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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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“Of Woman Born” A response by Phanesia Pharel

by Phanesia Pharel 0 Comments

“There is much to suggest that the male mind has always been haunted by the force of the idea of dependence on a woman for life itself, the son’s constant effort to assimilate, compensate for, or deny that he is “of woman born.”

 

This quote stood out to me for many reasons. When watching the entire canon of literary work it seems that humanity is haunted by the woman. From the role of Eve in the Bible as an evil seductress who is punished through motherhood, to the entire genre of film noir, it is clear that men are scared. One of my favorite lines of a Kehlani song, a queer biracial singer, who with no doubt has been inspired by Shange is “And I know every man has a fear of a strong-minded woman, but I say she’s a keeper if she keeps it all runnin.” And although, I agree with this quote and I feel that men in many of my personal interactions have tried to make me smaller out of fear of the power I possess as a dark-skinned black lavender goddess. The complexity of trans men being able to, and having given birth is one we must remember. Not every “female” body is one that holds a woman. This entire article is overwhelmingly cis, and even within Ntozake’s work, I question how trans and nonbinary individuals feel about the portrayal of womanhood. I also understand that not every literary source needs to be relatable to every person.

 

“Terms like “barren” or “childless” have been used to negate any further identity. The term “nonfather” does not exist in any realm or social categories.

 

I remember as a child, my parents whoa re still married were separated at one point. My father told me frankly that he felt he lost a part of his life marrying my mother. My father, who at this point had left me at home for months, was absent and had a life of his own from my perspective. While my mother was tethered to me, and although I faced abandonment by both of my parents. My father has never been blamed for anything that has gone wrong in our lives from my extended family. Growing up, I expected nothing but the worst of men. When I was thirteen, I attended my friend Hilda’s birthday party and I could tell her father was a good man who loved her mother dearly. I immediately romanticized this man and in the future any man who did the bare minimum of what was expected of a woman. I have slowly learned that by watching women like my mother, like myself with PCOS and other conditions that make childbirth difficult how little respect we truly have for women. For men, they are not vessels of childbirth. That’s just a fact. But women? We are USELESS until we succumb to being baby makers. This speech by Tracee Ellis Ross was a moment where I realized I might not want to have children, I might not ACTUALLY want to get married, or base my value on these things. And it’s really hard and confusing to ask these questions. I am going to pull this back to Shange, from one of my favorite moments of “For Colored Girls”.

FOR COLORED GIRLS EXCERPT

“but bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical

dilemma/ i havent conquered yet/ do you see the point

my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender/ my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face

 

my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face

 

my love is too beautiful to have thrown back on my face

 

my love is too sanctified to have thrown back on my face

 

my love is too magic to have thrown back on my face

 

my love is too Saturday nite to have thrown back on my face

 

my love is too complicated to have thrown back on my face

 

my love is too music to have thrown back on my face”

 

The first time I heard this I cried. I thought about all the love I offer people and how so often I don’t feel there are people there who care for me. In connection to Tracee’s words (which are straight lineage from Shange, I mean cmon shes a trained actress from Brown), I think “My life is my own” and “My love is too/ to be thrown back in my face” all connect to the same thing. Loving ourselves, recognizing our worth and doing the demanding work of taking care of ourselves. I started in one place and I resulted in another. Please bear with me, its how my mind works and a sign of growth I think. This week has been a helpful reminder. Thank you so much. I am so excited to discuss all of this.

The Colonized Intellectual

by Aissata Ba 1 Comment

“National culture is the collective thought

process of a people to describe,

justify,

and extol the actions

whereby they have joined forces

and remained strong…

National culture in the under­developed countries,

therefore,

must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle

these countries are waging.” (National Culture, Fanon)

This quote was quite interesting to me because it could easily be applied to modern day music and Shange. Awhile back, I had a small discussion with my friends about Nigerian music being called African music or Jamaican music being simply referred to as Caribbean music. Interestingly, the conversation shifted into talking about race, music, locality, etc. This quote also brought up two questions for me: what power does the collective have that an individual would not? To what extent or in what situations is the collective force necessary or needed? Shange And Fanon have two completely different writing styles. Though Shange’s writing might be a bit of an easier read, both writers and thinkers are intellectual and revolutionary thinkers.

