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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Shange and Radical Farming

by Clarke 2 Comments

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Photos from Soul Fire Farm courtesy of Afropunk and Yes Magazine

One could also say that racism is toxic, so by metaphorically refusing an all-American diet of meat and potatoes, Yvette and thousands of others refuse to swallow what will, in fact, poison them: self-hatred. (Shange 91)

Recognize that land and food have been used as a weapon to keep black people oppressed …Recognize also that land and food are essential to liberation for black people. (Curtis Hayes Muhammed via Soul Fire Farm)

In If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, Shange celebrates food and farming as a global black experience, while pointing to the disregard of black life that informs American food policy. In this way, If I Can Cook shows that decolonizing our minds goes hand in hand with decolonizing our diets. Shange’s statements evoke principles of radical farming, which emphasizes solidarity with people marginalized by food apartheid and reverence of ancestral knowledge of the land.

In fact, we knew something about the land, sensuality, rhythm, and ourselves that has continued to elude our captors (Shange 41)

Soul Fire Farm, a family farm committed to the dismantling of oppressive structures that misguide our food system, partners with Project Growth, a restorative justice program in Albany, in order to continue the literal work of “eluding our captors” via ancestral knowledge of the land and ourselves. The initiative brings convicted teenagers to the farm, both as a way for them to earn money to pay their restitution and “heal relationships with their communities, the land, and themselves.”

By understanding food as both a weapon of oppression and an essential tool for black liberation, we can more fully claim our pasts and envision radical systems today.

 

 

Black Intellectuals and Self Care

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Collage for Claudia Jones by Alexis Gumbs

Folks, I had all but forgotten to tell you that, on behalf of the class, I subscribed to the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus, an initiative by  Alexis Pauline Gumbs BC ’08. I invite you to use these meditations as we go through the rest of the year. (I will give out the password in  class). I think they are a perfect compliment to the kind of work many of you are doing.

If you went to the “Who’s going to sing a black girl’s song” event a few weeks ago, you know that Alexis is a writer, artist and intellectual whose work on black feminist intellectual history and theorizing on gender, race, sexuality and love has been provoking and elevating those of us who follow her work. In 2014, Alexis extended her summer freedom school, “The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind,” online with the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus. One thousand people followed her for 21 days as she created breathing meditations and collage art based sources of inspiration close to her. One of the things I love about her meditations is that she reminds us in how many ways the black women we’ve been reading about all semester were thinking of the world in terms we are only gaining words for now. For example, when she notes that, along with her other work, Fannie Lou Hamer was a food justice activist.

From an early email from Alexis:
This winter people around the United States have been protesting police violence by repeating the tragic last words of Eric Garner: “I can’t breathe.” Here in Durham activists have been diligently drawing attention to acts of police violence and harassment in our own community. As an act of love for a community in transformation, local artists Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace are using a technology they call “Black Feminist Breathing” to offer one strategy for how outraged, and exhausted communities can connect to a legacy of activism and build resources for their long-term spiritual, emotional and physical resilience.​

Gumbs, who has a PhD in English, African & African American Studies and Women & Gender Studies from Duke University, began “Black Feminist Breathing” as a personal resilience practice. Instead of chanting mantras from other cultures, in languages she did not know, she decided to meditate by repeating affirmations and quotations from black historical figures, from Audre Lorde and Pauli Murray, to Bayard Rustin and Harriet Tubman, who have inspired her lifelong commitment toblack feminism.

After chanting these affirmations alone in her office for a year, and sharing them at the community events that her non-traditional school, Eternal Summer of the BlackFeminist Mind, hosts around the United States, in Summer 2014 Alexis decided to share this practice online through a daily “Black Feminist Breathing Chorus” which had nearly 1000 daily participants for 21 days. For this meditation series Gumbs’s primary collaborator and life-partner Sangodare (also known as Julia Roxanne Wallace) composed original music to accompany each affirmation. Gumbs also created intricate visual remixes of iconic images of the historical figures that the meditations honored.

