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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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The Daughter Identity

by Nadia 4 Comments

WGSBSFor the past few weeks, I have been thinking about the concept of being a daughter and how that is a motif in Shange’s work. My understanding of the saliency of (what I call) “daughtership” was further developed through my reading of Sassafrass, Cyprus and Indigo and during the Africana Department event “Who’s Going to Sing A Black Girl’s Song?” A Conversation on Black Girlhood with distinguished Africana alumnae Asali Solomon ‘95  and Alexis Pauline Gumbs ‘04.

At the event on Black Girlhood, I asked the alumnae about the connotations the word daughter has. They said daughter denotes duty, great gifts, a claim a
nd aspirational dreams that are given to them by their mothers. These terms Asali and Alexis used are relevant to daughters Sassafrass, Cyprus and Indigo. They all have the duties. Indigo put away childish things, like her dolls, to step into womanhood and Cyprus and Sassafrass have to attract particular kinds of men as future husbands.  They each have unique gifts as musicians, dancers and weavers and they all have to negotiate their mother’s aspirations for their lives and futures.

As I reflected back on each of the daughters’ their relationships with their mother, I realized that much of the mother-daughter relationship is dictated by their relationships to men. Hilda Effania’s letters to her daughters often include advice and warnings about men. Also, when one of the daughters gifts her mother with sexy lingerie, Hilda Effania comments on how their father would have come home more often if she owned this article of clothing.

In thinking about the role of men in mother-daughter relationships, Cypress’ dream made me wonder what mother-daughter relationships would look like if men did not exist – in a world where “there were only Mothers and Daughters” (185). I wonder if the fixation on men in mother-daughter relationships has anything to do with mother’s teaching their daughters about how to navigate relationships with men for their own survival and out of a desire to protect their daughters.

This brings me to a concept which I learned of at the Black Girlhood event which is idea of “mothering oneself” as well as daughters mothering their mothers. As each of the daughters in the novel enter womanhood, they begin to mother themselves through self-nurturing and self-care, especially when their actions and beliefs are contrary to those of their mother’s desire for them. While negotiating the limitations of the mothering their own mothers can provide as they become their own woman in the coming of age process, Sassafrass, Cyprus and Indigo being to take on the role of a mother in addition to that of a daughter as they care for themselves and as they look to have daughters of their own.

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The Personal Is The Political

by Nadia 1 Comment

In my Black Scholar readings and my trip to the Schomburg, I was confronted with the message that the personal is the political. The Black Sexism Debate states,

“We cannot solve our “personal” problems individually, nor by pretending they are not real. What is required is a collective struggle to change the social conditions that create so many “personal” and social problems.”

In thinking about my final project, I have been interested in mental health and mental illness in communities of color and how it is dealt with both individually and collectively. During the Schomburg visit, I came across an article written by Vanessa Northington Gamble which referenced mental health issues in the black community. For Gamble, her “personal” issues battling depression are political. When she was having difficulties at her job due to her depression  she said, “I believed that my performance [work] represented not that of an individual, but that of a race.” This illustrates how mental health issues are political issues in communities of color because individual experiences get generalized to be representative of the whole race. As Gamble also writes about her mother’s suicide attempts and thus, her subsequent struggle with depression, there seems to be the idea that mental health issues are in some way generational and/or genetic.

Gamble's article from the Schomburg archives

Gamble’s article from the Schomburg archives

Gamble invokes bell hooks in arguing that the personal is political. When Gamble wanted to start writing about her battle with depression, her colleague criticized her for: “wanting to put her business out on the street.” However, she counters this by emphasizing that voicing our personal struggles is key to liberation. Gamble says,

“Telling our stories, hooks insists, is a crucial strategy for the self-recovery of black women because it allows us to acknowledge our pain, reach out for solace and find ways of healing. There is no healing in silence… hooks views personal transformation through a political lens. She sees self-hate, low self-esteem, and addiction disorders as reflections of a political system that devalues the lives of black people… Personal recovery, hooks argues, must go hand in hand with political struggles, because no level of individual self-actualization alone can sustain the marginalized and oppressed. We must be linked to collective struggle, to communities of resistance that move us outwards, into the world.”

