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Healing Justice: Feeling Shange

by Hossain 0 Comments

Yesterday, October 1st, 2019, was one of the most unique experiences of my life. It is still hard to put it in to words, what I felt in Barnard’s James Room last night, but it was Shange. Is that possible? To use her name as an adjective? It was Shange. Healing Justice, in a way, is Shange and her work. That’s quite some pressure to put on a singular woman, though, but she is Shange. Last night, Ebony Noelle Golden described her as a “firestar” and a firestar, she is. Last night, the James Room was decolonized for two and a half hours. I was lucky enough to be in that room last night, where we were all invited to participate in ceremony, veneration, and prostration to Shange. I know myself to be a monotheist, but Shange is not short of a goddess. Perhaps, in some way, her spirit last night, was sharing energies with Sechita, and her ephemeral presence was felt. I was in a meditative state. I keep thinking zen, but that’s not the right word. It was meditative, perhaps, even religious. I am a person that believes in the exchange of energies, but is often skeptical of spirits. Perhaps it is my own fear? But yesterday, I spoke to Shange. I felt her there, and I was unafraid. My mind was white matter, white light, blank, and present. She granted me that gift–to be present. I felt myself, a different part of me wake up- Samaha Hossain.

I’m posting this almost a whole month after attending the healing justice event. I often write when I feel moved and I wrote that quickly one afternoon when I felt compelled to put my thoughts and feelings on paper. I made the decision to publish the unedited and unfiltered version of my thoughts about the Healing Justice event. I am inspired by Shange and her philosophy of dismantling and using the oppressive English language in ways that work best for our tongues and our bodies. The thoughts are above are my own, untouched by the conventions of academic expectations and without the pressure of explaining my feelings and consciousness to make sense to another. In essence, that night and being surrounded by Shange and her works granted me this feeling of entitlement and empowerment over my intellectual property. I have to say, there’s something quite satisfying about seeing your name follow a quote, it feels right.

As I conclude this post, I felt a lot that night. And something I have come to realize is that words won’t do it justice. It was an embodied and internalized experience. But it was one that made me think. It made me reach out to my mentors and loved ones who have supported me throughout my time at Barnard and reminded me to show them more love. It made me reconnect with my faith and want to explore different sects. We ended the ceremony that night in communal song. I remember swaying my body, closing my eyes, and basking in my presence of mind. But healing and song reminded me of the Sufi sect of Islam, which is different from what I practice. Sufism is the sect more involved with mysticism and music in prayer; the whirling dervishes of Turkey may be a popular representation of this. I bring this up because a Sufi song kept coming to mind as I sat through the ceremony. Kun Faya Kun is a Sufi song that was popularized by a Bollywood movie. I have attached the link below so that folks may listen, if they have the time. Kun Faya Kun translated from Arabic to English, means, “to be.” It means to exist and manifest oneself in the world as a being as per Allah’s will. To me, it also means to be present and conscious of your existence and the might of the universe, which I think fit perfectly with what I was feeling at the healing justice event.

As I stood in the shower that night, I put my phone by the window. I turned my volume on high, and hit play on Kun Faya Kun. I closed my eyes and swayed once more as the steam and droplets of water took over my body and filled my air with song and life. White light, blank space, my natural high. I felt it once more. I felt her and Him and myself.

Simply, I was.

Healing Justice and Ancestral Calls – Makeen Blog Post #3

by Zachery 1 Comment

Recently, I have been thinking extensively about how the individual engages with the community. This is largely connected to Ntozake’s emphasis on the prioritizing of individual liberation to achieve communal freedom in Nappy Edges. The concept of the individual role within a community also arose in my reading of the goals of the Black and Feminist Art Movements in The Art of Transformation by Lisa Gail Collins. Many of my thoughts have framed this as a dilemma of the individual vs. the collective. The Healing Justice event encouraged me to think otherwise.

 

The event opened with the calling of the names of our ancestors into the space. Specifically, we were asked to call the names of ancestors that follow us into every room that we occupy. I began thinking of names of my genetic ancestors that I could remember. Then I heard the workshop leaders calling the names of Audre Lorde, of bell hooks, and I began to think more broadly of what ancestry is. I called the names of Ida B. Wells, of Maya Angelou, of the women whose work my mother made sure I was familiar with from an early age. I began to think also what it means for these ancestors to follow us into the spaces we occupy as individuals. For someone to follow you into a space means that you are never alone. And even as we navigate our moments of solitude, our navigation is very much so guided by those who came before us. As a result, I truly did have to deconstruct my former understandings of isolation and solitude.

