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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Thompson

Post # 8

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For my last post, I want to briefly speak to the last suggested prompt offered, to nominate a short excerpt of Shange’s work for the “Shange Mixtape”. One of the Shange pieces that resonated with me the most was Sassafrass, Cyrpress & Indigo and I think that the book, in really concise and revelatory ways, reveals some of Shange’s central themes such as: creation, the creation of new worlds, the magic of music and the moon and “women”, community and communion and the ghosts that play in the shadows of our words.

Pages 27-34 constitute a really helpful excerpt. The excerpt would not need to be that long but the narrative encapsulated between those pages feel really full of the central concepts that I pulled from the book. Page 27 begins with a chapter in which Indigo is learning to pray with her fiddle. She “invit[es] the moon in” and lets the “holy ghost” pour out of her creation, as she makes life, goes wild. And her mother is exhausted by it, it is too much and too off kilter, too loud and unwieldy. Indigo may need to go elsewhere to create her music.

 

Later in the pages, she meets the Junior Geechee Captains Spats and Crunch and shows them another world with her music, blows them away, scares them a littl, even. Shange writes then “Indigo’s specialities were other worlds” with the places she goes and sees in her music. Her nickname in the group becomes “digo” meaning to say– to speak into the silence– and if that isn’t a lot to unpack, I don’t know what is. So I think that that excerpt, cushioned by a little context of the book’s narrative, would be a really helpful entrance to the larger themes within some of Shange’s work.

2010 Cover of Sassafrass, press & Indigo

Cite:

Shange, Ntozake. Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo. St. Martins, 210.

Taylor Archive Post, Post #7

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Shange Flow Poem

Shange Flow Poem.  The photo above is reproducing a journal entry by Ntozake Shange in which it seems she began a poem she titled “ Flow” the Poem is written on  5inches x 8 inches white paper.  Note: I am working on changing the orientation of then photo, apologies!

An exciting aspect of the Archival search, is that we can potentially find really important works of literature that aren’t accessible otherwise. I think that the archive also helps us gauge the context of Ntozake Shange’s work in ways we could not have otherwise, simply by trying to google or look up what her timeline and life and projects were like.

Finding the “Flow” poem was exciting because as soon as I saw it, the first things I read were the first and last words, “Flow” and “World”. These two words are already some that come to mind when I consider Shange’s body of work, choreographically and literarily.
     My first thought in reading the poem was to connect flow to this sense of erotic we were exploring earlier in the semester. I connected in one of my previous blog posts a part of Shange’s Nappy Edges and Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic, as many of us did. In Nappy Edges, Shange writes “a poem shd fill you up with something…a poem shd happen to you like cold water or a kiss” (24). First of all, the phrase reminds me of her journal poem in which she also references a “ cool liquid embrace”. Beyond that the phrase connects to parts of Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” in which she writes that the erotic is a sense of fullness and a question of “how acutely and fully we can feel in…doing”. In writing Flow, I ams seeing an extension of thoughts developed within Nappy Edges and even more connections with Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic. The imagery that these lines surface in me is imagery of overflowing from being so full. It harkens back to the biblical phrase “my cup runneth over”.
      Shange also writes in the poem of an “umbilical” connection to our “entry into the world” and once again she is drawing our thought to the breach between this world and another perhaps, or at the very least she is drawing our thoughts to concepts of birth and the birth of worlds which has been a central theme in a lot of her writing especially within Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo.
This poem has really helped me connect these understandings of fulness and the birth of new worlds (and beyond that the idea of thinking critically and deeply about ones positionally and entry point into this world, and perhaps the next).
    While the photo is being displayed in the post for educational reasons and without the purpose of dissemination I believe we have permission form the archive under Fair Use to reproduce this photo for one another. However if I were to pursue any external publishing I would need permission from Shange’s estate.
Metadata associated with this photo can include:
-The date the poem was written
-The type of paper Flow is written on
-The type of journal Flow is written in
-How Ntozake Shange bought, received, came by this journal?
-The place that Ntozake Shange was when she wrote the Flow Poem
     I do not at present have the information necessary to cultivate that metadata however, ideally this would be information I could provide. Otherwise I can state where and when I personally engaged with the data for the first time, Barnard College, November 7, 1:12pm
Citation
Ntozake Shange Papers, 1966-2014: Box 17 Folder 3; Barnard Archives and Special Collections, Barnard Library, Barnard College