Going back to the entire reading by Fanon, Fanon details three stages in what he called the “colonized intellectual”. Fanon explained that in the first stage, the intellectual mimics the colonist and conforms to colonial tastes. This is a stage where the colonized tries to be like the Europeans, extolling and admiring European culture. In the second stage, Fanon explains,  the colonized reacts against this assimilation and desire. This is the Négritude phase in which, in reaction to the European casting of African culture as inferior, the intellectual extols each and every thing about African culture as superior. In the third stage, this love for culture finally moves to a fight for liberation. The intellectual begins to write “combat literature, revolutionary literature” that hopes to galvanize and motivate the people into fighting the colonists. In this stage, Fanon explains is the hope that developing a new culture will begin to shape a new nation.

Capitalism and Feminism

by Brianna Sturkey 0 Comments

A movement/narrowly concerned with pregnancy and birth

which does not ask

questions

and demands

answers about the lives of children, the priorities of the government:

a movement/ in which individual families

rely on consumerism and educational

privilege

to supply their own children with good

nutrition, health care can,

while perceiving itself a progressive or alternative

exist only as a minor contradiction within a society most of whose

children grow up in poverty

and which places its highest priority on the technology of

war.

 

My decision to turn this quote from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution into a poem was based on the malignancy ingrained in the questions of capitalism and sexism. This excerpt spoke to me heavily because Rich actively acknowledges the power of capitalism when addressing issues of a woman’s body and its relation to society. By integrating conversations of “consumerism” and “government” with topics such as “pregnancy”, Rich is encouraging a holistic approach when addressing 21st century feminism. When constructing this poem I thought heavily about Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story.” Her talk discusses how individuals are composed of complex identities and connections and to reduce someone to a single narrative is to take away their humanity. I believe that capitalism is an all-consuming force and to deny its power would be unjust and ultimately fail to dismantle any systems of oppression. Rich echoes Adichie’s sentiments in her TED talk by refusing to strip away conversations of capitalism when discussing motherhood and feminism.

Furthermore, my stylistic choice in how I turned this quote into a poem was based on words that I deemed the most dynamic. I choose to give words such as “questions,” “privilege,” and “war” their own lines in order to emphasize them. When reading this poem out loud the reader is forced to give intentional breaks and breaths dedicated to these three words. I this because I I believe these breaks force both the reader and the listener to reconcile with these words and think deeper about the meaning behind them.

 

Feminism and Fanon

by Dayna Beatty 1 Comment

I really enjoyed reading Fanon’s chapter “Algeria Unveiled” from his book A Dying Colonialism. Having read his article knowing that I was going to transform his words into a poem “Shange style,” gave me a new appreciation for his words. Personally, I find reading pieces by theorists like Marx and Foucault quite difficult because the writing is not as approachable as some other more contemporary authors. I expected Fanon’s work to be much of the same but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed this piece in particular—specifically, the style of it. Fanon discusses the Western notion that women who wear the veil are in need of saving and how this idea has become militarized to justify white intervention in the Middle East. In previous courses I have read Lila Abu-Lughod’s “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving,” and this piece echoed the sentiment of contemporary Middle Eastern scholars, which was refreshing to read from a male scholar writing in 1965. He describes how the veil is understood in the West as a mechanism of oppression, and by intervening in the Algeria and “saving” these women, they were “symbolically unveiled.” (Fanon 42) However, from the perspective of the colonized this symbolic unveiling can also be understood as rape—of both body and culture. What the colonizer understands as “freedom,” (as motivated by military goals,) the colonized sees this same action as an expression of violence against a physical and mental space. Fanon writes, in regards to the “saving” of Algerian women by the colonizers, “every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer.” (Fanon 43) Essentially, that the unveiling of women was the acceptance of colonization and one’s position as subordinate to the colonizer. Fanon then explores the effect of this, which was the choice to employ women in the fight against the colonizer. Fanon writes that “this decision to involve women in active elements of the Algerian Revolution was not reached lightly” and that at the start, female involvement in the war was restricted to “married women whose husbands were militants,” then gradually expanded to include “widows or divorced women.” (Fanon 51) Eventually, the volunteering of unmarried girls grew so high that “the political leaders…. Removed all restrictions to accept indiscriminately the support of all Algerian women.” (Fanon 51) While unveiling of women was a violent action in the name of Western perceptions of freedom, this permission to fight against the colonizer was the type of freedom that Algerian woman wanted. Fanon illuminates the key difference between Western perceptions of freedom and what women in Algeria truly want.

