Sydney is sick! So I’ve quickly cobbled together an exercise of sorts.
I think we should stretch and move as we feel, um, moved while listening to Wille Colon/Hector Lavoe, “Todo Tiene Su Final“. Then recite together the following passages from lost in language and sound:
Without examining our relationship to the English language, we cannot honestly “hear” the other speak, we cannot become intimate with what we do not respect. What we deem as “foreign” we cannot take to our hearts”130
As beginning dancers we have no ego problems learning merely to walk again hopefully we will humble ourselves to learn to simply talk again. 135
Freedom is not a commodity, nor am i, nor any of my people. 26
Speaking of Combat Breath, if you have time, take a look at Alexis Gumbs’ “That Transformative Dark Space,” an inquiry into breath, freedom and occupation that responds to Shange in the context of concerns about police occupation. Hopefully in the future we can use some of Alexis Gumbs “Black Feminist Breathing” meditations.
Ngugi’s Decolonizing the Mind — The Language of African Theatre
“Drama is closer to the dialectics of life than poetry and the fiction. Life is movement arising from the inherent contradiction and unity of opposites. Man and woman meet in a united dance of opposites out of which comes a human life separate from the two that gave it birth but incorporating features of both in such a way that it is recognizable at a glance that so and so is really product of so and so. The growth of that life depends on some cells dying and others being born (54).”
Rewrite of Quote:
drama is clo/ser to the dialectics
of life than poetry/nd/ d fiction/
life is movement risin from d inherent contradiction nd unity of opposites/
man and woman
meet in a united dance of opposites/ out of which comes
a human life separate/
from d two that gave it birth/ but incorporating features of both/
in such a way that it is/ recognizable/
at a glance/
that so and so is really product of so and so
d growth of that life depends on som cells dying/ nd others being born
Rewriting the excerpt for Ngugi’s The Language in African Theatre was liberating. Breaking away from the structure of prose into a text that is more fluid deepened my understanding of the text. I created spaces of silence, so that as I read the text I could reflect on the words for a longer period of time. Using paragraph breaks at “/out of which comes” into “a human life” emphasized the literal meaning of the text. I could show how life would emerge on paper and through this the natural emergence of humans. Using slashes broke apart ideas that would normally be hard to digest. They also gave additionally pauses.
A change that I appreciate most is the shortening or contracting of words. I change the to “d.” I changed and to “nd” while also cutting off some letters to sharpen the intake and pronunciation of the words to give the reading beats that are easy to land on. It feels pleasant to drop those letters. It’s like getting rid of dead weight, like jumping into freedom and an alternative way of being. I also changed the visually display of the words to a form that could help me see how the author’s ideas spilled into and out of each other.
Moreover, Ngugi’s “The Language of African Theatre,” echoes many of Fanon’s gender sentiments in the chapter “Algeria Unveiled” of his A Dying Colonialism. Fanon says “This is why we must watch the parallel progress of this man and this woman, of this couple that brings death to the enemy, life to the revolution (57).”
His words provide a distinct way of organizing the ideas in the Ngugi quote . Man and woman running parallel to each other is similar to the way their dance is a dance of opposites. And the theme of life that emerges from two opposite individuals is consistent. Fanon highlights the differences between man and woman by touching on their societal roles, but the movement between the two – the curving, diving, shifting, spinning – shows the dynamic conversation that happens between to humans before birth.
At the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s “Caribbean Feminism on a Page series: Edwidge Danticat In Conversation With Victoria Brown” the conversation was grounded in what feminism meant for each of the authors. More specifically, Caribbean Feminism. From that I made a realization that even in a Feminism that is as specific as Caribbean Feminism, as it should be,there are various approaches, experiences and additives that goes along with saying and living one’s “Caribbean Feminism” because each individual experience.
Edwidge Danticat highlighted and defined the importance of what she called “Homegrown Feminism”, which is/are the feminism(s) that is/are curated to one’s experiences. The necessity to differentiate theorizing and experiencing Feminism(s) is rooted in mapping Caribbean Women’s existence, which Brown and Danticat exemplified through their writing. Though they are both women from the region known as the Caribbean, Danticat from Haiti and Brown from Trinidad, they have experienced subjugation and objectification differently and they have expressed it differently, which ties back to Danticat’s point about the importance of “Homegrown Feminism”.
