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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Nia

studying shange: student interviews parte deux

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We’ve got a room! We’ve got a schedule! Let’s get down to business!

Reminder: I would like to explore how/why we are”studying shange.” Instead of talking about potential projects (which I am still open to do) we will discuss how students are experiencing this class and reading Shange with “carnal intellectuality” in mind. Students may group together to be interviewed (this is highly encouraged amongst students who read Shange together). The interviews will also attempt to incorporate Shange’s methods into the format. Be prepared to experiment.

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Original “studying shange” post

studying shange: student interviews

by Nia 1 Comment

In the next couple of weeks, I would like to explore how/why we are”studying shange.” Instead of talking about potential projects (which I am still open to do) we will discuss how students are experiencing this class and reading Shange with “carnal intellectuality” in mind. Students may group together to be interviewed (this is highly encouraged amongst students who read Shange together). The interviews will also attempt to incorporate Shange’s methods into the format. Be prepared to experiment.

Sign Up!

Original “studying shange” post

Black Girls are Magic: Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo

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I’m never been more confident in identifying as a) witch b) blessed c) magical than I do after reading Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo. 

Black Girls are Magic.

Cooking, nurturing others is magic. Women gathering together is magical. Women loving and supporting each other is magical. Affirming oneself is magic. Loving yourself and respecting to be loved is rare and magnificent.

Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo represent three types of magic which pervade Black women’s lives.

Sassafras embodies creation. She finds her gift early. She’s a weaver. Yet, she lets private school and the influence of her lover, Mitch devalue the worth of her craft. The men in her life try to name her magic, the magic of Black women. They try to create the Black woman that they think Sassafras is in her, and for awhile she lets them with little, sporadic protest. She keeps trying to write, though it doesn’t come naturally. She keeps trying to be their idea of the artist, their idea of the Black women. But her writing continues to explore weaving, her mother and her past. Without knowing it, Sassafras uses her writing to bring herself back to weaving, back to stereotypically feminine creation. She shows that even performing the role society expects of you is magic if done by your own choice, if done freely. She can bring beauty, generosity, and freedom into the world because she chooses to. That is magical.

Cypress embodies translation and transconfiguration. Through her body Cypress is able to speak to the past, present, and future. She is able to interpret the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly of the body. She can read people through their bodies, take in their messages and send back her own. She is able to blend the things she wants in the world through her body. She is able to reconcile the things she wants in her life that she struggles to reconcile otherwise through dance and her body’s expression. When she accepts her body for all it can do and all it cannot, she is able to utilize her magic.

Indigo embodies birth and rebirth. For a very young age it is clear Indigo can conjure and create life where there is none. Her dolls, carefully and painstakingly fashioned by her, have personalities. When she believes she’s outgrown them she lays them “to rest.” Her violin playing revives the deepest, most ancestral parts of her listeners. It evokes the pain and joy of them and all who came before them. As she ages, she uses her powers to bring “free” Black  children into the world; children who come into the world unconquered and remain so until their deaths. Her magic is what keeps Black women afloat. She can call on the spirits to protect those who live and make women honors those who have passed. Her magic is regenerative.

nia ashley in reflection

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In my posts I tend to close read Shange’s text to extract themes about the citizens of the African diaspora. I pick up to three themes present in the text we read that week and combine Shange’s text with my own interpretations and opinions of those topics. I’ve raised the issue of the imbalanced politics in interracial intimacy and how its perceived, the importance of poets as orators in the African diaspora, and how Shange “reconstructs language and culture to allow colonized and oppressed people, particularly Black people, to express emotions, discuss experiences, and commiserate with others.” As the semester has progressed, I’ve gotten freer with my forms, more willing to digress from the straight analytical form and embrace more of Shange’s poetics. The one thing I do want to revisit in my work is actually not in my posts, but in my “nappy edges” presentation. I feel that I raised some ideas about the projects and goals of Shange’s work that are worth revisiting and exploring.

I often struggle to write a post on the days that I did not fully connect with the text, especially before class. Reading Shange in my isolation I am often confused or conflicted, I don’t know what to think, what I think, or how to articulate it. It is only after class that I begin to understand the text and developed concrete and coherent thoughts about the work. I think that is visible in the posts I did for texts I did not connect with as strongly as others.

poet as orator/performer/activist; poetry as translation

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Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography

mozambique
angola
salvador & johannesburg
the atlantic side of nicaragua costa rica
cuba puerto rico
charleston & savannah/ haiti
panama canal/ the yucatan
manila
la habana
guyana
santiago & brixton
near managua/
pétionville
abidjan
chicago
trinidad
san juan
capetown & palestine
luanda
chicago

These are all the places Shange connects alludes to in “Bocas” in A Daughter’s Geography. She names them as her numerous children related though they “cannot speak/the same language.” (Shange). She connects all the children of Africa and the African diaspora through experience not just through heritage. There is the simple explanation for these relationships; the one often invoked by artists and academics alike: that each ethnicity is just a stop on the trade route. Mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons became Basian, Jamaican, American, and Cuban through trade and bartering. They developed new cultures and claimed happenstance for their own.