 

Women then became an instrumental part of the war and proved to be key militants in the fight against colonization. Fanon spends the later portion of his piece describing how it is that these Western stereotype of “innocence” among women who wear the veil was then militarized by Algerian women in their fight for independence. By mobilizing notions of femininity and its stereotypical ties to weakness and the veil, Algerian women became key players in the resistance, unassuming soldiers that were able to infiltrate European’s by using their own misinformed notions against them.

 

The idea of “saving women” at the surface level can be understood as feminist as freeing an entire country of women from the oppressive man, but in actuality, the story is quite different, and this is what Fanon attempts to make clear. The veil is a garment worn by women throughout history. It is just as anti-feminist to force a woman to wear a veil as it is to force her not to wear the veil. By forcing women to remove the veil, woman by woman, “piece by piece, the flesh of Algeria laid bare.” (Fanon 32) This physical removal of a garments, against the will of the wearer, is extremely possessive, dangerous, and anti-feminist. Fanon does the work of demonstrating how this is the case, and in my opinion his work can be understood as an attempt at an early, male’s feminist critique of colonialism.

 

Having read Shange’s works and understanding her emphasis on movement in literature, I began to see that in Fanon’s work as well. His piece is written in a very approachable and lyrical way, yet his words reflect the mood of the piece. His words of conquer are violent and the language he picks to illuminate this are visible throughout this piece. He uses words like “flesh,” “eroticism,” “brutality,” and “sadism” throughout his piece to evoke a feeling of forced entry—encroachment on physical space and culture. I tried to use the same type of forceful language throughout my poem to produce the same kind of effect. This exercise demonstrated to me how important a “mood” of a piece is—how choosing very specific words have a certain effect that is a deliberate choice made by the author to make the readers feel a certain way.

The Dilemma of Decolonization

by Jennell Strong 0 Comments

Passion and rage, nurtured

Discovering beyond

The present, the self-hatred, abdication and denial

An era capable of redemption

 

Discovering beyond the present because

There is little to marvel at

Little to fall in love with/ to come to terms with

Delving deeper instead

Discovering instead a past of glory

 

The above poem is my attempt at rewording and rereading Fanon in a Shange-like manner. The excerpt I chose to poeticize was from the chapter “On National Culture” in which Fanon dissects the process of conjuring from an idealized past a “national culture” that the colonized intellectual is tasked with. He describes the resentment towards the colonizer and their hegemonic control over every aspect of the colonized’s life. Consequentially, the colonized intellectual must struggle internally with everything they have been indoctrinated with about their history. The colonized intellectual is consumed by trying to prove to the colonizer but especially themself that they aren’t inferior, uncivilized, less than. So they turn to the past, trying to dig up proof of their humanity. They however only end up idealizing and overcompensating their past. It’s this desperate and incessant need to define the self outside of the box that the colonizer has so meticulously built. Shange asks us in Lost in Language and Sound “where are we to go?” if we rid ourselves of the white man. “Having delivered ourselves no way of naming the universe outside of the English language, where are we to go?” It’s the same dilemma of decolonization that Fanon expresses; the conscious colonized person struggles to conceptualize the black self outside of the oppression that has so greatly defined it.

Fanon’s passage immediately brought to mind a quote from Toni Morrison that resonates with me on a daily basis as I navigate white spaces as a black woman. Originally spoken in 1975 at a public lecture at Portland State University, Morrison sums up the toll racism plays on black people: it distracts us.