Taylor Post #6

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From This Bridge Called My Back, Writing By Radical Women Of Color, Cherrié Moraga writing a letter to Barbara Smith about Moraga’s experience at an Ntozake Shange concert:

“There, everything exploded for me. She was speaking a language that I knew—in the deepest parts of me—existed, and that I had ignored… What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother—the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems….The reading had forced me to remember that I knew things from my roots… I knew that then, sitting in that Oakland Theatre (as I know in my Poetry) the only thing worth writing about is what seems to be unknown and therefore fearful (Cherrié Moraga, 31)”

I think that this reading really tied together a lot of moving parts I have been negotiating in our class. For my post I’d like to facilitate a sort of close read of this quote and connect it to some other parts of our assignment for this week as well as the preceding assignments we have had this semester.

Of course it is important to recognize that centrally this quote by Cherrié Moraga, co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back (This Bridge), is speaking directly to the subject of our study, Ntozake Shange. Moraga goes to an Shange concert and is moved. Moraga talks about this movement as something that comes from the “deepest parts” of her, from her “roots” —the way the comment is framed makes me understand that roots and deepest parts simultaneously have to do with the literal deepest parts of her psychic self and also from the roots that constitute her mother and aunts, and perhaps her ancestors.

 

This brought up for me, the content of “For the Color of My Mother” an essay that opens This Bridge by Moraga. In the poem, Moraga speaks of a dream she has in which her mother’s head is being passed around a circle of brown women. To me, based on the way the essay/poem is crafted, it tells me that the dream may have been about the responsibility of birthing into the world what only a brown girl can. It was about rupture and the need to make what spills from that rupture be something that can combat the silencing of brown women globally. It is a responsibility that does not come out of nowhere, it comes from her mother, it comes from her roots.

 

What spills from that rupture, that combats the silence, may in fact be Moraga’s own voice which she says she denied from her brown mother, her brown self. What follows this comment is the idea that she had only claimed the white language from her father and that she needs to pick up the brown poetic language of her mother. This reminded me of the way that Audre Lorde constructs the idea of the“white father who:

  • tell us to “rely solely upon our ideas to make us free”
  • “distorted” poetry into “sterile word play”… “in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.”
  • “told us, I think therefore I am”

In “Poetry is not a Luxury”, Lorde writes of this figure in contrast to “the black mother in each of us” aka, “the poet” in each of us  who “whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free”. This part of “Poetry is Not A Luxury”, helped me frame and understand Moraga’s comment that the white language her father gave her cannot “speak to the emotions in her poems”.

Finally, I’d like to look at the last segment of the quote that says that the real need in her poetry is to explore things that are unknown and fearful. This reminded me of Shange’s quote in Language & Sound where she writes: “The catastrophe of ignoring the unfamiliar, the exiled, the forgotten, is more than a bit of wrestling with “something missing”, it is the terror of becoming the embodiment of our own folklore set in time, and not defined by our own terms” (133). I think ideally this is a quote by Shange that I would like to continue to explore over the remainder of the semester because it really speaks to the politics of fear that I am interested in in Shange’s work and it also speaks to the idea the importance of self definition in a country, in a language, that has historically worked to render us silenced and a mere caricature of ourselves. It also helps me think about the stakes of the project that we are engaging in, of attempting to write and record and archive the truth of our lives and our connections to each other, so that they don’t become distorted by a culture dominated by white supremacy, so that they don’t  become distorted by a university dominated by whiteness.

 

And to connect it to the separate piece we read for class today, “The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back: Woman of Color Feminism, Digital Labor, and Networked Pedagogy” I think I’d like to think momentarily about the pedagogical framework that This Bridge provides the reader with, it is a pedagogy through which the reader and educators can develop their own strategies for growing and helping others grow. If we observe fully the tenants expressed in the essays and poems in the book, how does that change regular and normative curriculum plans and the pedagogical approaches of a given class or social circle? I think I have seen classes function that propagate the pedagogical reference points brought to bear in This Bridge and those classes have without fail changed my life. I wonder how those classes in the past and how this class now are changed by bringing the pedagogy of This Bridge into the digital sphere?