“but a long time ago/ we boarded ships/ locked in
depths of seas our spirits/ kisst the earth
on the atlantic side of nicaragua costa rica
our lips traced the edges of cuba puerto rico
charleston & savannah/ in haiti
we embraced &
made children of the new world” (Shange)

Shange goes farther than this connection. She unites these ethnicities and nationalities through their experiences of oppression and subjugation at the hands of similar if not the same groups of oppressors.

“but we fight the same old men/ in the new world… the same men who thought the earth waz flat
go on over the edge/ go on over the edge old men”

She credits the experience of being marginalized and overcoming that marginalization as a uniting force of these colored people. The rhythms that emerged, the patios that formed, the food, the names, all point to a common experience. It is no surprise then that she had to make language move. When it moves, no matter what language it is, poems can capture, unite, and uplift her children. It doesn’t matter that one speaks Spanish, the other Portuguese; they use the movement in the poem, the space between the words, the history behind their creation to unite themselves as family.

I added some of my favorite spoken word poets from all over the diaspora.

http://operationelevation.tumblr.com/post/128567513644/bnv15

A Living Archive: Meeting Zake

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This post is late.

It took two days, three naps, several sessions of frenzied storytelling, and cataloguing, reviewing, and obsessing over my footage for me to properly reflect on and come to conclusions about Thursday and Friday’s encounters with Ntozake Shange. Last year when Professor Hall gave me Shange’s address so I could write to her and I spent all summer not knowing how I could possibly put into words all the things Shange is for me, I could not imagine meeting and interacting with her.

“provenance:” the beginning, the origin point of an archive; even if two subjects interact, they do not mix

What is an archive? It is and is not a collection of texts that signify a subject: a time, a place, a genre, a person. Objects which illuminate aspects of the subject to which they are attached. This definition, as flimsy and as finite as it is, is constantly under duress. There are politics around what subjects academia deems worthy of an archive (they didn’t collect Basquiat’s journals until the yt gaze on his art had already killed him). There are politics around what can be deemed an archive. An attic full of family heirlooms, a childhood bedroom undisturbed, a quilt of old clothing, can be studied to reveal what they signify, but are they an “Archive.” Capital letters Full Stop. There are even politics around what is kept long enough to signify anything. As Shange pointed out, ” the day they freed the slaves in Brazil they [the government, the slaveowners] were commanded to destroy all the documents about slavery.” Wh(o,y,at) is history? Who has access?

“original order:” trying to maintain text in the order in which it is received. 

The internet is an archive. One to which everyone (but not everyone) and anyone (but not anyone) can contribute. It is an open and radical space in which laymen’s can contribute their presence to history, can disrupt the canonical/dominant definitions of text, art, knowledge, history, existence; the list is an ever-expanding infinite. Yet, this classification/validation of the capital I “Internet” is often resisted by those who classify. There are divisive politics about what academia, journalism, and other spheres held holy by ytmen and held captive from all others save a few about what can be considered a text. Wh(o,at) is worth study? Collective recognition is what deems a text important, what creates its value. This is why we value autographs and object once owned, worn, touched, and eaten by celebrities and historical figures. How does agency, voice, and access factor into the process? For every text validated as worthy of research and study, there is one used for surveillance and marketing. A text is, as Shannon, the Shange archivist noted, “a piece that we allow to speak.” What we do with its words is up to us?

I drew pumpkins and pineapples and apples and seagulls on the page. I processed.

I napped for three hours after the open session on Friday and my subsequent interview with Shange. I discovered through it not only thing which validated and expanded my own views about womanhood, Black womanhood, love, sex, my body, my aethestic, and many other things which is would take more words than I have to express, but I also discovered that I have more in common with my classmates than I previously thought. Even with some distance, I have only movements and sounds to name the experience I had meeting Shange. Gentle hums in my throat, behind my ears, in the pit of stomach; the wrinkle I surely gave myself from darting my eyes, unable to meet her gaze. The ineffable sadness I felt that I did not hug her to say goodbye. So I offer only my notes from that day for now, my interview with her for later. Provenance of my own archive.

