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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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My top five quotes from Shange’s works

by Renee Charlow 0 Comments

My top five quotes from Shange’s works

Peace 002

 

5) From Lost in Language and Sound

“now that i am writing abt my own work/ I am finally finding some use for the appraisals of strangers. One new york critic had accused me of being too self-conscious of being a writer/ the other from the midwest had asserted that I waz so involved with the deconstruction of the English language/ that my writing approached verbal gymnastics like unto a reverse minstrel show.”

 

I found this statement  very entertaining yet curious.  She admitted during one of our lunchtime visits, it was supposed to be an insult.   Verbal gymnastics like undo a reverse minstrel show.   What was he saying?  Was it difficult?   Did he find  the writing distracting?  Or was the work delightful?  I admire the audacity Ms. Shange demonstrates here.  She does not need the approval of strangers, theatre critics and others who come in contact wither work.   She is different; she is an enigma, she de/constructs the English language with her lower case writing, thought provoking dialogue and slashes… on purpose.  She breaks all the rules and is proud to do so.

 

#4 from Ellington was not a Street

our house was filled with all kinda folks

our windows were not cement or steel

our doors opened like our daddy’s arms

held us safe & loved

children growing in the company of men

old southern men & young slick ones

sonny til was not a boy

the clovers no rag-tag orphans

our crooners/we belonged to a whole world

nkrumah was no foreigner

virgil akins was not the only fighter

 

This poem reminds me of being an onlooker during an evening of luminaries during the Harlem Renaissance. In the book Ellington was not a Street, its told from the perspective of a young precocious girl, listening and learning.   The doors of her home were always open for visitors, and the home sounded like a place where people of color could frequent safely.  Ntozake shared with me that her father actually knew these luminaries.  You see, they would stay at her family home because they could not check into hotels.  Her father Dr. Paul T. Williams was the ring doctor for boxer Virgil Akins, he knew Duke Ellington because he loved music, he knew Sonny Til who was the lead singer for the Orioles , and her father attended Lincoln University with   Ghana Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah.  Now, isn’t that a global who’s who for the young Ntozake to find sitting at her dinner table.   These are memories she holds close to her heart and have molded and shaped her into the woman we admire today.

treble

#3 from loosening strings or give me an ‘A’

“yes/I listened to country joe and the fish/

yes/I howled with steppenwolf/

yes/fleetwood mac was my epiphany/

& creedance clearwater revival

swept me neath the waters/

hendrix my national anthem/always

yes blind lemon Jefferson & b.b. huddle

by my stage door/yes chuck berry lives next to me/

yes

eric clapton made me wanna have a child named layla/

yes

I selected this section of the poem because it allowed me to look at yet another side of this woman I know as Zake.  For me that represents that high energy rock and roll side of Ntozake, and picture her  during her young adult days.  This young wordsmith who was forging words into poetry, forging words into plays, was looking around  society,  living in her world, and making her observations her muse.   During those days I can image this quick talking, quick moving ,  pretty young woman, who hung out in coffee shops and wrote, hung out at rock concerts and wrote, and hung out at the Public Theatre and wrote.

 

#2 from Liliane

“But your girls have to realize the freedom you wage your most serious battle for is your very own mind.  No white man on this earth has the power or the right for that matter to control a single inch of your brain. Your minds, girls are the first battlefields for freedom.  You understand me.”

These were the words from S. Bliss Lincoln the mother of Liliane’s. She and her best friend Roxie were in  best friend from Biloxi Mississippi.  The girls and their families were hosting a Legal Defense Fund party/fundraiser.  These type groups were prominent in the deep South during the 1960’s long before the days of political Super Pacs.  Just as the fundraiser got into full swing, the party goers were paid an unexpected visit from the Klu Klux Klan.

 

 

#1-from For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf

“I fell into numbness

Till the only tree I cd see

Took me up in her branches

Held ,e in the breeze

Made me dawn dew

The chill at daybreak

The sun wrapped me up swinging rose light everywhere

The sky laid over me like a million men

I waz cold/I was burin up/ a child

& endlessly weaving garments from the moon

With my tears

I found God in myself and I loved her.  I loved her fiercely”

 

For many years I had a distant relationship with God.  As I grew up, I was force fed a steady diet of Christianity, white Jesus and how everything I said, watched and thought would eventually send me to Hell. I took what would be called today verbal and physical abuse because my parents were firm believers in that Bible passage “spare the rod, spoil the child.”   I remember one day in church a girl, who happened to be about 6 years older than me, was made to apologize to the church because she was an unwed mother. The boy who impregnated her was nowhere to be seen, but she was publically humiliated.   I was only 10 years old,  but even then I knew there has to be more to God than this.