 

I’d like to leave the comment with a picture. Below you will find a picture I took of a painting I painted my senior year of high school in 2016 after reading through This Bridge for the first time. I was moved and spinning with information and poetry and truly, I was moved beyond words. I knew that I had to figure out how to embody what I had felt and what I was processing someway and I chose an acrylic medium to express the movement I was experiencing:

Painting by Taylor Thompson '20 depicting an interpretation of the cover of "This Bridge Called My Back"

May 20, 2016 Chicago, IL

Painting based off of the cover of the original This Bridge Called My Back by Johnetta Tinker.

 

Taylor on Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Saltwater Apprenticeship” Lecture at Cooper Union

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On Tuesday, November 6th , I attended a lecture by Alexis Pauline Gumbs at the Cooper Union. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a black feminist scholar and poet and a graduate of Barnard College ’04. Her work has been really important to me since I was in high school when I stumbled upon her Dissertation “’We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves’”: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996. The dissertation focuses on the pedagogical implications of the work that late 20th century black feminists cultivated as well as the politics of feminist publishing and Black queer survival strategies.  Cooper Union, NYU and Columbia University are hosting her this week in a trilogy of free lectures concerning her work in black feminist studies.

Her lecture at Cooper Union was Saltwater Apprenticeship: Black Being Beyond the Human. Gumbs is engaging in a project of trying to negotiate her relationship with saltwater and her saltwater relationships—that is, those that are born of sweat and tears. To do that, Gumbs decided to look at other mammals who are similarly hunted and endangered and who have mastered the art of breathing in saltwater. The lecture focused on the work she has begun to engage in concerning Marine Biology and the history, life and survivals of Marine Mammals. She concerns herself with the ways in which the systems of oppression which threaten the survival of Marine Mammals are co-constructive with those systems of oppression which threaten the survival of black folks. She also looks at different categorizing narratives of marine mammals which sound frighteningly similar to the deeply racialized categorizations of black people within white history and STEM texts.

What I found most salient about her lecture as it pertains to our class are two central themes and lecture points in her talk. First, she talked about the sediment at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. She talked about what lies there: So many of our ancestors. She urged the audience to understand that if so many of our ancestors lie there, there must be wisdom in the saltwater. She said “don’t sleep on sediment, at the bottom, knowledge grows”. This comment of course drew me to all of the dialogue we have seen in our texts surrounding the roots of people of color and the knowledge that grows at the roots of people.

Another even more salient discussion she had in the lecture was surrounding rituals. During the question section, someone asked her about her process in writing. She talked about how she gets up at 4am, each morning she can—when people cannot and will not dare disturb her. When she wakes up, she likes to engage in a series of “rituals”. Those rituals included chants that she says to herself in the mirror and breathing exercise, as well as visualization exercise. Her vision practice was particularly important as she spoke of sitting down and visualizing “traveling [somewhere in her mind and imagination] to access the ceremony I need to create for myself and for us”. For example, one ceremony she imagines is a space in which she is spending time with her sister and her nieces and experiencing joy with them.

Her description of the importance of rituals in one’s life to ensure that she grounded and connected with the project of liberation really reminded me of all of the rituals we saw in Sassafras, Cyprus & Indigo. It certainty made me think critically about the rituals that I perform, which ones I know about and practice deliberately and which ones I just do within out realizing it. It made me think of rituals that are perpetuated, for better or for worse in classrooms as well.

At the end of the day, the lecture that I was at was a classroom and we were in an academic building where regular lectures happen each day and where lectures were happening in the room over. But there was something very different about the experience in the space that night. One difference is that each time she would deliver a section of her lecture, as a repeated ritual, she would ask the entire ‘class’ to take a group breath. That was something really radical to experience and something I haven’t had a teacher ask the class to do since high school. I’m not completely sure what to do with the experience yet or how to articulate fully the pedagogical implications of the constructed rituals of her ‘class’ but I certainty believe that the experience opened me up to thinking critically about classroom rituals. I think it would be a really interesting line of discussion to critically approach, in our own class, the rituals we can bee seen performing within our classroom and within other classrooms we engage in.