The Holiness of a Cookbook

by Nicole 1 Comment

While reading both Shange and Mae’s cookbooks I took time to think about the ways in which cooking is important in my family. The first thing that came to mind is the cookbook that my mother keeps which contains recipes from my grandmother and great grandmother and some of our current favorite dishes. To be honest, my mother really does not do too much cooking, my grandmother was the cook in our household until she passed away. My grandmother is no longer here to cook for us, so having a catalogue of her recipes is like preserving the memory of her existence in our household. Her recipes are proof that she did not leave us empty, but left behind ways of nourishing our bodies. This way my grandmother can continue to fill our stomachs despite her not physically being here. Now my mother’s cookbook, our cookbook, is not the same book my Nana (great-grandmother) used. My mother has updated the book itself, but the recipes on cards and sometimes scraps of paper are still the same. Shange writes that “[c]ooking is a way of insisting on living,” I also think that recipes themselves are a way our elders insist on continuing to live with us after their passing (If I Can Cook/ You Know God Can, Ntzoake Shange, 70). This is how we refuse the idea that black culture is static and was ruptured during the Middle Passage. The fact that black people can pass down recipes and see the similarities in traditional dishes among different peoples of color prove that “[w]e are not folklore,” (Shange, 32).

It resonated with me when I read that Mae does not cook with measurements and relies on the feel of things. Reading this reminded me of what I’ve seen in my own home.

And when I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I van tell by the look and smell of it. Most of the ingredients in this book are aproximate. Some of the recipes that people gave me list the amounts, but for my part, I just do it by vibration.  Different strokes for different folks. Do your thing your way. 

(Vibration Cooking, Verta Mae, xxiii)

In my family’s cooking all of the recipes from my Nana and many of those from my grandmother are without certified measurements. Many describe using a tea cup as a measure. Now, what size tea cup, I have no idea. I believe that is what Mae describes as “[d]different strokes for different folks” cooking,” (Mae, xiii). Deciding to not use measurements also makes cooking a learning experience instead of following someone else’s formula. I believe that this is how the act of cooking becomes nourishment in itself, that making your own food is akin to the magical-like home remedies in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. Not only is the food nourishing, but the process of cooking and creating on your own terms is liberating.

 

Below are some photos of recipes from my family’s cookbook:

 

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(My great grandmother’s recipe with measurements adapted by my mother)

 

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(My grandmother’s recipe)

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(My Aunt Gwen’s Recipe)

 

 

 

La conexión a la madre patria While Living (In Music)

by Yemi 0 Comments

In if I can Cook/ you KNow God can, Ntozake Shange makes reference to the experience of Brixton, London. “When the sun comes out in Brixton, a heavily West Indian working-class neighborhood, all kinda miracles comes about. Colors challenging visions… winter’s mists and rains dance up and down… the heat remind[ing] everyone of home (23).” In a later paragraph she describes the music, “our music” that would blast from the vegetable stands. The two artists she mentions are YellowMan and Youssour N’Dour.

In the process of searching for ingredients of a American type dinner, Zake and her daughter, Savannah, are thrusts into the intricacies of the Brixton market. They experience this transcontinental, transcultural refiguring through people, food, and most importantly music.

Hearing Zungguzungguguzungguzeng by King YellowMan, a Jamaican reggae DJ, completes the experience of food shopping at brixton. The simple rhythm is easy to sway to and calls upon the minds of those listening in order to bridge the now and the then.

“Seh if yuh have a paper, yuh must have a pen

And if yuh have a start, yuh must have a end…

Jump fe happiness and jump fe joy
Yuh nuh fe call Yellowman nuh bwoy…
All a dem, dem have yellow children
Some live a Kingston and dung a Maypenn”

When I researched the music of the other artist Shange mentioned, Youssour N’Dour, I was immediately struck by the song Souvenirs.

What’s perfect about the music video of this song is that the singer himself is caught in this continual moment of recollection. He’s present in the land that his body is physically in (the house/ the pool), but his mind is engaged with a distant location. He can’t shake the thoughts of this place and takes the viewer and listeners through the process of reimagining/ revisiting homeland. What I love is that this act is celebratory and demands the right to be historicized (i.e. when the singer captures a selfie with someone from his vision). That selfie breaks international bounds. Later on in the video the protagonist sings as he looks at photo albums, dvds, and other items that remind him of the place he is deeply connected to. This same process is similar to that of Ntozake when she cooks, writes recipes that call to her ancestors, and pulls the knowledge her daughter will inherit closer by exposing her to these foods.

 

* Date of this post corresponds to my music presentation in class.