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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Updated: Blaxploitation Manic Pixie Dream Girl

by Asha Futterman 4 Comments

In today’s culture, a repetitive caricature is the “manic pixie dream girl.” She shows up in romantic comedies and dramas and young adult novels. She is Zooey Deschanel in 500 days of summer, Natalie Portman in Garden State, Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind, every major female character in John Green’s novels. The manic pixie dream girl is always white and small, she is always  beautiful in “non conventional way,” her main trait is “quirky.” She appeals to men because she is different than the other girls: deeper, more interesting, or doesn’t like to shop. In Sassafras Cypress and Indigo, Indigo seems like the Blaxploitation manic pixie dream girl. She doesn’t really seem like a real child: she is a 12 year old making poetic potions and talking to the moon and playing the fiddle behind a farm house for hours and hours. Instead of making friends, Indigo “sat in her window, working with her fiddle, telling everybody, the wind and all his brothers […] the turmoil of the spirit realm” (32). She is also small and beautiful and boys seem to fall in love with her every 10 pages. While the Black bohemian feminist version of the manic pixie dream girl shares some of the hyper quirky, unrealistic qualities of the white caricature, she also is majorly different. She is not interested in men, she says “I don’t think boys are as much fun as everybody says” (63). And unlike the white manic pixie dream girls and she is a main character rather than a side character designed to help the male character discover himself. She is also Black and in love with her Blackness. Still, I think there is some danger is the Black feminist dream girl. The Black fantasy child is magical, (while she loves her world of imagination) she also has extremely mature and deep ways of viewing the world, and doesn’t need friends to be happy. She lives off of the moon’s love and her family’s and elder’s love, but doesn’t need love from white people or other kids her age. She is “Black girl magic” and never not magic, she doesn’t need what the normal, less magical Black girls need. What the white girls need. Her unrealistic un-needing isn’t intended to demonize other Black girls, but I think it has the ability to fuel this culture in which Black girls are supposed to be to magical. This magic means Black girls don’t want approval from others, feel the pain of racism, feel pain at all. We are too magic so we don’t have problems that looking at the moon and playing the fiddle won’t solve, we don’t have problems a potion won’t solve and a bath won’t solve. But we do. I do.

I loved to read about Indigo: a wondrous, though un-real Black child. But I couldn’t help but think that she seemed a little manufactured. She too perfectly the embody the Blaxploitation feminist love child. I’m happy that she exists, though, especially considering her kind did not become a caricature in every other major motion picture. Like Mullen points out,  Sassafras Cypress and Indigo is one of Shange’s lesser known works. Just as Mill’s Fransico is widely unknown. The major difference between the manic pixie dream girl and the Black feminist bohemian dream girl? The Black girl doesn’t sell.

Black no Bohemian

by Jennell Strong 1 Comment

I am always wary about ascribing certain affixes to blackness in order to attribute a trait to a nonblack source. For example, the Black Marilyn Monroe to mean Dorothy Dandridge or the Black Meryl Streep to mean Viola Davis. I recall a professor proclaiming Beyonce to be a modern Madonna. The audacity! The profanity! To me it reads just as shady as “you’re so beautiful for a black girl”. In the minds of many (incompetent)people, black will forever be stained with inferiority. Therefore, ideals and positive concepts such as beauty, talent or success is counter to what blackness represents. Blackness can’t stand alone, in itself and embody goodness. Viola Davis can’t just be her talented, groundbreaking Viola Davis self because that’s just incomprehensible in our society. She’s sooo (unbelievably) good that she is in the image of another great(er) talent.

I say all this to say, I would have never deemed Shange or any other black artist of her era as “bohemian” because bohemian is a term which I’ve always seen associated with whiteness. Black people, to me, are artists. We are innately artistic. When whites get into the arts and spirituality and wearing their hair down and “being free”, it’s considered counterculture because it’s counter to their culture. How I’ve always perceived it, black folks been spiritual and immersed in the arts and it was never a conscious decision to be deliberately transgressive. Black folks live and breathe creativity and our casual expressions are works of art. So no I don’t see Shange as bohemian if bohemian means relating to some movement. In the same way I detest the redundancy of “black hippie”. Isn’t it laughable that a black slang (hip) is appropriated by whites and then thrown onto black people to say this black is like us. Shange being free-spirited, being a traveller, being spiritual and magical and a poet-cook-mother-activist is in line with an authentic blackness that doesn’t need to be supplemented by bohemian.

I want to share this quote by another Black Arts Movement poet that I think sums up how I feel:

Related image

 

Likewise, I wouldn’t read the sisters in Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo as bohemian but simply as black girls/women doing what is essentially black: creating. More specifically is the link between creation and survival that enables life for black women.

 

I remember wanting so badly to read Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo after seeing so many quotes about the magic of women with moons falling from mouths and roses from legs. But I remember being so disappointed in the cliche of living within a toxic love, where a man in his art is more important than a woman and she feels obliged to sacrifice because the man is so irresistibly talented. I am frustrated with this narrative because I am tired of black women characters’ storyline being incomplete without some man to inconvenience her greatness.