About 8 years ago I found a spiritual home (Unity Churches) where all judgment about life is suspended, and all are welcomed with open arms.  As I attended the leadership classes and the membership classes I finally joined the church.  It was then experienced what this poem speaks of and I realized that I had found what I had been looking for so diligently for my entire life…. God in myself.

Unity-CoP-Logo (1)

Revelations on Carnal Intellectuality

by Nadia 1 Comment

Shange’s visit gave me to the opportunity to ask her questions and connect the dots between ideas I have been developing throughout the semester. I was able to address issues I have been struggling with in my previous blog posts. These issues included questions Professor Hall and Tiana had in response to my blog post “Dance: as a means of survival and a revelation of truth” which was a response to Clarke’s blog post “Sweat, Truth and Survival.”  They asked,

“What kinds of truth does the body contain that aren’t as accessible in other ways?”

&

“What  does truth mean (in my, Clarke or Shange’s  writing)?”

I wrote my previous blog post in an attempt to understand why and how dance is so central to Shange’s work as a writer. I started to gain a greater understanding of Shange’s idea of truth when I asked her what the relationship was between dancing and cooking. I noted that she writes about cooking in From Okra To Greens as a mode for survival and self-preservation in a similar way to which she writes about dance in her other works.

I particularly observed this in the way in which she talks about cooking in “From Okra to Greens / A Different Love Poem / We Need a Change.” In  this poem she writes:

i lived in her kitchen/ wit greens i cd recollect

yes the very root of  myself

In response to my question, Shange said that cooking and dance are connected to her because both allow her to participate in a tradition of people of color that has existed for centuries and therefore, allows her to feel connected to people of color throughout time and throughout the world.

I began to understand the centrality of dance as I marveled at how dance, for Shange, cannot be separated from anything else in her life. Even in her discussion about cooking she mentioned that she dances in the kitchen while cooking. For Shange, the completion of a thought cannot be expressed in words, but rather is completed with a gesture. While writing, she dances in her seat to the tapping of the keys or to the rhythm of the music she is listening to. Shange’s response reminded me of her concept of carnal intellectuality which is a way of knowing that can only be processed, understood, and expressed through the body. Therefore, truth for Shange may have less to do with what is said, but rather what is felt and experienced.

movement and memories in the archival effort

by Melissa 1 Comment

When we defined the archive as a space wherein materials could be preserved for their enduring value, I wondered how the imagination and vitality of literature as it is produced in the human body, spoken language, and patterns of sociality could be preserved in its full essence. For me, the question arose: what is the function of the archive and how does it mirror, encompass, and fall short of the world-making possibilities offered by literature?

I have been thinking about literature as an expansive concept, one that transcends linguistic bounds and regulations. I have also been conceptualizing literature per Shange’s notion of carnal intellectuality, whereby stories and histories are articulated and constantly re-formed via the body’s motions in concert with human imagination. Memories for example, are part of a reproductive effort by the body, and can lend themselves to the archival process.

In literature, I find that there are endless possibilities for struggle against normativity and linearity in our narratives. The fragmented pieces of history take shape in the imaginative realm of literature, allowing for the reconfiguration of our realities and conceptions of self. How then is the archival effort able to encompass literature, and its malleable impulses? Only in thinking of the archive as functioning within the body through motions such as carnal intellectuality, am I able to understand the ways in which language, movement, and the imagination produce archival knowledge.

Shange’s work brings attention to the ways in which the Black woman’s body is shaped by the labor of the archival effort. I found a clip of Ntozake Shange reading from a piece titled “What Does it Mean That Black Folks Can Dance”. The poem conveys the notion of the moving body as a carrier of knowledge, collective sorrows/joys, and the memories that make up Black historical narratives. Here, dance is “how we remember what cannot be said”. The body takes up motion and mobility to recall, to create, and to transcend.

crooked woman/okra meets greens in strange circumstances
the woman dont stand up
straight
aint never stood up
straight/ always bent
some which a way
crooked turned abt
slanted sorta toward a shadow of herself

looking further into Felipe Luciano’s “Jíbaro, My Pretty Nigger”

by Sophia 1 Comment

“There’s a move to divide us. It’s being done by Afro-saxons and coconuts. People who would have us believe that there’s a separate gulf between two nations: Black and Latino. This is not the poem, y’all. I’m telling you there’s no difference between Buford, South Carolina and Ponce, Puerto Rico…Mambo is Black, merengue is Black, R&B is Black, joropo is Black, flamenco is Black, guaguanco is Black, bomba is Black, be careful. They will come to you and say be careful with those hoards of Spanish people. Fuck them.”

