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

Eliana

Archive Find

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Something that caught my eye upon one of my first visits to the archive was an edited draft of Shange’s “First Loves” (then called “First Love”) as a part of the early edits for Some Sing, Some Cry.  

Copy of “First Love” 2009 draft with edits.

Written in prose, this piece is not itself a work of poetry, but instead an exploration of her relationship with the art as she’s grown as a writer and as a lover. This piece caught my attention because I, like Shange, “always knew I liked poetry more than anything,” but seeing the piece beyond its first line forced me to rethink my rather privileged relationship to the English language. This draft of “First Love” made me interrogate how and why Shange’s mastery of the written word looks and feels so starkly different from other poets of her time. It became clear that this is no ordinary love story — Shange’s first love was one characterized by both hardship and liberation. 

“My mother, Eloise, had benefited from what were then called ‘elocution’ lessons privately given in the home of a striking yet demure Southern woman once removed to the Bronx. There she mastered Whitman, Whittier, Wheatley, Shakespeare, Dunbar, and Paul Laurence. This eclectic mix of word crafters were my lullabies, soothing rhymes, and demonstrations of slowly garnered memorization skills. This, I suspect, is where my love of poets began.”

Shange’s love is not for poetry, it’s for poets — the “word crafters” themselves. Shange’s use of the word “crafter” here is fascinating in that is suggests the need for action in reclaiming language. This allowed me to reflect on the scope of Shange’s own vernacular writing surpassing the restrictions of “‘elocution lessons’” and making language her own. This draft, and its published body in 2010 reinforced the notion that there is no correct way to speak or write, just as there is no single correct way to create art. Wheatley’s English was crafted for her, as was the memorized lexicon of Shange’s mother, Eloise. Shange, though, is the crafter — the lover. 

These word crafters were her “lullabies,” highlighting the role of the unconscious as an incubator for Shange’s language. When one dreams, their words are unfiltered and untouched by history and hierarchical social structures. Shange’s unfiltered love is her love for language, as she evolves as a subconscious poet herself. Given Shange’s own interest in and encounters with, not just psychoanalytic theory, but psychotherapy, this evolving romantic connection between poetry and the unconscious is vital in that it moves beyond the restrictions of language. When Shange wrote, “but mine was no constant love. I flirted with Baudelaire and Artaud because I longed for some immersion in dream,” she touches upon the deeply introspective nature of poetry — latent love residing in one’s unconscious. 

From Food to Faith: What’s in a Name?

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In If I can cook / you know God can, Ntozake Shange artfully toys with the boundaries of human sensation. Shange’s language forces the reader to experience instead of simply read, reworking thresholds of sight and taste in a conversation of identity. Like other works of Shange’s, If I can cook / you know God can reads as a radical travelogue, tracing identity in diaspora. In her exploration of the role of food in the African-American experience, Shange writes on nations beyond the United States putting recipes in conversation with memory, history, and religion. 

Chapter 8 connects history and religion engaging with African American slaves and Native Americans subject to the brutalization of colonialism. Shange writes, “we changed, made necessary readjustments to our gods and belief systems to accommodate the Christianity thrust upon us as our salvation.” Statements like these, reflecting a truth often neglected in history, challenges both me and Shange similarly. Throughout her works, Shange wrestles with reclaiming spirituality/religion from the colonizer and using it as a liberatory force. As indicated in the piece’s title, the Old Testament holds the notion that humans were created in God’s image. 

Abraham and Sarah are viewed as the patriarch and matriarch for all Abrahamic religions, including Christianity. Like Ntozake Shange, though, their names were not Abraham and Sarah at the start of their story. While Shakespeare may tell us that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” matriarchs Shange and Sarah share a different narrative. Theirs is one in which being created in the image of God means an affirmation of identity constructed through the changing of one’s name — a liberatory tool we see today through name changes affirming gender identity, religious identity, and an act dignifying history of black identity. Sarah’s name is Sarai at the start of the bible (which translates to “my princess”). The grammatically possessive nature of Sarai, and how the change in her name represents an affirmation of identity. Here, being made in God’s image as suggested in Shange’s title of her book, but also her own title, refers to transitioning from Sarai to Sarah —from the possessed to the possessor, entering uncharted maternal waters.