 

I had come to understand solitude as a being alone, separate and disconnected. This understanding of solitude has bled into my understanding of the individual. However, with this thought in mind of who follows me into the room, I was forced to think of how even my thoughts and how I carry myself have been formed and nurtured by those who came before me. It also forced me to view the individual and the collective not as being in competition with each other but as two entities that need each other to survive. I thrive as an individual because of the communities that existed before I was even here. My contributions as an individual to the communities that I exist within now are fueled by those that allow me to thrive on my own. Being in the space of the Healing Justice event, hearing the names of ancestors exit the mouths of every individual in the room, while seated in a circle truly helped me visually and audibly recognize that the individual does not have to be and is never alone. If it weren’t for this communal space, I would not have come to this realization for myself.

 

It was so wonderfully captivating to watch Ebony Noelle Golden and Tiffany Lenoi Jones embody what I hope to one day be capable of. To honor the past while navigating how to move forward. To acknowledge the many ways in which we’ve been positively influenced while shedding the negative influences that have skewed our perceptions of our past and present.

“Emergency Care of Wounds That Cannot Be Seen”: Healing Justice & Ntozake Shange (Event)

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Free and open to the public!

In the spirit of writer Ntozake Shange (BC ‘71), whose works explored indigenous, black, and folk ways of healing from both immediate emotional wounds and the transgenerational psychic pain wrought by legacies of patriarchal white supremacy, we invite you to a night of conversation, reflection, and embodied practice. According to cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer Cara Page, who coined the term, “healing justice” is a framework that  “identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence and bring[s] collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.” Working with Cara Page, choreographer-writer Ebony Noelle Golden, and Educator-herbalist Tiffany Lenoi, this space introduces attendees to healing justice practices that can promote individual and communal healing and transform the ways we work together. This is the first event of the Healing, Creativity, Envisioning Freedom Project  #ShangeMagic

October 1st, 6pm – 8pm  *  James Room, Barnard Hall, 4th floor

PARTICIPANTS (speaker bios available here)

Cara Page, cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer who coined the term “healing justice”

Ebony Noelle Golden (founder of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative)

Tiffany Lenoi (of Harriet’s Apothecary)

Moderator Vani Natarajan, Research and Instruction Librarian in the Humanities and Global Studies

**You are welcome to write a blogpost about this event for an Extra Credit / Wild Card blogpost**

where/when – event post

by Elizabeth 1 Comment

“We have been here since the beginning of time, just saying. We are also immigrants.”

During a slideshow presentation filled with pictures of her family, Cherríe Moraga made this comment during her event at Barnard this past Friday. It was a clear reference to her own Mexican-American heritage being attacked and demonized by the right and in particular, this country’s current president. To Moraga and millions like her, this is home and has been for generations. This made the audience laugh, but for me it prompted a series of questions- where and when am I from?

The first part is easy. I (and like Moraga says, when she says ‘I,’ she means “we”) am from Georgia, and my family has been in the same general areas of Georgia and South Carolina for as long we can remember. I have what has been created for me here- soul-stirring Black southern gospel services, lingering memories of formerly segregated restaurants and movie theaters, “white sounding” names, and a history and culture so rich that it is hidden and obscured by all who do not want me to understand or  remember. This is where I am/we are from.

For Moraga, the beginning was her ancestors moving across the border to Southern California. For me, there was the first slave ship 400 years ago that carried 20 people that may or may not be my great-great-great-great-something. Unlike Moraga, I do not know exactly who the first ones were in my family. So, her statement seems to hold even more true for me/us. We were brought here at the beginning of this country’s colonization, the slave trade, the occupation of indigenous bodies and land, the construction of what America has become today. We have been here since the beginning of time. We are also immigrants.

Ntozake Visit and Reflecting on Mother/Daughterhood

by Tirzah Anderson 0 Comments

In reflecting upon our visit with Ntozake, I find myself thinking of mothering. Although that may not have been the main topic of discussion for our conversations with her, I cannot help but think of my own mother after the visit. Ntozake’s work often centers a type of motherhood, not always biological in nature, and after meeting her, I felt a need to call my mom and talk to her about my experience. When I called my mother, after sending her a few photos and a video of Ntozake addressing my mom, her only response was “You are blessed”.

For me, my experience meeting with Ntozake centered me back into the ways that my mother first introduced me to her work and the conversations that I have had with my own mother surrounding identity and the ways that our identities change our experiences in the world. My own mother influences the way I see Ntozake’s work and the way I understand my own lived experiences, so I wanted to share this experience with her as much as possible, because I know if she was granted with the opportunity to meet with Ntozake so openly she would utilize and appreciate it fully.

It is also important to note that although her work focuses on motherhood and ideas of mothering often, it is not just content of her work that highlights ideas of motherhood, but also the ways in which her work is intergenerational and can bring common ground to “mothers” and “daughters”, not only biological ones, but relationships that are created from commonality and experience.