In my readings and encounters with archival material, I was struck by how the two were in conversation with each other. It is my hope that through my final project that I can bring Shange’s experience and that of other black female artists’ to the forefront so that other women of color can be empowered with the knowledge that their “personal” is political.

Shange’s Sentimental Fiction(s), Healing: The Public vs The Private

by Dania 0 Comments

Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo can be described as a Sentimental Fiction, a word that was used by Rafael Vicente whilst in conversation about his work  “White Love: Census and Melodrama in the U.S. Colonizationof the Philippines” and “Colonial Domesticity: Engendering Race at the Edge of Empire, 1899-1912,” which Vicente framed as fictional work that is very political in that it intentionally uses its plot, its characters, its location to convey and represent structures of power within specific context. And thus does critically and analytically engages the everyday life within structures that seem invisible. For example, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo focuses on the politics of black girlhood and black woman, the politics of class and the manners in which it affects black girlhood and black womanhood. The sentimental fiction higlights that personal is political. It does so by using the work of literature to tell historical and contemporary stories. It foreshadows the difficulty in compartmentalizing or differentiating the difference between the real and the imaginative. And Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo does that. As Indigo transitions or realizes her “womanhood”, “Indigo stood by the door watching this bloodletting. Silent. Pretty Man surveyed the situation. Put the evilest eye he could gather up on Indigo, who startled under the power of his gaze. That was all it took. The men slowly came back to themselves. Looked Puzzled” (38), there is an interruption, an unwanted interruption that, that enables and forces Indigo to see her womanhood in the way that her mother describe. Manhood, steps in and gawk at blackgirlhood, and the black girl is forced to see her womanhood, in the midst of her girlhood, an interpellation.

In addition to speaking to the interpellation of black girlhood to womanhood, Shange touches on the politics of seeking healing and resolution within the public versus private In Indigo’s personal spell “To rid oneself of the scent of evil”, the spell is very individualize, which is a very radical and non-binary way of think of healing. With the personal, the phrase that states “Violence or purposeful revenge should not be considered in most cases. Only during wars of national liberation, to restore the honor of the race, or to redress calamitous personal & familial trauma, may we consider brute force/annihilation”, following the spell makes a clear distinction about how-whether violence should be used, in the defense of the race publicly- matter of the community should be addressed. Which leads me to question to efficacy of having a divide between the public and the private when black girlhood and womanhood is jeopardized?

 

Songs I was listening as read this week’s reading:

Nina Simone- My Father

Nina Simone- I shall be released

Nina Simone- Blackbird (cover)

 

 

A Recipe & Letter of Love

by Danielle 1 Comment

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

1 duck, 5-7 pounds, cleaned & seasoned                        1 medium onion, chopped

1 pan cornbread                                                                   1 teaspoon paprika

2 tablespoons butter                                                           1 ground red pepper pod

1/2 cup celery, chopped                                                      1 dozen oysters (medium)

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.

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Throughout reading the novel, I listened to Martha Reeves & The Vandellas album Dancing in the Street, and I thought I’d share my favorite song!

photo/audio essays on Santería and Gullah/Geechee culture

by Sophia 3 Comments

Audio: Sacred Rhythms of Cuban Santería
produced by Olavo Alén Rodríguez (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1995), 1 hour

On Contemporary Cuban Practice of Santería
Photographed and captioned by Phil Clarke Hill

 

Shadows of the Gullah Geechee
Photographed by Pete Marovich
Captioned by Jordan G. Teicher

Outsiders: Uncle John’s Wisdom

by Nicole 2 Comments

“Them whites what owned slaves took everythin’ was ourselves & didn’t even keep it fo’ they own selves. Just threw it on away, ya heah. Took the drums what they could, but they couldn’t take our feet. Took them languages what we speak…But the fiddle was the talkin’ one. The fiddle be callin’ our gods what left us/be givin’ back some devilment & hope in our bodies worn down & lonely over these fields & kitchens. Why white folks so dumb, they was thinkin’ that if we didn’t have nothin’ of our own, they could come controllin’, meddlin’, whippin’ our sense on outta us. But the Colored smart, ya see. The Colored got some wits to em, you & me, we ain’t the onliest ones be talkin’ wit the unreal. What ya think music is, whatchu think the blues be, & them get happy church musics is about, but talkin’ with the unreal what’s mo’ real than most folks ever gonna know.”

(Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, pg. 22-23).

I find that often in literature the people who are outcasts and considered outside of society’s bounds are the most insightful. It is interesting that Indigo has the most thoughtful and honest conversation with an adult who is somewhat outside of the community because he is eccentric and lives outdoors. Uncle John is able to speak freely to Indigo despite her age because he separated from normal society. He is honest with Indigo about what it means that black people must take advantage of other modes of communication and expression. Indigo’s mother adores her and does her best to protect her but she wants to shelter her child instead of providing her with the necessary truths to prepare her for black womanhood. Not treating Indigo like a young adult is her mother’s way of protecting her and being a good parent. Unlike her mother, Uncle John does not feel the need to shelter Indigo. Uncle John is characterized as being “off” and does not subscribe to the unwritten rules of keeping children naive, so he sees no fault in educating Indigo on the history of her people.

The presence of white people in this passage, and in this book as a whole, is extremely different from the Shange works that we have read so far. In for colored girls, white people are not present nor seem to be of much importance. Of course, the systems that oppress the black women in the choreopoem are sometimes the result of a white presence, but in her manual for young black women how to deal with a white presence is not the goal. Instead she focuses on the relationships of black women with black men, other black women and self exploration. In Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo there is discussion about how black people must live their lives in response to the presence of white people around them. In this passage Uncle John schools Indigo on the mistakes slave masters maid when trying to subdue the spirits and cultures of black slaves. He does not conceal his contempt and disapproval of white people and their actions towards black people, in a way that we have yet not seen Shange of her characters refer to white people.

studying shange: student interviews

by Nia 1 Comment

In the next couple of weeks, I would like to explore how/why we are”studying shange.” Instead of talking about potential projects (which I am still open to do) we will discuss how students are experiencing this class and reading Shange with “carnal intellectuality” in mind. Students may group together to be interviewed (this is highly encouraged amongst students who read Shange together). The interviews will also attempt to incorporate Shange’s methods into the format. Be prepared to experiment.

Sign Up!

Original “studying shange” post

the slaves who were ourselves / the children who will have my dolls

by Michelle 2 Comments

Black girl magic is prevalent throughout sassafrass, cypress, & indigo in many different forms, perhaps the most straightforward are Indigo’s literal spells she writes for self-preservation and dream catching. She particularly draws on the power of her ancestor’s who were women.

When Indigo first started her menses, her mother sent her to the Pharmacy. In her mission to buy Kotex from the Pharmacy, Indigo experienced sexual violence by Mr. Lucas and had to quickly run home to engineer a spell that would rid herself of the evil.

TO RID ONESELF OF THE SCENT OF EVIL*

by Indigo

….

Take a piece of silk or cotton to which you feel attached & that bodes of happier times. Fill it with caraway seeds. Tie it with a ribbon that is your oldest female relative’s favorite color (30).

The ritual begins with repeating the offender’s name to bring the violent moment present, waving your arms and hands around you to clean the atmosphere, drawing a bath to cleanse yourself of the evilness, and ends with floating an object that is made from something that reminds you of happier times and of your oldest female relative. In the process of washing the evilness off, Indigo is also trying to draw in goodness for healing – for her, that is through channeling the happier times sentimental objects hold and perhaps some form of power or magic her oldest female relative has.

In addition to drawing on her oldest female relative, she also brings into the present (or connects the past with the present) her ancestors who were slaves. Twice she mentions, “the slaves who were ourselves”.

The first time she says this is when Indigo first joined the Junior Geechee Captains with Spats and Crunch. She rejected the idea of adopting a new name because she liked her name. She strongly identified with her name and liked that,

“The slaves who were ourselves knew all about indigo & Indigo herself” (40).

This is a beautiful sentence that seamlessly brings together the past and the present. In the first part of the sentence, “the slaves who were ourselves”, she plays with grammatical tenses in order to convey how slavery is both historical and present within her. She continues to draw on the presentness and history within her in the second part of the sentence, “knew all about indigo & Indigo herself”. She is making connections with the origins of her name, the indigo dye, a major plantation crop in South Carolina in the 18th century, and her present self, “Indigo”.