Feminizm Ve Tarih — Historical Narratives From New York to Eastern Anatolia

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When evaluating my own roots, as Shange often pushes me to, I turn to the Turkish academic Ayşe Gül Altınay. Professor Altınay, a personal feminist exemplar, was recently arrested and sentenced to two years in prison after signing a petition criticizing the Turkish government on behalf of the Academics For Peace Group. This serves as a case study in governmental treatment of pedagogy worldwide, and how American challenges of criminalizing, not just bodies, but ideas, are not uniquely American. Today, American discussions of the federal government dictating which news is “fake” and “real” are deeply intertwined with conversations on the mass incarceration, as political power structures force marginalized communities deeper into society’s margins. One can criminalize opposition and create bureaucratic barriers between a writer and publisher, but one cannot stop individuals from sharing their ideas to counter hegemony. 

Last Fall, Professor Altınay gave a lecture on “Bridging Academia and Activism Through Gender Studies,” where she both gave an overview of the feminist movement in Turkey and reflected on her own work as a scholar of gender and sexuality studies in Turkey. The history of female-identified Turkish activists fighting for change is being gradually erased over time, and one can view the treatment of their history as seemingly disposable in the eyes of the government and educators. Gender and Sexuality scholars such as Professor Altınay have been discovering pre-existing Kurdish and Armenian women’s organizations from the times of the Turkish feminist movement, which were excluded from the mainstream documentation of the movement. 

“Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you.” – Gloria Anzaldúa

For Anzaldúa and Altınay, words represent a lifeline. For those fighting tirelessly amidst systemic oppression, writing one’s own history is essential to survival. Complacency emerges when the Third World Woman is spoken for, as these narratives represent the sanctity of her own voice. Through their fierce attempts to safeguard the written word, from eastern Anatolia to New York City, writers like Altınay and Anzaldúa work to reshape and reclaim historical narratives.

Ntozake Shange and Joan Vollmer: The Missing Beat Poets

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When discussing the literary identities as “Black Bohemian Feminists” honed by Ntozake Shange and Alison Mills, Harryette Mullen alludes to the poetry of the Beat Generation — a literary staple of 1950’s and 1960’s bohemia. Mullen’s analysis of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo in part revolves around defining the black woman relative to the man, characterized by allegiance to the family and serving as “passionate lovers of black men” (205). This comment allowed me to interrogate, not just the well-known poets of the Beat Generation, but their families and lovers as well. A central name in among the Beats was William S Burroughs. A less central name is Joan Vollmer, his wife who he ‘accidentally’ murdered one night in Mexico. Unlike Shange and Mills, Vollmer is recognized as one of the few female voices of the Beat Generation. In this regard, focusing on the lovers of the great figures of the Beat Generation sheds light on the apparent disposability of the female voice and female body. While Shange was falsely criticized for negatively depicting black men through her work, the murder of of Joan Vollmer is scarcely discussed and hardly tarnished Burroughs’ pristine literary reputation.

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo concludes with the powerful image of Sassafrass giving birth to a “free child” after she has freed herself from Mitch after suffering from his abuse. This freedom is not just from the male literary gaze, but from systemic violence of any sort targeting the black female body and voice. Mullen mentions that Shange chose art over family in contrast to the bourgeois feminist “who wants to have it all,” but I challenge this with the notion that Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo alongside Daughter’s Geography conveys the bohemian rawness of the Beats through the lens of a mother, sister, lover, and poet. Shange’s art instead honors her family just as authentically as Allen Ginsberg does in Kaddish. Shange’s black bohemian rawness does indeed deserve to be captured and praised poetically alongside Ginsberg and Kerouac, two key figures of the Beat Generation who met at Columbia just over ten years before Shange enrolled at Barnard. While Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac write of mothers and lovers respectively, one is forced to question why the female lover, particularly within a familial context, must be seen only as the subject. When will black women have an equal platform to tell their own stories of motherhood and womanhood? Perhaps this discrepancy explains why there are no black female voices of the Beat generation and why the glorified bohemian literary life of the Beats left Joan Vollmer writing from her grave.