Language was also a very important component of the conversation, the ways in which each author translates their feminism through their writing and the inability to not translate. For example, Edwidge talked about the difficulty to translate certain phrases between Creole, English, and French, whether it is out of the impossibility or out reverence of the home or “love” language. In “Decolonizing the Mind” Thiong’o, mentions, “In my view language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner. The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.” the recognition of the power of language and its translation(s) centralized Victoria Brown’s and Edwidge Danticat’s narratives and made it accessible to the audience. Additionally, Edwidge Danticat spoke about writing in English as opposed to French and accessibility to writing in Creole, which aligns with Thiong’o’s point about using language, a tool that was used by colonizers and imperialists, to express and curate experiences and record histories.
The dual character of language as a carrier of culture and as a tool of communication allow it to be deployed for the benefit of communality and self-determination. Self-determination and communality serve as crucial points of resistance. But when located within an imperialist logic, language serves as a function of power and a as means by which the parameters of subjectivity are delineated for the colonized subject. The three integral aspects of communication outlined by Thiong’o are: its importance as a mode of creating and solidifying interrelationality through the division of labor, its usage through verbal signposts, and its function through the written word. Communication essentially creates patterns of life and produces naturalized truths about subjectivities. Colonized subjectivities are interpolated by the truths and logics of imperialism. That is, the images and conceptions of individual and collective identity are reconfigured via imperial tools that destroy “a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature” (16) while “[elevating] the language of the coloniser” (16). Thiong’o is interested in the “dissociation, divorce, [and] alienation” (17) this process ushers in. Written language became the most effective area of language domination because it created a disconnect between native student’s spoken world and their written world, creating colonial alienation.
the colonial mother protects her chld
from itself/
from itz ego/ n from itz physiology
itz biology
n itz own unhappiness whch is/
itz very essence
(from Frantz Fanon’s ‘On National Culture’ pg. 211)
This quote was emotionally difficult to read– over and over again. It was difficult to parse out its components and to make it dance and to make it move because of the brevity of the trauma it alludes to. The quote describes a total manipulation– of identity, biology, physiology, the ego, and so on. It personifies and personalizes one’s relationship to colonialism. Without apology, this relationship is coded as emotionally, spiritually, and physically abusive. The colonial mother “cares for” her child by stripping the child of its identity and context, and thus its essence. This quote is extremely powerful in its ability to communicate what the relationship is not by listing exactly what is happening inside of it.
“A strand of hair, a bit of forehead, a segment of an ‘overwhelmingly beautiful’ face glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train, may suffice to keep alive and strengthen the European’s persistence in his irrational conviction that the Algerian woman is the queen of all women” (43).
A strand of hair
a [bit] of forehead
a segment of an overwhelmingly beautiful face
overwhelmingly beautiful
glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train,
yeh you
may suffice to keep alive / strengthen / reinforce the European’s persistence / irrational conviction that the Algerian woman
the overwhelmingly beautiful you
is
the
queen of all women.
Breaking the quote into several lines emphasize the pace and flow of the train of thoughts. It begins with short observations, “A strand of hair,” “a [bit] of forehead,” a segment of an overwhelmingly beautiful face,” but then the pattern changes to no longer listing an observation but describing what about the observation, “glimpsed in a streetcar or on a train,” alerting the reader that the poem is ready to go somewhere. “yeh you” is the final scream at the reader to pay attention because the following lines are going to be quick and insightful. The next line explains the significance and violence behind the observations listed in the beginning of the poem. It does so in the longest line of the poem with slashes instead of line breaks to separate fragments in order to convey the overwhelmingness of this unraveling of thoughts. I added extra adjectives to this line because the explanation in this line is so important and I wanted the message to be clear, that the colonizer is persistent and aggressive. This is especially important since the tone in the following lines is no longer direct and straightforward.
I feel that including “the overwhelmingly beautiful you” at the end of the poem turns the poem’s observation [European’s persistence to save the Algerian women] into an action. It demonstrates the tactics they use to approach Algerian women, which is direct and flattering. The Algerian is saying “the overwhelmingly beautiful you / is / the / queen of all women,” who wouldn’t want to join a movement that declares this conviction? It seems that Shange uses the rhetorical “you” in her pieces to do just this. It is a powerful tool to “show and not just tell” her point. By including “yeh you” towards the middle of the poem catches the reader off guard, insinuating that, “while you might not realize it right away, but I am talking about you, this is about you”, referring to the descriptors the poem begins with and what the poem is about.
the re-al language of humankind/ the language of struggle
it is the universoul language
underlying all speech & words of our history.
struggle. struggle/
makes history. struggle/
makes us. in struggle/
is our history/ our language & our being.
struggle begins wherever we are
in whatever we do/ then
we become part of those millions
whom martin carter once saw
sleeping not to dream
but
dreaming to change the world.