Felipe Luciano opens his appearance on Def Jam in this way. Audience members cheer as though the poem has already begun before he tells them that he’s just going off. In “To Make a Poet Black,” Wilkinson concludes that Luciano’s place in the Black Arts Movement “should serve less to conceal cultural nuances, but work more to convey a cultural milieu in which poetry by African Americans and Puerto Ricans shared a communal residence” (330). Whether or not this statement applies to his self-image and artistic mission is obviously impossible to glean without consulting him, but judging by this performance, he seems to be acting first and apologizing later –making a radical point by saying that Black and Latino cultures ought not to be divided or even nuanced, but are one and the same.

I speak only intermediate-level Spanish, but for those who don’t at all, I’ve translated his first four lines:

“Jíbaro, mi negro lindo
De los bosques de caña
Caciques de luz
Tiempo es una cosa cómica.”

Jíbaro, my pretty negro
From the cane forests
Chiefs of light
Time is a funny thing

Read about the modern connotations of “jíbaro” here

As was briefly discussed in “To Make a Poet Black,” the poem is about the Black/Puerto Rican/Nuyorican experience as single, fluid, and inclusive. The use of “jíbaro” and “nigger” as relatively interchangeable or at least cohabitating terms suggests a cultural history and relationship so familial that each group is permitted to reappropriate the other’s slurs.
The majority of the poem reminisces about a decolonized state, so outside the realm of present possibility that most of it takes place in the womb of a universal mother. The images he uses are commonly resonant: one set of “mother” and “father,” shared “ancient empires” that have since been lost, “thoughts of freedom,” interchangeable use of “black” and “brown,” “the foul bowels of the ship/That vomited you up on the harbors of a cold metal city to die,” referencing both the colonization of Puerto Rico and The Middle Passage.

It ends with an ardent demand for community, addressing the division Luciano mentions in his preface to the reading, in which everyone ought to live in fear and division, being “careful” of each other –which really translates to “Fuck them.”

Jíbaro, did you know you my nigga?
I love the curve of your brow,
The slant of your baby’s eyes
The calves of your woman dancing;
I dig you!

You can’t hide.
I ride with you on subways.
I touch shoulders with you in dances.
I make crazy love to your daughter.
yea, you my cold nigga man.
And I love you ’cause you’re mine.

And I’ll never let you go.
And I’ll never let you go.
(You mine, nigga!)
And I’ll never let you go.
Forget about self.
We’re together now.
And I’ll never let you go!
Uh’uh
Never, Nigga.

The descriptions of collective love with terms typically reserved for romantic love are particularly effective. I love the use of “baby’s eyes,” as it could be interpreted to literally refer to the subject’s child as well as the image of the subject as pure love-object. The self/other line becomes very blurred (very directly!), as Luciano begs the reader to “Forget about self./ We’re together now.”

“Her Sisters Cooked & She Made Spells”: Reflections on meeting Shange

by Amanda 2 Comments

I am really grateful for having the opportunity to meet Shange in such an intimate setting. I think the most stimulating of many pleasant moments were hearing Shange talk about the thoughts and stories behind the creation of some of her major works, realizing she literally lives a choreopoem, and getting to speak to her about i live in music.

I titled this post after the words Shange used to encapsulate her novel Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo. The simplicity of her synopsis lends to the idea that explication isn’t always necessary—a point that I think is central to Shange’s work. Although the statement is simple and accessible, it also proves complex and in need of dissection. Cooking and making spells are two sides of the same creative coin. While her sisters cook, Indigo makes spells—collectively their crafts render them creators, historians, and even personal archivists.

In thinking of the class’ discussion on the significance of women of color telling and recording their own stories, I am inclined to consider the way Shange communicated throughout the class meeting. While speaking, Shange often tapped her foot on the floor to a rhythm that was in conversation with the swaying of her arms. At some point, I realized that I was listening out for these taps. Not merely out of curiosity, but rather out of necessity. Her stomping music and dancing arms served as means for me to grasp her thoughts, completely. They functioned as beginning, ending, and accent of her ideas. Her life truly is choreopoem in practice.

