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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Keller

All you must hold onto

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The “Black Sexism Debate” issue of The Black Scholar, Vol. 10, No. 8/9, May/June 1979, reminded me of Nikki Giovanni’s remarkable 1971 dialogue with James Baldwin on Soul!, a TV program that has been called the U.S.’s “first Black Tonight Show.”

While host Ellis Haizlip introduces James Baldwin as “Mr. Baldwin,” he introduces Giovanni as “Nikki.” The dynamic between Baldwin and Giovanni is compelling. At times, when Baldwin calls Giovanni “baby, baby, baby,” and “my dear,” it comes across as approachable; at other times, it comes across as rather patronizing. (Affectionately, and perhaps wryly, she responds by calling him “Jimmy.”) He routinely interrupts and corrects her, blurring the line between his status as an elder and his status as a man.

At one point (51:00), while Giovanni struggles to get a word in about Black women and children’s experiences with domestic violence and lack of support from Black men, Baldwin puts his hand over hers, stopping her hand gestures, and says, “But wait, wait, hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone, baby.” He gives her hand a squeeze before gesturing towards himself. “Look,” he transitions, “I’ve had to learn in my own life…” Divested by racism of the social economic ability to provide for his family, Baldwin suggests, “I’m no longer in my own eyes – it doesn’t make any difference what you may think of me – in my own eyes I’m not a man.” Giovanni does not budge, responding at once, “It does indeed make a difference what I think about it.”

Earlier, Giovanni has explained her position (48:11):

Let’s say a guy’s going with a girl. You’re going with Maybelle and Maybelle gets preg­nant, and all of a sudden you can’t speak to Maybelle because you don’t have the money for a crib, right? Maybelle doesn’t need a crib. […] What Maybelle needs at that moment is a man. […] A man […] is not necessarily a provider of all that stuff. […] You don’t have a job. […] Maybelle understands there is no job. But what she needs is a man to come by and say, ‘Hey baby, you look good.’ And Black men re­fuse to function like that because they say, ‘I want to bring the crib when I come.’ You’re never going to get the crib. Bring yourself. […] I’m a poor woman. […] I’m already deprived of almost everything that we find in the world. Must I also be de­prived of you?

Baldwin responds with a memorable quote (50:16): “You can blame him [the man] on a human level if you like, but I think it’s more interesting to try to – you have to understand it, the bag the cat is in.” His riff on the saying is powerful, but where do Black women fit in? Are Black women responsible for understanding both the social reality men have been stuffed into, and their own? Are men and women’s “bags” separate at all? And if there are two cats in one bag, can they not use their combined strength to discover the shape of their social reality together, to break out together? Why is it an inevitability for the bag to be external to the man, to overdetermine the man’s behavior, and yet an expectation for the woman to understand the bag and accommodate its harmful effects on people trapped inside? Why are women expected to perform unique epistemological labor to understand social realities affecting multiple genders?

The question of how Black men can better understand and support Black women’s struggle against oppression never comes up in Giovanni and Baldwin’s dialogue. I was reminded of Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady”:

Bag lady you gone hurt your back
Dragging all them bags like that
I guess nobody ever told you
All you must hold onto, is you, is you, is you

This resonates with Giovanni’s insistence: “You’re never going to get the crib. Bring yourself.” Whereas Baldwin emphasizes a man’s dependence on the bag in which he has been trapped, and thus “the Black man’s” need to be seen as a man by white society’s standards, Giovanni focuses on “Maybelle’s” radical antimaterialist love for her man. He is already seen as a man by the woman right in front of him; if only he would value her perspective just as much as his own, she wouldn’t pay the price of his needing affirmation elsewhere. As Toni Morrison critiqued Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – “Invisible to whom?”

There is no unmediated relationship, Giovanni and Morrison suggest, between “the Black man” and a larger, uniformly white “society.” Relationships between Black people and their world are also shaped by families, communities, and workplaces in which Black women and Black men can and must support each other, across difference. A Black woman’s perspective is essential to establish this radical commons. Otherwise, Black women become, as Donna Kate Rushin has written so eloquently in Bridge Poem (1981), the bridge between Black men and white society. Who will build Black women’s healing connections to each other, and to themselves? As Audre Lorde challenges, “If society ascribes roles to black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?” (The Black Scholar, “The Black Sexism Debate,” 17).

