During my second trip to the Schomburg, I looked through the radio collection in the digital archives. I found many stunning photographs of the late radio host Betty Granger Reid. Here is a couple:
Betty Granger with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Betty Granger with Eartha Kitt
Reaction:
What I’ve gathered from the archives is that Ms. Granger was a radio personality and host for WLIB during the 1950s. I’ve scavenged the internet for information, but I was unable to find much more beyond what the archive details. Unfortunately, I think this speaks to how little information has been preserved regarding pioneering women radio deejays of color.
Access:
I received access to the photographs from The Schomburg Digital Archives.
Metadata:
The photographs list the photographer, Cecil Layne.
My archive find is from Pacifica Radio Archives. Joan Thornell interviews Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis for her “Another Perspective” series about the development of black music. Shange and Davis talk about Stevie Wonder, jazz, the differences between poetry and music and how each exists within a gendered space. The interview was produced at WPFW, Washington, DC in 1977. Read More
This semester, I’ve been a frequent commuter for work, and have often felt myself at a loss for focus, struggling to let go of frenzied thoughts between where I’ve been and where I’m going. Spying Shange’s poem, “What Do You Believe A Poem Shd Do?,” as a part of the MTA’s Arts for Transit collection hit me like a wave of present. It, quite literally, ‘stopped me in my tracks.’ Seeing, reading and experiencing the poem in transit reminded me of the beauty in mundane rituals, like travel and movement. To me, the poem seems to celebrate leaning in to the challenge of letting go of haphazard thoughts and committing to the experience and gestures of the present moment. Read More
I was really taken by Bradley’s final anecdote about learning to take photos in your own backyard, and how humbling that can be. Often our everyday blurs into the mundane. Holding a camera, I think there’s always an initial desire to capture something fresh and new; something you’ve never seen before. But I believe the most empowering kind of photography requires using your lens to kindle the magic of your mundane. Read More
This was my second time reading Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. I looked more delicately at the recipes woven throughout the story. They are the yarn through which Hilda Effania/Mama stays connected to her daughters after they leaver her house. With the first line of the novel in mind (“When there is a woman, there is magic”), I think, especially as a child, there is a magic in motherhood. Mama knows how to heal wounds and almost always has advice that reassures. But as her daughters grow older and leave the nest, Mama finds that some of her advice seems to have staled (though, not for a lack of trying) in reaching the new lifestyles her daughters are living on their own. At moments when Sassafrass & Cypress are more distant from their mama’s hopes for their future/livelihood/womanhood, they find comfort and connection in her recipes.
Cypress has a recipe—My Mama & Her Mama ‘Fore Her: Codfish Cakes (Accra). The ingredients have immortalized over time, bridging the connection and comfort of generations; Mama’s recipes are magic that transcend time and space. Cypress is across the country from her home but—through cooking—in dialogue with the love of her maternal roots.
Mama’s Kwanza Recipe (for Sassafrass): Duck with Mixed Oyster Stuffing
Salt & fine black pepper to taste 1 cup pecans, chopped
Wet the cornbread, break into bits and fry in the butter with the celery and onion. Add seasonings. As mixture gets crisp, add oysters & pecans. Stuff your duck & bake in a 450° oven for 15 minutes, then lower to 350° and bake 15 minutes for each pound. Baste every 15 minutes. Don’t forget to cover the bottoms of the pan with water, and be sure to keep the duck tightly covered until the last 15 minutes, when the skin can be brown.
Mama is pained that Sassafrass trades in Christmas for Kwanza (“When you said you weren’t having Christmas, I kept wondering where I had failed”), but she sends a recipe for her daughter’s holiday feast. Mama’s love and recipe from home transcends distance, and takes a seat at her daughter’s table. It’s her way of participating in her daughter’s life without physically being there. The recipe name (“Kwanza” replaces “Christmas”) Mama coins speaks to how recipes are like letters constantly in dialogue; they are conversations not fixed, but alive and shaped by the artists of each generation.
At first glance, I read “is not so gd” as “g-o-d” vs. “g-o-o-d”. I wonder if the abbreviation is supposed to make us think of god/ the idea of god at all. Does god exist from the moment a girl is born? Or is god a kind of love women must find within themselves? I thought about these questions as I read “is not so gd to be born a girl” closely.
