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A strong addition to the Shange Mixtape, in my opinion, would be the Lady in Purple’s no more love poem in for colored girls. I offer this poem specifically because of it’s way of highlighting a certain vulnerability and humanity from the colored women along with Shange’s preoccupation with music and it’s connection to love. At it’s base the Lady in Purple is professing the most raw form of her love to a partner that saw her outside of her “tricks” and got to experience her as who she was. This is currently my favorite poem within for colored girls because of the stinging realness of lines like,

When Professor Hall gave us the directive to begin checking out the Ntozake Shange Papers in the archives, I had no idea what to expect. I had never been in an Archive center until then, despite being 2 and a half years into my college career. However, I went in with an open mind and little expectations of what I was going to encounter.

What struck me in my perusal of Shange’s journals and original manuscripts of poems that show up in for colored girls, was the way certain characters and her dedication to certain themes show up in her archive long before the publishing of the works that we affiliate these characters and themes with. Vani provided me with the language to reflect my perception of the way her archive and works to illuminate an active engagement with certain themes and characters throughout time. The word that she offered me to define this lineage in Shange’s published works and archive was “Intertextuality”.

Below, I’ve attached one of my favorite moments of this “intertextuality” that I found in the original chapbook of for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf.

What strikes me about this poem, is not only the appearance of Cypress outside of a Cypress, Sassafrass, and Indigo but the appearance of Cypress in relation to queer and dance based context. As a queer woman myself, I appreciated Shange’s choice in highlighting Cypress’ queerness and it’s relationship to dance in Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo. However this poem reflects Cypress’ encounter with queerness or non-cisnormativity in a very different tone, with Sarah: a cross-dressing man being the center of Cypress’ attention and engagement. The way Ntozake paints Sarah and Cypress’ behavior is reflective of the times in which this poem was written and published, where LGBTQ but more specifically trans people were the recipients of large ostracization and violence in this country and often created & flocked to their own communities. Her choice in ending the poem with Cypress’ rescue of Sarah from a beat down from a black male and “[taking] her dancin”, (note, Cypress’ use of she/her pronouns rather than referring to Sarah as a man for the first time here) not only illuminates a certain tolerance of LGBTQ people and hatred of violence from Cypress but more importantly illuminates a thematic connection between dance and queerness preceeding the publishing of Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo. 

I loved seeing the fact that Shange was thinking about and trying things with Cypress far before the publishing of her novel. This is one of countless examples of the way Shange’s publications and the Ntozake Shange Papers expand our conceptions of an archive as being a static or dead thing. She is consistently in conversation with her characters and her archive as a whole. It’s alive.

Works Cited:

Chapbook of “for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf; BC20-29 – Ntozake Shange Papers,; Box 4 and Folder 1; Barnard Archives and Special Collections, Barnard Library, Barnard College.

“for colored girls” at the public theater, 2019

Seeing for colored girls was one of the most special theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. I was initially nervous about sitting onstage and engaging so intimately with the material. I think if we’d gone to the show at the beginning of the semester, I probably would not have been able to do it. After this whole semester of getting to know Shange’s work, I feel more comfortable in engaging with these ideas. I have really started to realize the source of my original discomfort. I think there was something about for colored girls that made me feel helpless when I was younger- I felt that Black women’s pain was inevitable- at the hands of society and the government, at the hands of Black men we are supposed to trust.

Throughout the semester I’ve told my mom and some of my friends that it’s so frustrating for me to be taking this class now, just a year after Shange passed. As grateful as I am to have the opportunity to read her work at all, it often feels like I just missed her. I think that night finally showed me that for colored girls came right when I needed it. Being required to read (and finally finish) the choreopoem for this class finally got me to the incredibly important ending- Shange and the colored girls’ declaration that is just as much an imperative – i found god in myself and i loved her / i loved her fiercely.

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.

Cite:

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

Something that caught my eye upon one of my first visits to the archive was an edited draft of Shange’s “First Loves” (then called “First Love”) as a part of the early edits for Some Sing, Some Cry.  

Copy of “First Love” 2009 draft with edits.

Written in prose, this piece is not itself a work of poetry, but instead an exploration of her relationship with the art as she’s grown as a writer and as a lover. This piece caught my attention because I, like Shange, “always knew I liked poetry more than anything,” but seeing the piece beyond its first line forced me to rethink my rather privileged relationship to the English language. This draft of “First Love” made me interrogate how and why Shange’s mastery of the written word looks and feels so starkly different from other poets of her time. It became clear that this is no ordinary love story — Shange’s first love was one characterized by both hardship and liberation. 