Like Giovanni’s Maybelle, June Jordan uses the Scholar‘s conversation around sexism to advance an anticapitalist argument. “The point is not whether he earns a couple dollars more or less than she; the point is that, as a people, our ability to provide for ourselves is under […] white institutional attack,” Jordan stresses (The Black Scholar, “The Black Sexism Debate,” 40). Aspiring to gendered white economic ideals and competing for scraps will not fix this crisis; rather, solidarity and Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” are in order. The ideal man for Giovanni’s Maybelle refuses to buy into the demands of racist capitalist materialism, for he does not measure his worth in dollars or property accumulation. He brings value to Maybelle’s life in himself, by offering to share emotional support and child care responsibilities, and by treating her with respect. He carries his own weight, and they are both freer for it.

 

 

[1] Quentin Lucas has written an excellent analysis of their conversation, with excerpts transcribed, for Medium.

Dilemmas of the Kitchen Table

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Readings

I was fascinated to learn that, after the racist white feminist press Persephone dropped This Bridge, women of color feminists including Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde worked together to found their own radical feminist press by and for women of color, Kitchen Table, in 1980, with which they kept This Bridge in circulation (Adair and Nakamura, 261). This immediately reminded me of Carrie Mae Weems’s historic exhibition, her Kitchen Table photo series, in 1990. Both the feminist press and Weems’s photo series chose to center the kitchen table in projects that defended women of color’s and queer women’s access to intimate justice.

Picture

Members of the Kitchen Table Press. Source: Kitchen Table Literary Arts. https://www.kitchen-table.org/

For the radical feminist press, the name Kitchen Table immediately announces the editors’ commitment to prioritizing praxis over theory. There are many crucial contrasts with the racist white feminist title “Persephone” – a reference to an ancient Greek goddess and princess who, in a thinly veiled fruit allegory, disobeys injunctions against sex before marriage. “Persephone” appeals to the racist european cult of claiming ancient Greek and Roman slaveholding and colonizing societies as whitewashed cultural forebears to europe and the united states. The white feminist invocation of “Persephone” defines freedom in a very limited and individualistic sense: a princess’s desire to choose heterosexual partners without consequences.

In contrast, Kitchen Table locates freedom in direct action more than theory or myth, in the lives of ordinary women rather than the elite. Persephone is a fictional character; the Kitchen Table is a very real place. Kitchen Table recalls a linkage of necessity and creativity in the full dimensions of Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” that rejects heteronormativity, superficial pornographic consumerism, and freedom without accountability. Rather than representing the name of an individual woman, Kitchen Table names a space that has functioned at once as a home and a workplace for working women throughout history, a space within which women are, through the press, finally invited to define and name themselves.

Similarly, in The Kitchen Table Series (1990), Carrie Mae Weems brilliantly subverts the anthropological gaze of the camera.[1] She acts as both object – that which is captured by the lens – and subject – the framer, editor, and namer of what can be seen. For Weems, the kitchen table does not symbolize political isolation; a lamp illuminates the kitchen table like a stage, or a factory floor. Largely a homosocial space shared by women, in which men feature only as visitors, never as fixtures, the kitchen table represents a political economic arena in its own right. Weems’s kitchen table is entangled with and helps shape the mainstream masculinist, white supremacist political landscape, rather than existing “outside” it.

The fact that the essential work Black women expend in kitchens is perennially unpaid and often required in addition to a full day’s work at a formal job risks refiguring racist and patriarchal exploitation. Weems’s Kitchen Table explores the contradictory potentialities of the kitchen: on the one hand, as a landmark of the ongoing, unredressed labor given by and seized from Black women; and on the other hand, as a radical commons out of which the liberatory possibilities of communities and the sustenance of generations can grow.

In Untitled (Eating lobster), a man at the head of the table hungrily sucks lobster, leaving shells behind. Weems’s food is untouched as she leans over to caress the man. Behind them, a bird sits in a looming cage. Maya Angelou wrote that the bird’s wings are clipped and her legs are tied. But Weems’s limbs are unchained and her kitchen has no bars. What bonds make her stay and pull her towards the man she feeds – force or love, pleasure or obligation, delight or debt? Can either/or questions help us understand her position?