For the first time, I read the slashes as the word “slash”. The imagery of violence in this choreoessay is more potent than any other I’ve read thus far that verbalizing the word “slash” felt relevant. Shange’s pen feels visceral—the slashes like machetes—carving a rhythm of violent protest. Her word choice—abominable, cutting, glass, scissors—conjure images of a war on the “girl-child”.
at least women cd carry things & cook/ but to be born a girl is not good sometimes
At the start, Shange makes a striking comparison between women and girls. Women can “carry things” (they have physical strength) and “cook” (they know how to care for/sustain themselves), while girls cannot; they are old enough to be taken advantage of but too young to fathom how to carry the weight of their experiences. Instead of writing “sex” and/or “rape”, Shange chooses the juvenile “you know what” to invoke a child’s perspective; it can be difficult for a girl/child to imagine a concept too mature for her age even if she has experienced it.
As violent as the choreoessay is, Shange does not sensationalize the physical threats of being born a girl. She defines words, like ‘infibulation’, and works out an equation, “virginity insurance = infibulation” to be matter-of-fact about the reality. Scientific descriptions of the way female genitals are maimed feel akin in tone to ingredients/ steps in a recipe, a recipe for a “girl-child” born to have the ‘child’ murdered. Her delivery is raw and compact. The paragraphs are long, and without any blank spaces Shange sometimes crafts; only the last few lines relieve some space.
we are born girls & live to be women who live our own lives/ to
live our lives/
to have/
our lives/
to live.
We’ve talked a lot in class about how her work often finds magic in the mundane. In this choreoessay, I’m curious whether the structure suggests that the mundane can also be suffocating and painful for a “girl-child” who has no control. Hope seems to live in the future of womanhood (“we are born girls & live to be women who live our own lives”), a time when girls will have grown able to respond to the threat of their destinies. I’m struck by the slash between “to have” and “our lives”. I think back to Shange’s title/phrase “my pen is a machete”. My interpretation of the ending is that women have the tool to write the connection between having/owning their own lives.
Some questions I still have…in the choreoessay, Shange writes “for some of us & we go crazy/ or never go anyplace”…is crazy juxtaposed with anyplace? Can crazy be a place a person goes to? What does it mean to go crazy?
In “Ntozake Shange’s Multilingual Poetics of Relation”, Ania Spyra draws a connection between the English Only/ Official English movements of the 1980’s and Shange’s publication of poetry that fiercely creates a multilingual narrative and identity. Movements to cement English as the official language in the US have been reoccurring/racist themes in history since the 1700s. Turning to English has notoriously been an ugly tactic of forced assimilation, and a defense mechanism against immigration and people of color threatening the colonialist power dynamic. The 1980s saw a revival as English was declared the official language in the commonwealth of Virginia. Last week, I had the opportunity to ask Shange whether A Daughter’s Geography (1983) and From Okra to Greens (1984) were a reaction to these homogenizing efforts. She explained that her choreopoems were/are an unconscious response, and that she sees her poetry as a kind of “combat poetry”.
With our class’s return to A Daughter’s Geography, I wanted to explore how Shange deconstructs English to create multilingual and transnational narratives. In “Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography”, children have geographical names—“daughter/ trinidad”, “son/ san juan”. The slash seems to simultaneously build and deconstruct. In her choreoessay, “my pen is a machete”, Shange writes of how she has to take language “apart to the bone/ so that the malignancies fall away/ leaving us space to literally create our own image.” Here, the slash undecks colonialist grammar, but creates a shared family/identity among people of color across the Americas. Shange writes, “go on over the edge/ go on over the edge old men”. She creates movement as she alludes to the absence of borders; the world is not flat, but home to the flow of transnational identities. Shange noted that the slash can indicate a shift in tone and voice. Perhaps the slash is a new beat—the shift of identity/geography—celebrating and connecting a patchwork of peoples all part of the same rhythm and history. The last line—“we are feeding our children the sun”—is fierce, and identity is vibrant. Through deconstructing English and building multilingual narratives, African-Americans can find revolution in the feast of the sun—the vessel of life.