 

 

TIP: Posting to the Digital Shange Projects site

by Sarah Greene 0 Comments

General information

Log-in to the Digital Shange Projects page with the following url:
http://bcrw.barnard.edu/digitalshange/projects/wp-admin

Your username is the same as your UNI. If you have any trouble logging in, or if you lost your password, email me at sgreene@barnard.edu.

Remember to save your work because WordPress will not automatically save it for you. When working with an unpublished item, hit “Save Draft” often. When working with a published item, hit “Update” often. I would also recommend saving your work in another platform (e.g. Word, Google Docs) by copy/pasting.

“As beginning dancers we have no ego problems” … a call to move!

by Melissa 0 Comments

Dancing Shange copy (1)

If we are drawn for a number of reasons/ to the lives & times of black people who conquered their environments/ or at least their pain/ with their art, & if these people are mostly musicians & singers & dancers/ then what is a writer to do to draw the most from human & revealing moments from lives spent in nonverbal activity.

(Shange, Ntozake. Lost in Language & Sound 14)

 

From there, Shange calls upon us to syncretize all of our forms of creation. Writing and dancing are indispensable to each other as form of making, breathing with, moving to, listening to rhythm. Writing itself is a rhythmic effort that calls upon the body to breathe and move through sets of unrecognizable grammars until we can form our own language. Dance is a polysyllabic, multi-form, amalgamation of syncopated heartbeats – an effortful, physical calligraphy etched onto the living landscape of breath. Music somehow conveys all that we have always known about ourselves, the world, and each other.

Ntozake Shange has always insisted on calling upon all of her capacities to stir up joy to write, dance, and make music with her breath and body. I respond to Shange’s call to move and invite my fellow lovers of Shange to join me for a workshop on collaborative dance and writing through collective writing, reading, and movement. I hope this workshop will fit into the context of my peers’ work, picking up from where Michelle Loo started in her collaborative zine happenin’ Time to Greez.
My hope is that through movement, we will put together the fragmented pieces of our memories to create an embodied narrative that continues the legacy of Shange, and countless Black women writers, dancers, movers, and thinkers through the timelessness of the choreopoem.

 

Saturday April 30, 2016 

Studio 1, Basement of Barnard Hall 

10am-12pm

7pm-9pm

bring hydrated bodies, bare feet, and kind spirits 

Harlem Semester Walking Tours!

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Dear Zakettes,

Harlem Semester has arranged for thematic walking tours of Harlem for linked classes. If you would like to go on one of these tours, I’ll need to know which one by next Monday’s class. You can see the list at the end of this post. (You are not confined to the ones that are earmarked as having special interest for our class). Also, we have purchased a block of tickets for the Meshell Ndegeocello WIP showing of, “Can I Get a Witness”: The Gospel of James Baldwin, which will be on March 4th at Harlem Stage.

A Living Archive: Meeting Zake

by Nia 1 Comment

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

“Nappy Edges” Recap & Announcements

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Thanks to Nicole and Nia for giving us a lot to think about.  I wanted to highlight Nichole’s final question as something we might also focus on in for colored girls . . . “In what ways does Shange’s poetry invoke the ‘spiritual ethic’ (Collins 286). How does she implement the ‘ancient link between art, ritual and religion” in her poetry (Collins 286)”?

Please don’t forget that I tweaked the syllabus a bit. Instead of reading all three essays from S&F Online, you should pick the essay that best matches your interest. Again, the choices are:

There are so many exciting events coming up:

  • the BOLD book group is doing a live reading of for colored girls . . . this Monday,  October 5th at 5:45pm. At the Courtyard Marriott on 1717 Broadway (Entrance on 54th) 4th Floor. I’ll be leaving from campus at around 5:15 if anyone wants to go.
  • bell hooks is conducting a week of discussions at the New School from October 5-9
  • Nicole recommends Pueblo Harlem, October 10 from 11am-7pm.  It will be at the Harlem School of the Arts on 141 and St. Nicholas Avenue. It might get you in the mood for talking about Shange’s interest in Caribbean/Nuyorican/Latin@ cultures.
  • Coincidentally, MadibaMist is having a screening/discussion of Thomas Allen Harris’ critically acclaimed film, “Through a Lens Darkly” (which is on the syllabus for next semester) on 10/10 **not free**

Zaki is coming to class on October 22 and October 23rd.

This will involve some adjustment of the syllabus–stay tuned for details.

 

I’ve added a new “music blogpost” prompt. You aren’t obligated to do it, but you might want to try it on  week you are stuck for something to write (and it will encourage you to start incorporating media into your posts!