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Eating lobster), 1990 © the artist and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Eating lobster), 1990 © the artist

The kitchen table as a social economic institution analyzed by Weems and Adair and Nakamura’s reflection on the Kitchen Table as a radical feminist press by and for women of color raise similar dilemmas. After recounting women’s struggles to gain access to books by women of color that were routinely abandoned out of print by racist mainstream publishers, Adair and Nakamura in “Digital Afterlives” give credit to online networks of radical free information sharing, while also pointing out troubling continuities with legal systems of exploitation. Spaces for “digital consciousness raising on Tumblr” serve as a

“feminist classroom[,] but one in which nobody – not the authors of This Bridge, not the unknown laborers who scanned and uploaded hundreds of pages, not the feminists of color writing and critiquing the work online – was compensated for providing [this] education. Nobody, that is, except the media corporation Yahoo, which owns and sells advertising space on Tumblr. […] [Thus,] both the legally distributed book and the pirated version online raise ethical concerns about the uneven distribution of work, ownership, and social power in pedagogical spaces” (Adair and Nakamura, 256).

For example, the Kitchen Table press survived in part by taking advantage of personal relationships with people – predominantly women of color – who were committed to the cause of circulating their radical message, which spared the press the cost of hiring paid staff to do the same work. Adair and Nakamura add hastily, “Of course, we do not equate these acts of solidarity with the exploits of racial capital” (262). Ultimately, however, “even ‘revolutionary’ pedagogical networks inevitably reproduce some racial and gendered dynamics of unremunerated work,” including work that is not counted or credited as work (263). Is the kitchen table a home or a workplace? A product of public labor or private love? An appliance serving at a woman’s convenience, or a domineering institution in whose framework her life plays out, like a cross-section of a dollhouse? If it is both, what does that tell us about freedom and the work of getting free?

 

1. My sources for analyzing Weems’s Kitchen Table are: (1) O’Grady, Megan, “How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making,” The New York Times, 2018. (2) Kelsey, Hall, Tillet, Bey, and Blessing, “Around the Kitchen Table,” Aperture, No. 223, Vision & Justice (Summer 2016), 52-56.

The dissension that expands the base

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Readings
• Kimberly Springer, Chs. 1, 2, 4, Living for the revolution: Black feminist organizations, 1968-1980
• Ntozake Shange, A Daughter’s Geography

After discussing how Black women created their own organizations after finding their needs often sidelined in both white feminist and masculinist Black civil rights movements, Springer engages with fissures within Black feminist movements that mirrored the fault lines of power in society at large. At first glance, Black feminism suggests a reprieve from monolithic and hierarchical social organizing. Because “Black feminists’ voices and visions fell between the cracks of the civil rights and women’s movements,” Springer argues that they “conducted their ‘politics in the cracks’” (Springer, 1). These “cracks,” negative spaces breaking away from the establishment, offer a space to experiment with radical agendas and bottom-up change, to chip away at the foundations of the dominant political structure.

On closer examination, however, these “cracks” are not void of power relations, but are themselves constituted by power relations that need to be grappled with. “Though united through a collective racial and gender identity,” Springer reveals that Black feminists “discovered cleavages based on” various additional intersections,[1] such as “class and sexual orientation” (Springer, 63). The idea of a perfectly united struggle against hegemony is itself problematically monolithic.

Audre Lorde, for instance, struggled not only against racism and sexism but also against homophobia, ableism, and U.S. chauvinism. In the Cancer Journals, Lorde reflected that “I am defined as other in every group I’m part of” (Lorde, 18). Notably, this dilemma did not lead her to give up advocating for each group’s political rights. Rather, Lorde is famous for her intersectional methodology of using difference as a source of power and community, rather than a cause for constructing adversarial hierarchies and mutually exclusive competition.