“The function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

All colonized people, whether or not they qualify as intellectuals, are faced with this existential plight of overcompensating to gain basic humanity. Being a student in a PWI and specifically an Ivy League university, it is very common for students of color to defend their communities and cultures from ignorant white students. They feel frustrated yet dignified in explaining how problematic a student or professor or text or policy is and they work themselves up about others’ ignorance. I made a personal vow some time ago to not waste any breath, sweat, or tears over proving my humanity to others. I refuse to be distracted by racism.

Of Woman Born & Limitless Love

by Breana Beaudreault 0 Comments

Adrienne Rich’s introduction to her book Of Woman Born showed her growth and elaborated on her reflections in the ten years since first publishing the book. Throughout the introduction, Rich points to the many nuanced facets of motherhood that complicate the relationship, mainly the way systemic pressures and oppressions shape the way these relationships come do be (or don’t) and how they grow and progress in reaction to the child’s specific environment. When Rich spoke about black motherhood and referenced literature by afro- and carribean-american women and the ways they tackle the “specific cultural differences in mother-daughter interactions”, I couldn’t help but think of the multitudes of stories of ways these cultural differences have played out between my own mother and myself. This particular topic had been on my mind today, and after reading the section on black motherhood, I was naturally prompted to go back to an article my mother sent me just this morning. Having been born and raised in Panama, my mother and I have often struggled to find common ground or to understand where the other is coming from, not due to lack of trying, but due to the environments that we were raised in. We have worked hard to understand each other’s love languages, to communicate effectively, and to really listen when the other is speaking. To this point, she had forwarded a Roxane Gay article about growing up with Haitian-American parents, an article that was full of quotes that I can remember from my childhood almost exactly the same. Some of the most striking to me were “a closed door meant we were probably up to no good. A closed door meant we were trying to shut our parents out of our lives when they wanted nothing more than to have their lives fully entwined with theirs.” The idea of boundaries and privacy are key concepts in healthy American families, but one that was utterly unheard of to my mother. I was able to see this tension even between my American-born father, who accepted my requests for space and boundaries immediately, and my mother, who seemed truly shocked at his reaction and hurt by what she perceived as my not needing her. However, when she sent the article, as you can see in the copy I’ve attached, she wrote  “Hi Bre—this article will help you understand the “me”, my love + my belie[fs]”. Although it has been hard at times, particularly when I was young and saw relationships functioning differently than my own, I am reminded and truly overwhelmed by the uniqueness and, as Gay puts it, the limitlessness of love that I have been given and taught to give back.

roxane gay article pdf

 

The Lost Generation

by Brianna Sturkey 1 Comment

The poem titled ‘ii. Improvisation” is a cautionary narrative in which Ntozake Shange weaves a generational pattern of sexism, gender, and voice that follows women like shadows throughout their lives. In this poem, she begins with the phrase “there is something caught in my throat” and this imagery of choking is continuously repeated throughout every stanza. The significance of this phrase indicates her lack of voice due to the presence of male domination that consumes her physically and mentally. However, she refuses to allow this male subjection to control her daughter as well. She repeatedly “checks” on her daughter to ensure that she is still “sleeping” and not experiencing the atrocities that she is. This desperate plea by Shange to secure the innocence of her daughter ultimately reveals this poem as a vision of collective womanhood and identity. This “daughter” is a symbol of younger women who have been spared from the degradation of their ancestors due to their strength and sheer will to survive. The ending where Shange refuses materialistic items such as flowers, white wine, or a house and instead states that she wants “this place out of [her] throat.” By ending this poem with the same phrase she begins with unveils the true cost of freedom and how women struggle not only for themselves, but for their survival as a collective identity in the past, present, and future.

I choose the song “ I Remember” by Lauryn Hill preformed live, because I feel as though the tones of ancestry that this song exudes runs parallel with this specific poem. Furthermore in the lyrics, Hill’s voice noticeably cracks during her singing and it reminded me of Shange’s phrase “there is something stuck in my throat”. Ultimately this song demonstrates a similar vulnerability that Shange brilliantly illustrates in “ii. Improvisations” through the flaws and hardships of womanhood, but how hope still somehow remains at the end of both the song and the poem like a lighthouse at the bay.