 

For more info about Alexis Pauline Gumbs: https://www.alexispauline.com

For info about her lecture Series:

-NYU: Nov. 6:

https://tisch.nyu.edu/art-public-policy/events/-with-our-freedom—an-oracle-of-june-jordan

-Columbia: Nov. 7:

http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/calendar/necessary-as-water-queer-black-ceremony-and-the-depth-of-listening-gn5c3

To access Alexis Pauline Gumbs Instagram: @alexispauline

 

Taylor Post #4

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“You gotta be mo’ in this world” (21, Shange)

“Indigo’s specialties were other worlds, fiddling” (34, Shange)

“I just can’t imagine another world” (63, Shange)

“There was so much to do. Black people needed so many things” (2, Shange)

—————

I’m thinking a lot about what has got to be birthed into this world and what worlds have got to be birthed:

Sometimes, the apocalyptic-ness of our times threatens to stop me in my tracks–I feel fear spread up my back, belly and chest, all hot and prickly. I go numb.

And then I remember learning to make apple pie with my Grandmother.

I don’t remember a lot about her anymore but I just remember that day: the Kitchen is too hot and I’m sweating and really bad at kneading dough because I am a child, with clumsy child fingers. But her fingers move all swift and skillful “recipe, and ritual”. And all I can remember about the moment otherwise is that, that woman just loved me– so much. And I can feel her taking care of me–teaching me to create something that will nourish our spirits–every time I remember to reach for her (memory).

I think the memory sometimes exists like a pocket-world I can inhabit and draw strength from. It beats the life back into me on days I don’t want to feel anything anymore, when the fear creeps and  I forget to “take care”.

In Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, there is great concern around what world the girls choose to inhabit, what world the girls choose to create and what world the girls can consider to be ‘real’ and fictional. What is clear to me though, is that no matter how “mad” the girls looked while engaging in their unique and respective rituals of creation throughout the text, they were all on a journey of learning how to take care of themselves and by extension, each other in a time where they were “never meant to survive” (Lorde).

 

Edit:

Youtube Poem by ‘Tasha’ from Debut Album ‘Alone at Last’

Link to article on her Debut Album and Work as an Artist: https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/multidisciplinary-chicago-artist-tasha-comes-into-her-own-as-a-musician-on-alone-at-last/Content?oid=60978249

Taylor Post #3

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“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives” (Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider 36)  

A through line I would like to bring forward in this post that I found salient in all three of our readings is this concept of consciousness raising as well as the very function of art and poetry as means through which to facilitate a generative and essential fullness in our lives–which is perhaps a facet of liberation itself. In Lisa Gail Collins rehearsal of the Black Arts Movement and the Feminist Art Movement, Lisa meditates on the importance of consciousness raising as a means for crafting ones imaginary for liberation and for learning how to self define oneself and be more responsible about the ways one moves through the world. I read this as an effort to deliberately and “responsibly” shed light on the affective map of ones life and see the ways in which it overlaps, clashes, and exists in space and with others. 

In Nappy Edges, Shange writes that “we ourselves suffer form a frightening lack of clarity abt who we are. my work attempts to ferret out what i  know and touch in a woman’s body” (21). Here I read that she values the ability to self reflect and self reflect with clarity and quality about the way that we move through space. Shange goes on to articulate that poems are “essential to our existence” and moreover, when ruminating on ‘what poetry should do’ she writes that “poems should fill you with something” (24). 

Audre Lorde in “Poetry is Not a Luxury” of course argues that poetry is not a luxury. Instead she argues that it is a “revelatory distillation of thought” which brings forth ideas that are ‘felt but not yet birthed fully’. In its revelatory nature, it functions as a “quality light” which allows us to better understand ourselves and the world through teaching us to listen and read for what affects us. What moves us, what makes us feel full and feel fully (in a world where we were “not meant to survive, not as humans” and how to do we facilitate that fullness as ritual?

Poetry.

These readings intersected at a critical juncture of affect, the erotic (Lorde) and self-consciousness—three things that the academy within which we function does not value. As Lorde urges us to learn to respect what affects us, respect our feelings and that which does not yet have language and furthermore, demand more of our institution of learning I begin asking myself more and more how I can turn to poetry and art making as a medium for articulating certain facets of liberation and liberatory praxis how I can facilitate art as a medium for connection. 