Springer’s “cracks,” then, do not only refer to destruction of hegemony but to the generative use of difference as a basis for political solidarity, instead of insisting on identity as a prerequisite for empathy and shared interests. Here, I use the term “identity” according to its original meaning — the property of being identical. White rich women, for instance, claimed access to “equal” rights in the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments on the basis of their “identity” with white rich men. To these white feminists, equal rights meant rights identical to those of white rich men — meaning, an equal right to own enslaved people; an equal right to exploit the working class by owning businesses; an equal right to hire unpaid or underpaid surrogates for child care and domestic work. Far from challenging white rich men to end colonial capitalist violence, the 1848 Declaration epitomizes the ways in which white rich women’s challenge to power constituted of them jostling with white men for front and center seats in perpetrating colonial capitalist violence — especially against working women and women of color — and reaping the profits, “equally.”

The “cracks” represent a Black feminist refusal to seek “identity” with power. These “cracks” do not build on the foundation of power to include more groups, such as white women and the Irish and the middle class, but work to tear down the foundation of power altogether, and offer a more radical and syncretic way of life in its place. “The heterogeneity of black feminists’ individual political perspectives would yield dissention,” Springer reflects, “but that dissention would in turn expand the boundaries of black feminist politics and the base of the black feminist movement” (Springer, 64). Like roots splitting apart pavement, this rhizomatic disruption of monolithic hegemony creates what Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza has described as “an effervescence – so, a bubble up, rather than a trickle down.”[2]

These cracks that create more cracks abound in Ntozake Shange’s poetry. The diasporic geography of Shange’s Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography mirrors the dissension that expands the base of intersectional and transnational political solidarity:

i have a daughter/ la habana
i have a son/ guyana
our twins

Shange weaponizes the same slashes used in formal grammar to separate lines of poetry in order to unite people across difference, be it gender or oceans. Like Springer’s “cracks,” Shange’s slashes are a breaking that expands the boundaries of how we see ourselves and our opportunities for collaboration in the freedom struggle. Through her poetic mutilation of the colonizer’s language, Shange demonstrates the need to shatter the power structure and its standardizing mission in order to create a radical future.

 

[1] The term “intersectionality” was popularized by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a Black woman and legal scholar who is not credited often enough for her contribution. She uses the term not simply for people who stand at a crossroads of “identity,” but for people who find themselves targeted by multiple interacting systems of oppression at once.

[2] Great analysis of that TED talk here. Excerpted from Deva Woodly’s upcoming book, Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements.

The fiction is forever with us

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The fiction that
most women have both husbands and
money is forever
with us

— Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 247
Edited to be “read like Shange”

“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.”

— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, p. 119

 

Although Rich repeatedly speaks out against “the fiction” that privileged women represent an experience universal to all women (247), her essay contrasts with Ntozake Shange’s semi-autobiographical style in a significant way. Just as she grapples with both her womanhood and Blackness, Shange also confronts the privilege granted English speakers and American nationals like herself. However, Rich’s essay focuses on the oppression of women by men and women (but mostly by men), without granting the same deep interrogation to her own whiteness and the role of white women in perpetrating racist oppression.

Rich sympathetically engages with the burdensome expectations her mother faces as a white woman in the U.S. South to be “pure” like a “gardenia” (220). However, Rich does not necessarily explore how the white fragility granted more readily to women than men can be a privilege. Likewise, to convey an image of her mother, Rich, like her father, references the Botticelli Venus and Helen of Troy (219). These (often ahistorically whitewashed) Greek and Roman references dip into a cultural cache of sympathy for white beauty and innocence rooted in colonialism.

If oppression happens to women who do not look like Diane Kruger, it is not clear that their struggles take on equal importance in Rich’s essay. Her scattered references to women of color and women living outside of Europe and the U.S. are not framed in terms of solidarity, struggle, and family like in Shange’s poem Bocas — “i have a daughter/ mozambique / i have a son/ angola” (Daughter’s Geography, 21). Instead, she presents them as passive victims of backwards regimes, such as the blanket statement that Chinese foot-binding is an “affliction” and a “mutilat[ion]” (243).

 

The hubris, as Gayatri Spivak has put it, that “white men [need to] save brown women from brown men” has been used by colonial governments and continues to be used by neocolonial governments as a justification for violent intervention and conquest (see, for instance, the U.S. invasion in Afghanistan), as Dorothy Ko, Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood have pointed out. In her reflection on sati in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak suggests that it is very suspect when women wish to fight for women’s rights in a society they do not come from without making a lifetime commitment to becoming fluent in the epistemologies, languages, and histories of that society.