“My mother, Eloise, had benefited from what were then called ‘elocution’ lessons privately given in the home of a striking yet demure Southern woman once removed to the Bronx. There she mastered Whitman, Whittier, Wheatley, Shakespeare, Dunbar, and Paul Laurence. This eclectic mix of word crafters were my lullabies, soothing rhymes, and demonstrations of slowly garnered memorization skills. This, I suspect, is where my love of poets began.”

Shange’s love is not for poetry, it’s for poets — the “word crafters” themselves. Shange’s use of the word “crafter” here is fascinating in that is suggests the need for action in reclaiming language. This allowed me to reflect on the scope of Shange’s own vernacular writing surpassing the restrictions of “‘elocution lessons’” and making language her own. This draft, and its published body in 2010 reinforced the notion that there is no correct way to speak or write, just as there is no single correct way to create art. Wheatley’s English was crafted for her, as was the memorized lexicon of Shange’s mother, Eloise. Shange, though, is the crafter — the lover. 

These word crafters were her “lullabies,” highlighting the role of the unconscious as an incubator for Shange’s language. When one dreams, their words are unfiltered and untouched by history and hierarchical social structures. Shange’s unfiltered love is her love for language, as she evolves as a subconscious poet herself. Given Shange’s own interest in and encounters with, not just psychoanalytic theory, but psychotherapy, this evolving romantic connection between poetry and the unconscious is vital in that it moves beyond the restrictions of language. When Shange wrote, “but mine was no constant love. I flirted with Baudelaire and Artaud because I longed for some immersion in dream,” she touches upon the deeply introspective nature of poetry — latent love residing in one’s unconscious. 

This semester, I hosted a two-part series at my job which illuminated the work of up-and coming/new femmes in Music. Femme artists like Meg Thee Stallion and Summer Walker came up among others during the discussion, and a major theme that we, as a group of Womxn, kept returning to was the way in which these women center themselves and their desires within their music and the impact it has on us as womxn-identifying listeners. Interestingly enough, when we discussed negative responses to these women it largely came from Black Men whose issues stemmed from their centering of their desires and thus exclusion of the desires of Black men. To Black men like Joe Budden as we see in a portion of this interview, Meg Thee Stallion through lyrics like

“Lick, lick, lick, lick, lick. This is not about your dick/ These are simply just instructions on how you should treat my clit” (Pimpin)

“Handle me? (Huh) Who gon’ handle me? (Who?)/ Thinkin’ he’s a player, he’s a member on the team/He put in all that work, he wanna be the MVP (boy, bye)/I told him ain’t no taming me” (Hot Girl Summer)

 “Yeah, I’m in my bag, but I’m in his too, And that’s why every time you see me, I got some new shoes” (Cash Shit)

she is dedicated to “degrading and demoralizing men” within much of her music and thus is the recipient of widespread “Man-hate”.  Meg gracefully explains, that “Women need to feel empowered. We need to feel in charge. We need to feel confident and beautiful and strong. So when I’m making my music, I’m making shit that makes me feel good.”

As similar thread of centering female, particularly Black Female Desire and experience shows up in the work of Summer Walker, most notably in her smash-hit “Girls Need Love”, where in the bridge and chorus she states,

“I just need some dick
I just need some love
Tired of fucking with these lame N***** baby
I just need a thug…

Girls can’t never say they want it
Girls can’t never say how
Girls can’t never say they need it
Girls can’t never say now.”

In reading Wallace’s The Black Macho & The Myth of the Superwoman alongside Frank’s text, I realized some of the larger systematic issues at play regarding this cultural phenomenon of Black Men feeling threatened by Black Women’s choice in centering their self hood and desires over theirs. Wallace analyzes the Civil Rights Movement and defines it as a movement predicated on the “pursuit of [black] manhood” (33), which was expressed in a myriad of way most notably the pursuit of white women, and the responsibilities of black women lay in their role as “the workhouse that keeps his house functioning” (14) where she is given little agency in the expressions of her own story. Frank’s text further foregrounded the anxiety ridden preoccupation that black men had with the way they were being perceived in media such as Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Sapphire’s novel turned film Precious (Push). In the centering of Black Femme Experiences there is a feeling from black men that we are omitting the experiences and voices of Black Men, and this is precisely why womxn like Shange, Summer Walker, Alice Walker, Meg, among a myriad of others faced (and may continue to face) this backlash from Black Men. The White Gaze and more importantly the White Male Standard of Living that Black Men are conditioned to approximate is what fuels their vehement distaste of these acts of centering the desires and selfhoods of black women, because it calls into question the foundation of their selfhood outside of their gender and the privilege it affords them.

