the black self outside of the oppression that has so greatly defined it.

Fanon’s passage immediately brought to mind a quote from Toni Morrison that resonates with me on a daily basis as I navigate white spaces as a black woman. Originally spoken in 1975 at a public lecture at Portland State University, Morrison sums up the toll racism plays on black people: it distracts us.

“The function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

All colonized people, whether or not they qualify as intellectuals, are faced with this existential plight of overcompensating to gain basic humanity. Being a student in a PWI and specifically an Ivy League university, it is very common for students of color to defend their communities and cultures from ignorant white students. They feel frustrated yet dignified in explaining how problematic a student or professor or text or policy is and they work themselves up about others’ ignorance. I made a personal vow some time ago to not waste any breath, sweat, or tears over proving my humanity to others. I refuse to be distracted by racism.