Taylor Post: On BCRW Discussion with Cherrié Moraga

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     During Cherrié Moraga’s discussion, Ntozake Shange’s words continued to surface in me:
“that’s what I means that black folks cd dance/ it don’t mean the slop or the hully gully…./it don’t mean just what we do all the time/
It’s how we remember what cannot be said
That’s why the white folks say it ain’t got no form/ what was the form 
of slavery/ what was the form of Jim Crow/ & how in the hell
wd they know… “
     In these words, I read that there are forms of knowledge, ways of being and loving and communicating—moving and being moved— that happen beyond this language—which exist beyond the written word. There is a form beyond.
     But in a society whose reason still rests upon enlightenment era conceptions of truth, evidence and thought, it is too easy for people to call these forms of knowledge invalid—if the word is not written it is not considered real. But I know that sometimes the body of evidence most relevant to the debate is my own body. I know to value the knowledge, feelings, memories and truths that surface, I know to call them revelatory and vital.
     Cherrié Moraga brought to bear the ways in which students are often surfacing and sharing wealths of knowledge all of the time and that their institutions at large often cannot or will not support it. That fostering those sites of knowledge production is vital but underperformed. She brought to bear that there are so many ways and forms of being and living and loving and knowing that are “too much for this world”, “to queer”, to expansive, colorful—and to me, what this all meant was that there are ways of knowing and loving that, as Audre Lorde might say,  are too full for this world. 
    Or perhaps, Lorde would say that they are too erotic.
    Alexis Pauline Gumbs may say they are forms which threaten to spill.
     Either way, what I took away from the experience was that it is I/we must continue to “write what [we] keep knowing” as Moraga said that night. That even when I am made to feel so wrong and too wild for the classroom, “we keep writing what we keep knowing” and keep finding ways of communicating those things beyond language. For, as Moraga said those spaces where we feel contradiction/friction between what we know to be true about this world  and what other institutions (like the academy, for example) tell us is true, produce consciousness and help us cultivate consciousness and feminist analysis. That consciousness helps us “go home”, explore our origin story and (re)produce knowledges which help us “get free”.

Taylor Post 1: Epistemological Violence & “Going Home”

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Excerpt From Wretched Of The Earth p. 210
Colonialism is
         (not)
     satisfied
                   merely
 with holding people in its
 grip and emptying the
native brain of all form and content.
By a kind of perverted
logic,
it turns
to the past
of the oppressed people, and
dis           torts,
   d i s
      f i g u r e
   s,
and destroys it.
This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.
Why I formatted the way that I did:
I tried to organize the poem on the page to reflect the way my body read the words. The way I annotated the page, I thought first that the following paragraph was to be about ‘What Colonialism Is’. It was, instead, a paragraph on what colonialism is (not). It opened up questions in me around what would ’satisfy colonialism’ and by extension, what would satisfy larger iterations of capitalist settler colonial logics in the country we live in here. I couldn’t stop thinking about how voracious a system this is, how gluttonous and ridiculous and alienating it becomes. How often it distorts the ways I am able to understand the world and the way I want to move through it.
Epistemological Violence & “Going Home”: 
    The passage I chose is talking—to me— about the many forms of epistemological violence constituted through colonial logics. Epistemological violence, to me, constitutes forms of violence which attack, undermine, and erase the ways people understand the world and peoples ways of knowing. When our ways of understanding and translating the world are distorted, it makes it harder to think reflexively, to (as Cherrié Moraga reminded us last week in her BCRW interview) “go home” to one’s origin stories and work out what must be worked out. Perhaps that is the point of this specific system of oppression.
    Thinking critically about forms of epistemological violence, my mind was certainly drawn to the prompt quote of this assignment. Ntozake Shange writes in Language and Sound of the ways in which she often wants to attack and deform that language which attempts to attack her—that language being English. It is a language which “perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as he/she learns to speak of the world & the “self” (19). In many ways, the english language over and over again through series of, what Foucault might call, ‘small punishments’, teaches us that the ways we want to express the world has limits that must be respected if we ourselves want to be respected. For example, in many ways, the manner in which the english language has historically been implicated in the lives of my ancestors has been as a tool to devalue their stories. And I feel that pull, that friction. I know that the very language I use to articulate and read maps of liberation in essays, and novels, and poems, has also constituted great violence upon my ghosts.
What I learned to articulate: 
    In this place, if things cannot be articulated in this language, they are invalidated and distorted. When I mean that I don’t have words but I have a movement or a sound in my chest that can tell you everything, it is with the hope that you (can read beyond this place)/ understand. Audre Lorde tells us “that poetry is not a luxury” and I have to constantly remind myself that that poetry can exist outside of this colonizer tongue. That poetry is bigger than my tongue, mouth and body—that it prompts an overflowing in me.