I want to conclude with a quote Shange said during her class visit: “When you take control of the language, you take control of life. When you take control of life, you can have a movement. When you have a movement, you can have a revolution.”
Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography
i have a daughter/ mozambique
i have a son/ angola
our twins
salvador & johannesburg/ cannot speak
the same language
but we fight the same old men/ in the new world
we are so hungry for the morning
we’re trying to feed our children the sun
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
but old men spit on us/ shackled our limbs
but for a minute
our cries are the panama canal/ the yucatan
we poured thru more sea/ more ships/ to manila
ah ha we’re back again
everybody in manila awready speaks spanish
the old men sent for the archbishop of canterbury
“can whole continents be excommunicated?”
“what wd happen to the children?”
“wd their allegiance slip over the edge?”
“don’t worry bout lumumba/ don’t even think bout
ho chi minh/ the dead cant procreate”
so say the old men
but I have a daughter/ la habana
I have a son/ guyana
our twins
santiago & brixton/ cannot speak
the same language
yet we fight the same old men
the ones who think helicopters rhyme with hunger
who think patrol boats can confiscate a people
the ones whose dreams are full of none of our
children
the see mae west & harlow in whittled white cafes
near managua/ listening to primitive rhythms in
jungles near pétionville
with bejeweled benign nativess
ice skating in abidjan
unaware of the rest of us in chicago
all the dark urchins
rounding out the globe/ primitively whispering
the earth is not flat old men
there is no edge
no end to the new world
cuz I have a daughter/ trinidad
I have a son/ san juan
our twins
capetown & palestine/ cannot speak the same
language/ but we fight the same old men
the same men who thought the earth waz flat
go on over the edge/ go on over the edge old men
you’ll see us in luanda, or the rest of us
in chicago
rounding out the morning/
we are feeding our children the sun
After watching the ending of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman in class, I wanted to further explore Clay and Lula as symbols of black and white America. The following shot by shot analysis looks at the ways in which camera angles and mise en scène (everything in front of the camera) interact with the dialogue, and ultimately advance this duality…
A. “They’ll murder you, and have very rational explanations. Very much like your own.”
In his final speech, Clay warns Lula that the day will arrive when black America will turn to a forceful/violent response after centuries of being victims of murder. The silver/white appearing subway pole slices through the image in a jarring fashion. The way the pole intrudes on the image seems to undercut his message and foretell that he is Lula/white America’s next victim.
Giving up a part of the (or even the whole) self to sustain/nourish/love men is a very female experience. For Colored Girls offers the common understanding of sisterhood as a way to uncover and embrace the music of your spirit, and as a way for women—especially women of color—to reclaim their ownership/pride of the self.
I read the choreopoem while watching/listening to a Middlebury College adaptation. Experiencing Shange’s work as a performance completely changed the way I was able to experience and engage with the text. I want to look specifically at the poems “somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff” and “sorry” and how they are in dialogue with each other. The first poem talks about how relationships/men can take from women the very essence of themselves/all that is nourishing (“my laugh”, “my rhythms & my voice” & “my calloused feet & quick language”). The lady in green is the sole woman on the stage, yet watching the performance as a part of an audience, reacting claps and snaps fight the strong presence of isolation onstage. The crowd erupted in snaps after she said, “now you can’t have me less i give me away”. Within the audience exists a common understanding that sometimes for love we—women—give up all of the parts of ourselves that we love. But women need to handle their own stuff. They need to love themselves and stop taking care of themselves last.
There is a blurring of transition to “sorry”. The lights do not dim/there is no re-staging; the other women of color walk out one by one. They talk about how “sorry” isn’t nourishing. “Sorry” doesn’t make up for what men have taken. “Sorry” doesn’t allow women to feel wanted, understood & happy. I think the blurring of borders between the two poems speaks to the narrative as a whole. This isolated experience is easier understood in the company of other women. Shange shows that through sisterhood, women find space to navigate these painful experiences, and are able to find a place to care and love themselves.
Here is the adaptation I watched while reading the choreopoem…
Here are some songs I listened to while watching/reading For Colored Girls…
