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

Ortiz

Reading Zake: Vamo Hablar Ingles

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As I read for coloured girls by Shange, I was saddened by the idea that I hadn’t found her before. Before, when my curling hair and español didn’t fit in my mouth, didn’t fit in my writing, in my thoughts. When my own identity alienated me from my conceived self, a self that was white-passing (at least in South Jamaica, where white was just skin), and desired a white family and white traditions. As I read Shange, 21 and no longer desiring a white

identity, but desperately clinging to the aspects of my identity that are deeply Latina and give me culture, sabor at Barnard, I am deeply moved by her words. I annotated her work, as pictured, expressing the way my heart stopped when her stanzas did, or when it left me full of something unrecognizable – was it love for myself, or the people I identify with? Shange’s writing is not just feminist writing, it is not just transnational and globalized, it is not just about culture and music and movement, it is about humanity as its core. It is about empathy and love and passion, pain, and healing and for these reasons, for the shared experiences Shange expresses in for coloured girls¸ I am able to tie myself to a story that is not necessarily, explicitly my own.

we deal wit emotion too much

so why don’t we go on ahead & be white then/

& make everythin dry & abstract wit no rhythm & no

reelin for sheer sensual pleasure/ yes let’s go on & be white. (58-59)

— and I wanted to be white, for so long, because, as Shange expresses, maybe being white means not having to address the idea of the woman of color that is too sensitive, too concerned about herself. Maybe this was a way to remove myself from myself? But as Shange states, “bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma / i havent conquered yet” (59). Haven’t conquered because I refuse to view myself as separate, fragmented pieces, at least not anymore.

Now, as I read other literary works, I search for myself. I don’t search for a regurgitated image of what others think I am, because I am too complicated, too sanctified, too magic, too music (60-61) to be one thing.

El español de Shange, the reference to the music of my childhood, merengue, immediately reminded me of Fefita’s performance of Vamo Hablar Ingles; watching as a woman dominate a stage, surrounded by music and movement and culture / my culture adopted a new meaning. A song that only in asserting to “hablar ingles” is adopting the same transnational, global connections that Shange evokes, and in a sense, it’s all tied together.

 

 

this midnight oil / Rewriting Cherríe Moraga

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we write letters to each other / incessantly / across a kitchen table / third wrld feminist strategy / is plotted.

we tlk long hours / into the night / it is when this midnight oil is burning /inthoseafterhours / that we secretly reclaim our goddesses / and our female-identified / cultural tradition

“i got myself home, / lit me some candles / … / put on sum

dinah and / aretha” (rushin)

 

In “Between the Lines: On Culture, Class, and Homophobia” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga describes the limitations of a strictly racialized reading of a woman’s experience. In this passage, Moraga describes the act of turning towards each other for “strength and sustenance” (102) as we search for our desire to have “all [our] sisters of color actively identified and involved as feminists” (102). Adopting Shange’s poetic style of writing, I chose this passage to emphasize the act of coming together through mediums of letters, music, or the spoken word. By deconstructing the original structure, including the quote by Rushin, I can now read Moraga and Rushin’s writing in the way it makes me feel; the words now dance and move and pause in a way that expresses a collectiveness, a warmth inherent in what we desire “third wrld feminist strategy” to be. It is “to write letters / to tlk long hours / put on sum dinah and / aretha” that we move past fractured images of the self, where our “whole” identities can meld into a single movement that acknowledges and is fueled by this “midnight oil,” this difference, that is learned through these mediums.

 

Reconciling the Necessary and the Real

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In reading The Art of Transformation, I understood the necessity for a unified culture in the
“struggle for freedom,” as described by Collins, but as I continued reading the accounts of individuals at the time, I was conflicted by what they believed to be a necessity in the movement for freedom, and what I believed to be essential in the creation of an individual identity.

“We stress culture because it gives identity, purpose, and direction. It tells you who you are, what you must do, and how you can do it,” – Maulana Ron Karenga

This dependency on a united, practically homogeneous culture for an identity, on the surface appears to be inclusive, a place where those normally excluded from culture can create and find refuge. Yet, I struggled to understand why culture should dictate the entirety of one’s identity, what they “must do” and how to do it. It’s almost restricting the purpose of an identity and culture to something completely political. What must we do, and how do we do it? What are the tactics that we find in this culture, and how do I execute them? This notion of culture and identity has an agenda, and must we embed our entire being into a political purpose, regardless of how badly we need it?

Also, how can one culture, a culture specifically tied to African descent account for the varied, mixed identities that still identify as Black? In takin a solo / a poetic possibility / a poetic imperative by Ntozake Shange, Shange acknowledges how limiting this concept of a homogeneous, unified culture can be.

“that means there is absolutely no acceptance of blk personal reality. If you are 14, female & black in the u.s.a./ you have one solitary voice/ thought you number 3 million/ no nuance exists for you/ you have been sequestered in the monolith/ the common denominator as a persona”

So how do we reconcile the necessity for a black culture without the violent exclusion of so many? Even now in the age of social media, there is an image of black culture that is entirely too narrow, too limiting. How can we repair this rupture between what is necessary and what is real, as Shange addresses in Nappy Edges?

an impossible knot

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My mother, pregnant with me in El Salto, a waterfall in Azua, Dominican Republic.

My mother, pregnant with me.

To be a daughter is to be inextricably intertwined with one’s mother, as explained by Adrienne Rich in “Of Woman Born,”. As I read through Rich’s logic of the all too complicated phenomenon that is the mother-daughter relationship, I came to understand my own relationship with my mother. Of course, there is only so much that can be taken from a text written by a woman whose relationship with her mother is not complicated by race or class. But nevertheless, I found myself thinking of the adolescent rage that inhabited my body as I thought of my mother. My mother is a woman born in the Dominican Republic, and having been dispossessed of her own mother as a child, she drew all of her energy into her relationship with her own children. My mother experienced the essential female tragedy, as described by Rich (237) and as a result, she nurtured us and provided a fierce, tender form of love that allowed us, allowed me to unashamedly desire this complete return to the mother. And yet, I experienced a similar distancing from the being that I am unavoidably tied to. 

I used to blame my mother for forcing me to stand in front of a sink and do dishes. She was unaware that the alienation from my brothers and what was expected of me made me believe I was somehow inferior, as if it to say that I was born with the purpose to serve. I hated her as she stood idly while I suffered the consequences of a rigid, patriarchal society that began in the confines of my home. And while I had not been introduced to the concept of feminism until my adolescence, I recognized the pillars of inequality, and saw her as the vessel of it. Yet, I did not understand the plight of motherhood. I did not understand the ways that my mother, too, had fallen victim to a system that rendered her a vehicle for oppression to her own daughter. I look at these images of my mother, pregnant with me, and understand Adrienne Rich as she describes the physical ties that envelop the mother and daughter. I rejected my own desire to return to my mother, but I imagine myself, enveloped in a warm, amniotic fluid that only meant to nourish me. I imagine myself, a mother to a daughter, whose own relationship to her mother is violently disrupted by her death. To make sense of my own plights, I needed to understand my mother’s, and the way she was limited, not only by the harsh expectations of a “male-controlled world,” but her inability to return to her own mother, aside from vignettes stored in her memory. I am still learning from her, of her, about her, and in doing so, I further tie myself to her. Yet, I don’t mind this impossible knot we’re creating.