It is this centering of one selves that these Black Femme artists from, Shange to Summer, that make their work so radical along with so powerful for Black Women all over the world across time. What I kept going back to during my reading of this week’s texts was this question of, “What does it mean for Shange to insist—from the choosing of her name to be “she who comes with her own things”— on emphasizing her inherent right to autonomy in regard to expressions of her selfhood because of her Black Womxnhood rather than despite it?” She breaks the chain of dependence to a system not made with our selfhoods or desires in mind, and creates stories that re-imagine our visions of ourselves as the center of our worlds rather than the omitted or the periphery.

It is in her lineage among other Black Femme creators that Black femme performers like Meg and Summer can create the art that they do.

“make sure you have eye contact Brianna!”

“what are you looking at?”

“okay, can you look at me?”

“yeah, I’ve noticed that you don’t look directly in people’s eyes.”

Hi everyone,

My name is Brianna Johnson, and I am an actress who finds it difficult to maintain eye contact. Why…? you may wonder. I haven’t taken the time to truly interrogate this anxiety in depth, but I know it definitely has to do with an anxiety around fully connecting to another person in space. In a medium like Theatre, I’ve quickly realized this anxiety doesn’t bode well during rehearsals and performances. Thus, I’ve learned to dedicate some of that anxiety I hold around actually connecting with my scene partners into actually leaning into connecting with my scene partners. However, it is no simple act or one that I am always comfortable with. As my training and experiences in acting progress, its become easier and I’ve realized an important thing about the foundational aims of Theatre.

For me, the Theatrical Space should offer people the opportunity “to see” &/or “be/feel seen”. I am only interested in theatrical work that can allow people to expand their worldviews with variegated experiences and or provide a space for folks (both actors and audience members) to feel represented. Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf as a piece of Theatre is premised on this ability “to see” various Black femme experiences and provide a space for black women to “be/feel seen” or as Shange states in for colored girls “somebody/ anybody sing a black girl’s song bring her out to know herself.” for colored girls came into my life at a time where I was incredibly disillusioned with college theatre and its Eurocentric foundations and not only redefined my view of what Theatre could be, but affirmed to me my right of belonging within that space. Everytime I revisit this text, I discover something new about it and something new about my relationship to it.

Thus, to SEE this work in action—outside of performing within it—was an experience that I knew would be enormous for me. Walking out of the Public Theatre on that night of October 17th, 2019, the one word that kept returning to my mind was intentional. I could honestly talk about how obviously intentional and collaborative the directing, casting, characterization, choreography, lighting, sound, and costuming among other production elements was, FOR HOURS ON END. However, we do not have the time or word count for my extensive review of this play. What I will say is that the most striking part of this play, outside of the wonderful casting, was the way that the actresses utilized eye contact within their deliverance of the lines. As an actress, I am cognizant of the power that eye contact can have in really raising the stakes of a theatrical moment. However, to experience this as AN AUDIENCE member in a production of for colored girls was such a striking experience for me. Sitting on the stage, I was afforded the experience to hold eye contact with almost all if not all of the colored women for at least 2 seconds, and it was in those moments that I saw and felt seen in a Theatre but in a different way. In their choice to hold direct eye-contact with me, I found our personal identities as performer and audience member to disappear for a couple of moments and instead we were just two humans, two Black girls connecting– seeing each other for who we are and who we can be for a couple of moments. These moments of intimacy between the colored women and myself, compounded with the experience of seeing the choreopoem play out as an audience member for the first time, emphasized to me not only what Theatre can be but in my opinion should be: “a place to see & be/feel seen.”

It still can be uncomfortable for me to hold eye contact with folks in my daily and Theatrical life. However, with this experience in mind I know the impact that something as simple as eye-contact can do for an audience member’s experience of the show.