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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Third World Women’s Alliance/Making Use of Digital Archives

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

First edition of Triple Jeopardy, the newspaper of the Third World Women’s Alliance

I wanted to just make a pitch to everyone to remember that  you can find primary sources in rooms beyond those designated as “archives”   cultural institutions like the Schomburg: sometimes they are in main collections or (since digitization is happening at an increasing rapid clip) online. You should be inventive and wide-ranging when looking for accessible copies of works you might want to use.  For example, following up on Michelle’s Archive Task #1, I was trying to see if there was anyplace in NYC that has papers related to the Third World Women’s Alliance.  The main branch of the NYPL (not the “archive” per se) has Triple Jeopardy, the newspaper of the TWWA, in its main collection.  However, that journal is also available online in the Independent Voices database.

Independent Voices is an open-access collection of digitized independent publications. It can be a very rich source for Black Power/”post” Black Power and Feminist materials. For example, I found several pieces by Ntozake (also spelled Ntosake) in the database.  Since some of you are interested in healing, I have a screenshot of  her talking about her work with “injured” women in an extensive interview published in the literary journal,  River Styx.

Screenshot 2015-12-05 10.56.44

Ntozake’s response to interview questions from Students at Harris-Stowe College in Saint Louis (1978). Note the use of the dash in the interview transcription.

I highly recommend this interview, Shange talks about many of the things you are investigating now: Black Power, Spirituality, Third Worldism,  Feminism, childhood, etc.  Independent Voices also suggests that you help with digitization by correcting some of the OCR (Optical-Scanning Recognition) errors.

Shange, Ntozake. “Ntozake Shange: Live from Saint Louis!” River Styx, no. 5 (1979): 91–115.
UPDATE:  I absolutely forgot to share with you Archive Grid, an archive search engine that lets you map searches. for example, when I did a search for Triple Jeopardy, once I moved from the daunting “list view,” the summary view let me know that in Philadelphia (hey Michelle!) there was a copy of one issue located in the “Women’s Health Concerns Committee Records” at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Closer to home, I discovered that the Columbia literary magazine, Emanon, published some of Ntozake Shange’s poetry from when she was a Barnard Student (search Paulette Williams).

 

Books for borrowing

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

From Ellington Was Not A Street, a children’s book based on the “Mood Indigo” poem in *A Daughter’s Geography*. Illustrated by Kadir Nelson.

Hi all,

While you described your future projects, I suggested some books that might be helpful for you.  Given the library/archive move, I’ve placed these books in a box in the Barnard Center For Research on Women (BCRW) for informal loan. PLEASE TAKE CARE OF MY BOOKS. Some of them I’ve had for 20+ years and others are just difficult to get.  Most of you might find Neal Lester’s Ntozake Shange : A Critical Study of the Plays useful. It is very thoroughly documented and the bibliography/notes might lead you to some interesting primary sources. There are several books on Black Women’s Health and the Black Arts Movement. (FYI, I am also loading items in our group Zotero folder as I find things that are related to your project.)

Bracey, John H., Sonia Sanchez, and James Edward Smethurst, eds. SOS/Calling All Black People : A Black Arts Movement Reader. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.

Clarke, Cheryl. “After Mecca” : Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c2005.

Collins, Lisa Gail, and Margo Nathalie Crawford, eds. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c2006.

hooks, bell. Sisters of the Yam : Black Women and Self-Recovery. Boston, MA: South End Press, c1993.

Lester, Neal A. Ntozake Shange : A Critical Study of the Plays /. New York : Garland Pub., 1995.

Shange, Ntozake. Coretta Scott. New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2011.

———. Ellington Was Not a Street. 1 edition. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2004.

———. Freedom’s a-Callin Me. New York: Amistad, 2012.

———. Lost in Language and Sound: Or, How I Found My Way to the Arts; Essays (audio Book). Unabridged edition. North Kingstown, RI: AudioGO, 2012.

———. The Sweet Breath of Life : A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family. New York: Atria Books, 2004.

———. We Troubled the Waters. New York: Amistad, 2009.

Smethurst, James Edward. The Black Arts Movement : Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c2005.

Van Deburg, William L. New Day in Babylon : The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c1992.

Villarosa, Linda, ed. Body & Soul: The Black Women’s Guide to Physical Health and Emotional Well-Being. New York: HarperPerennial, 1994.

White, Evelyn, ed. The Black Women’s Health Book : Speaking for Ourselves. Seattle, Wash: Seal, c1994.

embodied responses: what it takes to feel real

by Kiani 2 Comments

“i commenced to buying pieces of gold/ 14 carat/ 24 carat/ 18 carat gold/ every time some black person did something that waz beneath him as a black person & more like a white person. i bought gold cuz it came from the earth/ & more than likely it came from south africa/ where the black people are humiliated & oppressed like in slavery. i wear all these things at once/ to remind the black people that it cost a lot for us to be here/ our value/ can be known instinctively/ but since so many black people are having a hard time not being like white folks/ i wear these gold pieces to protest their ignorance/ their disconnect from history. i buy gold with a vengeance/ each time someone appropriates my space or my time without permission/ each time someone is discourteous or actually cruel to me/ if my mind is not respected/ my body toyed with/ i buy gold/ & weep. i weep as i fix the chains round my neck/ my wrists/ my ankles.” pg 51, Spell #7 of Three Pieces 

For me, Spell #7 was harrowing in its candidness. In between the lines of the banter and bar talk and blackface, the text ate away at me. This quote was particularly salient in my reading of the text. Here, Maxine describes painful experiences of appropriation, disrespect, humiliation, and oppression done to her by her oppressors and by those of her skin kind. Maxine copes with these experiences by materializing them. Her pain is embodied by jewelry that reminds of where she comes from, or where she’d like to be, or where she should be. She identifies with objects of gold from this place with bodies like hers experiencing things like she is. She puts the gold on her body. The implication of any kind of adornment is weighted with questions of identification, self-concept, history, and context. The implications of this diasporic woman putting a diasporic object on her body are huge and almost agonizing as these objects represent a lost connection and a visceral connection to pain in her immediate life. Adornment is thus a historic and revived identification with pain. Maxine wears these pieces of gold to remind herself and others of the pain of being; the realness of being a black body in space, in a world that rejects that realness as often as it can.

The act of adorning one’s self is often seen as this purely positive means of communicating one’s self, one’s means, one’s class, and one’s convictions. This excerpt from Spell #7 shows the reader Maxine’s or anyone’s greater reasons for decorating their bodies in the ways that they do. The quote calls to mind the explicit detail with which Shange describes the women and their colors in for colored girls– their “rhinestones etchin the corners of her (their) mouths” and their “oranges & magnolia scented wrists” … signs of fragility and femininity and also a kind of armor against oppressive forces. A kind of homage to the many sweet ways a body can be and an acknowledgement of why they are that way.