 

Quoting the Upanishads and ancient Egyptian hymns out of context without understanding the original or explaining who did the translating and why, leads to a loss of opportunity to truly appreciate the dimensions of women’s struggles and everyday experiences in these societies (226). As Spivak points out in “The Politics of Translation,” “if we were thinking of translating […] Emily Dickinson, the standard for the translator could not be ‘anyone who can conduct a conversation in the language of the original (in this case English)’” (188).

 

Rich’s detour to Atwood’s novel about a white woman who, as white women do, finds herself by “going back to nature” in a Rousseau-esque, George-Catlin-esque appropriation of the culture, skills, knowledge systems, and survival strategies of the Creek nation in Canada is particularly troubling because she does not bring up white women’s role in genocide and land theft from First Nations; nor does she acknowledge the violence of the anthropological technology of the “Indian photographs” (240-241). For a useful critique, see contemporary artist Kent Monkman’s work (he has Scots-Irish and Creek ancestry).

Moreover, Rich’s quotes from ancient India, ancient Egypt, ancient China, and ancient Greece are all actually about a tiny elite of rich women, and should not be taken to represent all women in that time period. Rich mourns that women have been historically saddled with the difficulties of raising children and being full-time “homemakers” (236). She describes the specter of “women going mad ‘for want of something to do’” (229). In contrast, Shange is far more concerned with the history of Black American women, who have always had to fight for the right to mother their children and make time to do so amidst enormous work demands.

This history is rooted in from the separation of mothers from children under American white supremacist slavery, a system in which women were an equal or majority proportion of field laborers outdoors, in addition to maintaining food and households in their communities and kinship networks. The experiences of women who worked in white women’s households trouble the distinctions between home and workplace. Aside from the feeling of being trapped in the legal institution of marriage, enslaved women were struggling to have their family relations and marriages, as well as their rights as mothers, be legally and socially recognized and respected at all; and to this day Black American women struggle to live peacefully with their partners without racist government intervention tearing them apart, for instance through police brutality and mass incarceration.

This is a far cry from the enormous privilege of the “pattern” of “close” and “long-lasting” bonds between mothers and daughters in intimate domestic spheres that Rich attributes as “characteristic of the period” of “the 1760s to the 1880s” (233). She does not address the experiences of millions of enslaved women, thus implying that there is something un-“characteristic” about their struggles. Here she loses an opportunity to interrogate her own white privilege as a woman who identifies with the boredom of the household and child care, but free of work demands due to perceived purity and fragility.

On 225, Rich suggests that institutional motherhood incompatible with wage-earning (or more generally, outside-the-house-working) motherhood: “Institutional motherhood makes no provision for the wage-earning mother.” As proof she draws on the constraints given white women and elite women historically. This contrasts with Shange’s work, which is deeply focused on the tangles between women’s unpaid labor as exploitation and their labors of love, and which is invested in contributing to the restoration and new creation of destroyed kinship networks.

 

Through the lens of Shange’s work, it may be worth asking whether institutional motherhood is, for most women, anything but incompatible with being mother-workers who are expected to maintain households, provide sexual labors, and replenish the labor force by raising children, all unpaid, at the same time as working outside the house, for the maintenance of other families’ households, and/or in paid work.

For instance, as Dorothy Ko has pointed out in Cinderella’s Sisters, most ancient Chinese women were peasants who did not undergo foot-binding, in large part because they had to be able to work. Part of what made foot-binding a status symbol was that it meant the woman with “delicate,” “small” feet had servants with “ugly,” “big” feet who waited on her and did her housework for her. In the institution of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman has pointed out, the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem conscripted enslaved women’s wombs as factories to reproduce an unpaid labor force.

 

For most women today, it remains true that we are expected to raise healthy children and bring pregnancies to term while at the same time working around the clock. What would it look like if Rich’s analysis explored the ways in which institutional motherhood is built around the working mother, with rare exemptions for a small elite who thus have a deep personal stake in maintaining patriarchy, racism, and class oppression?