At the dinner’s conclusion I spoke with Shange about her poem, i live in music and asked about the motivation behind it. Not only did Shange recount that the poem’s creation was an improvisational act—the result of having a band cancel their performance last minute during a radio show she was hosting (?)—she also explained that the line “I got 15 trumpets where other women got hips”—a line that I had to inquire about because of its particular importance to me—came out of the genuine and literal desire to have 15 trumpets playing during her show. The line also spoke to the functionality of horns, like trumpets, as tools for heralding things and people of great importance. Furthering this idea, Shange spoke to the horn and trumpet being analogy to women as heralds of the miraculous—the creation of art and life, for example.

 

This is a short playlist of some of the songs that got me over hurdles while writing this post. Hope you enjoy!

Combat Poetry/ Creating A Multilingual Narrative

by Danielle 1 Comment

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

Glissant’s Linguistic Analysis + Movement

by Melissa 1 Comment

Part of the struggle against a single-axis cultural and historical narrative lies in the contestation of power via language, or the creation of a new language marked by struggle against hegemonic paradigms of knowledge and subjectivity. Glissant asserts that a national literature, borne of the “urge for each group to assert itself” (Glissant 99), is an enactment of this struggle. A community goes in search of itself and its subjectivity by creating a literature that gives voice to its beliefs, its memories, its pains etc. In this literature, a new language emerges from the colliding forces of orality – which are, in the case of the Caribbean, found in the phonetics of resistance found in Creole – and the written forms of European languages. Glissant acknowledges a “forced poetics” faced by the Caribbean speaker (specifically by the Martinican) in encountering the tension between French and Creole.

Glissant defines the basis of Creole’s orality as located in the body. Creole mobilizes the body’s reproductive functions that allow African traditions to persist and reappear in the context of the Western Hemisphere, where they are perpetually carried in the body and consciousness of the Caribbean speaker. This logic of reproduction imbues the Black Caribbean body with the power of resistance, which is deployed in the making of national literature. Describing the nature of Creole as conceptual, Glissant is able to illustrate the ways in which linguistic orality is and does as music, in that it embodies collective resistance and is carried across temporal and corporeal bounds. Glissant’s explanations offer insight into the workings of the literary impulse as an alternative to the fragmentation and chaos of Black subjectivities. In giving voice to these suppressed and undermined subjectivities, literature creates the conditions for the persistence and expansion of Black expression.
“Shange’s multilingual poetry puts languages in Relation in order to encourage people to connect in the transnational web of Relation that Glissant envisions.” (Spyra 793). Ntozake Shange produces a national literature that transcends borders by linking languages in the Western Hemisphere. Shange’s work, specifically the choreopoem, is described as “‘an ancient African form’ enriched with influences from European experimental theater and dance” (786). This allows us to view the body and its movements as an extension of language and literature. Thus in Shange’s work we not only see the body reproducing timeless resistance through spoken and language, but also enacting forced poetics in its breath and movement. There is a continuous link then, between knowledge, language, and corporeality.

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

BAM, Multiculturalism & the “Languages” of Ntozake Shange

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Black, white Chicana/o, and Asian American artists within the avant-garde theater movement shared similar interests in popular theatrical forms, particularly satire and farce, as well as nonnaturalist and often non -European dramatic norms that emphasized gesture, ritual and spectacle over plot and character development– Edward Smethurst “Bandung World . . .” 264

Well, this has been quite a week! I heard that the Friday session was quite exciting. Thanks again to Tiana and

Richard Wright’s essays reporting on the 1955 Bandung Conference: “They were getting a new sense of themselves, getting used to new roles and new identities.”

Sydnie for leading the group whike I was across the street talking about race and the seventeenth century stage. When I put together the syllabus, I had grouped several BAM-linked phenomena through the rubric “Decolonization,” perhaps because when I was writing it, I was thinking about how the decolonization movements of the 50s, particularly the 1955 Bandung Conference, an Afro-Asian conference of 29 African and Asian nations that excluded the Western powers, set the stage for the Black Power Movement and other liberation movements.

Shange & New Archival Practices

by Clarke 1 Comment

Our introduction to Shange’s Archives allowed me to theorize archival space and the process of archiving in new ways. Since our session, I have been pondering the significance of Shange’s collection — what makes the archive of a living, black woman, and Barnard alumna, so significant and distinct?

In pondering this question, I was struck by Shannon Miller’s account of the history of archival work and the etymology of the word “archive” from the Greek “arkhe” meaning “magistracy, office, government”. There is a historic relationship between the traditional practice of archiving and maintaining governance and control of access to information. Understanding this relationship is integral to recognizing the unique space and place of the Shange collection.