 

Indigo uses the phrase “the slaves who were ourselves” again just as she was about to submit herself to Mabel and Prettyman for disrespecting Mabel. She thinks to herself,

“The Caverns began to moan, not with sorrow but in recognition of Indigo’s revelation. The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness” (49).

In this moment, Indigo decides not to run away from Mabel and Prettyman and instead listen to her ancestors. She did not want to hurt Prettyman and Mabel; there were no malicious feelings between them, there was just a difference in interest between Indigo and Mabel and Prettyman. She realized this confusion through thinking about her ancestor’s confusions and thereby again, bridging the past and the present, paying homage to her ancestors who have done this before.

The first time Indigo thinks about younger generations rather than older generations is when she decides to put her dolls away in order to protect their youth. She decides that she would save the dolls for her daughters and her mother,

Hilda Effania couldn’t agree more with Indigo’s familial fervor. After all, she was devoted to her daughters. Now, Indigo, all of 12, was saving her more treasured possessions for the daughters to come (53).

In this scene, Hilda Effania is particularly proud that her daughter is already thinking about her own daughter in the future. This scene affirms the priorities and powers in passing things down intergenerationally. Shange includes a moment where the present is working towards passing down rather than just receiving from generations before.

As I was reading sassafrass, cypress, and indigo this past week, I was also catching up with the show, “Jane the Virgin”. Reading and watching this book and show side-by-side overwhelmed my heart with content on intergenerational love, mother-daughter relationships, support and love between women of color, etc. The show follows a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter working together to achieve their individual goals and overcome their individual problems. Jane (the daughter), just had a baby, and she problem solves heavily with her mother and grandmother on taking care of the child. In the scene below, Jane is delivering a Christening speech for her baby that was written by her grandmother and read during both her’s and her mother’s christenings.

“We Need To Talk About This Christening Speech From “Jane The Virgin””, Buzzfeed

“17 Times Jane the Virgin Filled Your Heart to the Brim”, Buzzfeed

Black Girls are Magic: Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo

by Nia 0 Comments

I’m never been more confident in identifying as a) witch b) blessed c) magical than I do after reading Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo. 

Black Girls are Magic.

Cooking, nurturing others is magic. Women gathering together is magical. Women loving and supporting each other is magical. Affirming oneself is magic. Loving yourself and respecting to be loved is rare and magnificent.

Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo represent three types of magic which pervade Black women’s lives.

Sassafras embodies creation. She finds her gift early. She’s a weaver. Yet, she lets private school and the influence of her lover, Mitch devalue the worth of her craft. The men in her life try to name her magic, the magic of Black women. They try to create the Black woman that they think Sassafras is in her, and for awhile she lets them with little, sporadic protest. She keeps trying to write, though it doesn’t come naturally. She keeps trying to be their idea of the artist, their idea of the Black women. But her writing continues to explore weaving, her mother and her past. Without knowing it, Sassafras uses her writing to bring herself back to weaving, back to stereotypically feminine creation. She shows that even performing the role society expects of you is magic if done by your own choice, if done freely. She can bring beauty, generosity, and freedom into the world because she chooses to. That is magical.

Cypress embodies translation and transconfiguration. Through her body Cypress is able to speak to the past, present, and future. She is able to interpret the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly of the body. She can read people through their bodies, take in their messages and send back her own. She is able to blend the things she wants in the world through her body. She is able to reconcile the things she wants in her life that she struggles to reconcile otherwise through dance and her body’s expression. When she accepts her body for all it can do and all it cannot, she is able to utilize her magic.

Indigo embodies birth and rebirth. For a very young age it is clear Indigo can conjure and create life where there is none. Her dolls, carefully and painstakingly fashioned by her, have personalities. When she believes she’s outgrown them she lays them “to rest.” Her violin playing revives the deepest, most ancestral parts of her listeners. It evokes the pain and joy of them and all who came before them. As she ages, she uses her powers to bring “free” Black  children into the world; children who come into the world unconquered and remain so until their deaths. Her magic is what keeps Black women afloat. She can call on the spirits to protect those who live and make women honors those who have passed. Her magic is regenerative.