Movement + Lit

“the joy of breathlessness…readies the body for literature” – Zake

“approach language from a state of excitement” – Zake

Begin interviews with an excessive movement/running, dancing, drop swings

“My writing come from a pit, from deep inside of me instead of from my skin” – Zake

“slashes indicate a change in intonation…intent or voice” – Zake

“I wanted to read somebody so I decided I had to read myself” – Zake

poh-ten-see

The Black Sexism Debate, interracial intimacy, and Black women’s agency

by Nia 2 Comments

It’s intriguing to see how different modern vitrol for bm/ww, bw/wm, bm/wm, and bw/ww even now when those relationships have agency on both sides. Because Black women were always accessible to yt men they are almost never seen as having the agency or the choice to date inter or intra racially. When a black men dates interracially there are two understandings of his choice. In the case of dating a yt woman, it is seen an affirmation of his masculinity to the detriment of his race. As Michelle Wallace elaborates subjugating the yt woman is seen as a symbol of ultimate masculinity. The betrayal is understood as an obviously advantageous position in which he’s put himself but on which he should not have attempted in order to stay loyal to his race. As Kayne West puts it, “ Stick by his side/you know the dude’s balling and yeah that’s right/but you keep calling and trying and you stay right girl/and when he get on he’ll leave yo ass for a white girl” (Goldigger). Wealth and power and a Doris Day to share it with. That’s the American dream. In the case of a Black man dating a yt man, his choice is seen as an assault on his masculinity, a elective castration, and an act to the detriment of his race and the national project. The Black Nationalist project is not queer. In the patriarchal construct of sex as domination over a lesser being for one’s own pleasure, Black men are subjugating themselves willingly, making them less than, and even worse to yt men. In a vast simplification of the politics of these relationships, the yt men who sleep with Black men are seen as acting out a power dynamic of which the movement is trying to strip them. I do not doubt that this is true in some cases, but the assumption still stands as overarching and all consuming.

“studying shange” – working title

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studying shange is a docu-series that hopes to capture and explore the ways in which new scholarship in created in the 21st century. The project seeks to answer the questions: “What does it mean to build scholarship and an archive of a living artist and scholar? (How) Does the student as collaborator methodology work in an undergraduate setting? Are Shange’s answers the only answers to questions the academic and cultural worlds have about her work? Where does her opinion factor in to the process of building scholarship? It will include interviews with the students in the Digital Shange Seminar. Students will discuss their individual archival projects as well as the process of the class itself. How did they come to selecting the projects to which they’ve ascribed themselves? How has their experience of the class and as academic collaborators been so far? Extra-university collaborators will explain how they’ve made the digital archiving process possible. I will also interview Professor Hall and others who initiated the study, and even Ntozake Shange herself.

 

breaking language

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blog post #1

what i was listening to while reading: to pimp a butterfly by Kendrick Lamar

what i watching while typing: black-ish

 

the dominant administration/solemnly/

undertook to defend this/woman, pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered… it described the immense possibilities of woman/unfortunately/ transformed by the Algerian man into an inert, dem(one)tized, indeed dehumanized object… (Fanon 38)

 

in an initial phase (it is the action) the plans of the

occupier that determine the/

centers/

of resistance around which a people’s will

to survive becomes

organized/it is the white man who creates

the Negro/But it is

the Negro who creates negritude. (Fanon 47)

 

In Algeria Unveiled, Fanon points to the ways in which dominant culture and resistance operate. In the first quote I choose to “Shange-tize,” Fanon illustrates the way the colonizer, in his attempt to control and regulate the behaviors of the colonized, attempts to use their culture and moralities against them. Fanon utilizes the custom of the veil in Algeria explain this practice. By positioning the veil as a mode of oppression, the British hoped to present Algerian women as victims to themselves and to the outside world. They position her as a symbol, an object to liberated from her archaic society in order to sow discord within the community and encourage assimilation. In the second quote, Fanon dissects how colonized people form modes of resistance. Since the colonizers determine what will be prioritized by dominant culture, what will be the center, the colonized determines what they will prioritize about their own culture and promote as their own self-identity.

 

I picked this two quotes to juxtapose these two quotes, and by extension, these two ideas because I think they say a lot of Ntozake Shange’s mode of artistic production. One of her works many purposes, as she expresses in “my pen is a machete” is to reconstruct language and culture to allow colonized and oppressed people, particularly Black people, to express emotions, discuss experiences, and commiserate with others. By breaking down the constructions of centrist language, Shange both dismisses its value and creates new language for black people.