Eroticism as Poetic Introspection

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In Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Audre Lorde speaks to the importance of autonomy and self-ownership of black female bodies — to be a source of pleasure and introspection “self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society” (Lorde, 59). Lorde writes, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings” (Lorde, 54). Lorde is discussing something deeply internal, which goes against the common placement of eroticism exclusively in the realm of the external or physical. To both Lorde and Shange, sense of self is paramount, speaking to the inherent bond between poetry and eroticism.

On page 55, Lorde writes, “women so empowered are dangerous.” In Nappy Edges, Shange too puts sexual expression in conversation with danger, but does so to relay an entirely different message. Shange brings out the apparent irony in Lorde’s statement through examples of men using eroticism to put women in positions of physical danger. These instances of danger present through Nappy Edges’ detailed scenes of sexual violence are physical, and yet they are far from erotic.

Shange’s decision to define herself as a poet (rather than a playwright) is powerful in that it establishes ownership of her narrative — she is not writing to put on a performance or to wear a costume of another, she instead writes her own poetic, deeply introspective, narrative. “Some men are poets. They find wonderment & joy in themselves & give it to me. I snatch it up quick & gloat. Some men are poets” (Shange, 20). Shange then closes her piece reaffirming her stance as the poet she is by noting that she will keep writing poems ten years from now and beyond; she will continue to affirm her own selfhood and that of other black women finding their voices and owning their narratives, as this introspection of poetry and eroticism is a luxury not afforded to many women, especially not women of color. Thus, For Shange, poetry is something erotic in the way Lorde uses the word — it’s a source of power through raw recognition of internal consciousness and internal desires.

Post #1 — One Bloodstream, Two Inheritances

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“I am talking here about a kind of strength which can only be one woman’s gift to another, 

the bloodstream of our inheritance. 

Until a strong line 

of love, 

confirmation, 

and example 

stretches from mother to daughter, 

from woman to woman across the generations, 

women will still be wandering in the wilderness.” (246)

 

My arrangement of the lines forces the reader to meditate on the importance of intergenerational love, confirmation, and example paved by a unified line of women throughout time. The breath also shifts the reader’s attention to the power of this intergenerational mothering line being a strong one — which is what spoke to me about the passage as a whole. 

 

In my case, I’ve received the gift Rich describes here twofold. Of Woman Born helped me understand why, throughout most of my life, I’ve considered having two moms to be a superpower. The inherited gift of strength, passed down to me from both of my parents, has allowed me to become my own hero. My mothers, both born in the 1950’s, gifted me this strength after decades of struggling with the “institutionalized heterosexuality” (218) identified by Rich, coping with the reality of starting a unified life as religious queer women. My mothers both follow the paths of the “unmothered” (243) as described by Rich, having lived most of their lives without their own mothers. This path is one of pain turned fortitude, throughout their motherless process of coming out and building their own family, after the birth of my sibling in 1994. Thus, they carry with them both hardship and immense courage which stretches proudly from mother(s) to daughter. My line of generational inheritance may not be as refined as Rich describes, but it’s just as unified and just as strong. This line comes from both of my mothers, and it’s for me to pass on to my daughters and their daughters. 

 

My mothers treat their title as “mother,” fittingly, like most queens treat their crowns. If ever I refer to one of my parents by their name instead of “mom” or “mommy,” I know I’ll be met with the same do you know how hard I worked to become your mother? that I know all too well, and have grown to love. The labor being described here is not that of pregnancy, suggested by Rich, but the labor of facing intolerance. This is a way in which Rich and I divert. In my poetic rewrite of the quote, the breath and spacing I chose pair bloodstream and inheritance, placing them in an unexpected juxtaposition; my inheritance has little to do with my bloodstream but it’s still strong. I disagree with the notion that “probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies.” (225) Much of what runs through my inherited bloodstream is unknown; anonymous donor #138 may have given me wide brown eyes, but it was my mothers who taught me to see. They taught me to love through the greatest process of confirmation and example – greater than I could have imagined.