Rewriting Ngugi’s final passage in “The Quest for Relevance” allowed me to reinterpret and add meaning to a passage that had already challenged me as it was written in its original prose. Using more space enabled me to draw attention to words and phrases Ngugi repeats, most notably the word “struggle”. While this repetition is apparent in the prose, allowing the word to spread over three lines rather than one and form a sort of shape instead of remain within a straight line forces recognition of the word and its significance in the text. Separating the prefix “re” from words that imply “again” as well as from those that do not (i.e. “real”) inspired new thoughts about the ways “realness” is formed by continuities and cycles, particularly in terms of what Ngugi expresses about the nature of language, culture, and struggle. I deliberately uncapitalized most words, but was not sure of whether or not to capitalize “Africa” which led me to consider Shange’s capitalization choices and their implications.
we therefore learnt to value words
for their meaning/nuances
“language” waz not a mere string of words/it haz a suggestive power
well beyond the immediate n lexical meaning
our appreciation of the suggestive/magical power of language waz reinforced
by the games we played w words
through riddles/proverbs/transpositions of syllables
or through (nonsensical but) musically arranged
words
So we learnt the music of our language on top of
the “content” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 11)
Language ought to be nourishing. The shadows of its content feed the memories of a people’s history; its rhythm underscores the music behind morals and symbols. When I think of Shange’s writing, I imagine language that is nourishing through its movement and musicality. In this quote from Ngugi’s Decolonizing the Mind, he writes of the necessity of music/the magic of nuance. Without either, language sits undercooked and static. I felt inspired to re-arrange this passage in the style of Shange because I think the subject resonates with the heart of her writing—language that is good for the mouth, the body and the soul.
I wrote out my interpretation while listening to Charles Mingus’s “Mode D—Trio and Group Dancers”. The rhythm of the piece changes gradually, but sometimes swiftly. Its company helped me imagine when Shange might leave space for a gesture at the end of a phrase. I wanted “words” to be the only word to have its own line. Rhythmically, it felt like a place for a gesture/to exhale. What are “words” (nourishing words) but gestures that symbolize what we value/where we come from/how we want to be remembered?
The original quote reads, “Language was not…It had…” I left the “was” (implicitly) past tense, but changed the “had” to reflect the present. I’d imagine that language was never just “content” for Shange; but language is alive, and has/has always had the “suggestive power” that nourishes a particular experience of culture and history in its vital rejection of colonialist language/narrative.
Later in the chapter “The Language of African Literature”, Ngugi writes, “Learning, for a colonial child, became a cerebral activity and not an emotionally felt experience” (17). This brings to mind a quote from If I can Cook: “Speaking American ain’t necessarily nourishing.” Shange makes her words dance in the spirit of protest. Like Ngugi describes, Shange plays games with the structure and rhythm of language—leaving the audience with food for thought. What is good for the body/what heals the body is a language that rejects colonialist English, and relies on intuition/the sensical nonsensical/the music “on top of the content”. This is a language that nourishes history and culture.
“Decolonizing the Mind,” N’gugi wa Thiongo (p. 23).
Throughout the text Thiong’o reflects on how language can define an individual and their culture. He outlines how writers have grappled with the question of which language they should use and what that choice says about them. It is important that Thiong’o makes it clear that African languages are still thriving and how speaking in one’s native tongue does not prevent one from “belonging to a larger national or continental geography,” (23). Speaking in one’s native tongue is also an act of defiance against imperialism. He continues to say that even when the peasantry and working class were forced to speak imperialist languages they creolized them to fit their own needs. African languages, despite being made second to imperialist languages, have managed to survive and continue to play a role in maintaining African cultures.
I found it difficult to break up the prose in a way that added to the meaning of the text instead of merely fragmenting the lines. I attempted to highlight the determination of African cultures to resist colonialist culture through language. The exercise made me think about what the pauses and breaths in poetry actually do to the consumption of the text. I also found that transforming some of the words into black vernacular did not skew the meaning or the integrity of the text as I thought it might. Using “wud” instead of “would” did not make the text seems any less intelligent or poignant. Overall I found that the task of transforming the prose into Shange style poetry made the text almost easier to digest. Without periods or commas the words all seem to flow together without hesitation or clear stops.
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.