Rituals!

by Perry O'Parsons 3 Comments

The rituals outlined in Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo got me thinking about my own personal rituals. In the Shange’s book they are very specific instructions that serve very specific purposes. In my own life I have very informal rituals that I practice, for healing or distraction or peace etc. but I have never thought to identify or outline them.

Last year, going to a school where I was not happy, and living in a totally unfamiliar place, I developed lots of rituals that helped me feel more at home and were a source of healing when I was under a lot of stress. Below is a ritual inspired by my Sunday morning ritual from last year, which was almost always the same.

 

Waking in a Room Where You Feel Out of Place/Feeling at Home

On a Sunday morning, waking in a room that is yours, but where you feel out of place, open the blinds enough to let in morning light, but not enough to see out the window. Softly play the music that your mother played in your home when you were a child. Fetch water from the bathroom to make the coffee. Pour the water into the coffee-maker, scoop out spoonfuls of the coffee until you are pleased with the amount in the filter, close the top, and push the button. The fresh coffee will make the small, unfamiliar room smell like home. When the coffee is ready, carefully pick a mug and pour the coffee. Open the window slightly to let in crisp morning air, and sit in your chair by the window. Sip the coffee, breath deeply, relax.

 

Another practice of mine is to do a deep clean of my room everytime I go through a transition. These transitions can big or small. Moving out of my room at home to come to New York, closing a show I’ve been working on for six weeks, a break-up, or even just finishing an assignment that has been stressing me out. These are all transitions that usually prompt a deep-clean of my room.

 

Transition Ritual/Deep Clean

Pull up the shades and let in all the light you can! Open the window to let fresh air in and old air out. Turn on music that makes you want to dance! Strip the bed and wash everything that might be dirty. Take everything out of the drawers and off the shelves and place on the bare mattress. Re-fold clean clothes and re-organize shoes. Wipe down every hard surface to remove dust. Scour the room for trash. Trash old receipts, old newspapers or magazines, bits of paper and flyers etc. In looking for trash lying around, throw away things you’ve held onto for too long. After wiping everything down and throwing away all unnecessary things, put everything back in a new way, something that suits you better now that you’ve gone through this transition. Finally, retrieve the clean laundry, put away, and make the bed with the freshly cleaned sheets. Nothing is better than clean sheets!

 

These are just two of my many rituals that I practice all the time and which have grown and changed overtime. I think everyone has rituals that they are not aware of. Identifying them and writing them down is a valuable practice because it helps me better understand myself and do things with greater intention and awareness.

Thinking about ritual also got me thinking about a book by Malidoma Patrice Somé called Ritual: Power, Healing and Community which discusses the importance or ritual. In it, the author says

“ritual is called for because our soul communicates things to us that the body translates as need, or want, or absence. So we enter into ritual in order to respond to the call of the soul.”

― Malidoma Patrice Somé, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community

This is the cover of Ritual: Power, Healing and Community by Malidoma Patrice Somé

Change Makers

by Dayna Beatty 1 Comment

I enjoyed reading Harryette Mullen’s article after having read Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo because it helped me contextualize the text and understand its importance and the nuances to the story. The article emphasizes how intersectional and approachable the text is, and I found myself agreeing with Mullen’s comments.

Mullen writes that Shange is best known for being a poet, but that this novel includes “narrative, poetry, drama, letters, recipes, folklore, and magic spells.” (Mullen 206) Each of these different mediums, with the exception of narrative, on their own may not seem as approachable or cohesive, but how Shange puts them together in her novel makes it easy for readers to see each of these different platforms as a part of a whole.

The book is intersectional in several ways. Firstly, the topic of the story is intersectional in that it describes an intersectional experience, the “emergence of black feminist consciousness within communities of bohemian artists in the 1970s.” (Mullen 205) The novel is also intersectional in its approach to storytelling—through the use of over five different mediums Shange not only puts together a beautiful piece of literature, but celebrates the many ways in which writers choose to share their stories. The subjects of this story are also intersectional, from sharing Indigo’s journey at home to her sisters Cypress and Sassafrass’s stories as they journey away to find themselves and explore their respective passions of dance and art, the novel itself incorporates three different lives into one.

The piece of digital media that I included for this week’s post seemed appropriate to me for two reasons. The poet who wrote this piece was the first person that introduced me to spoken word poetry. Prior to hearing her work, I had never before experienced spoken word and my knowledge of poetry was very limited. She opened my eyes to a world of expression that I had previously never thought much of. Secondly, this piece combines spoken word with both music and cinematography.  In keeping with the theme of intersectional mediums, I wanted to include this piece as an example of a combination of platforms through which artists can communicate a message.

Azure Antoinette says, “we cling to the past, we cling to the normal we cling to the useful, accessible information, we define ourselves by those that have come before us, what they did or did not accomplish… you are your history.” In the first portion of the poem, she emphasizes embracing your past, but not defining ourselves solely based on the past. She continues her poem by saying, “You are a change maker… so when people ask you who you are, tell them you are a vessel, that your job is desperately trying to make the next Sistine Chapel with your hands tied behind your back and your eyes closed. Tell them you are working on creating a positive social system… when someone asks you how you are, them ‘em, I’m brilliant. When they as you where are you, tell them, I’m architecting change.” The purpose of this poem is for listeners to understand that your past is a part of you, but you are also an agent of change. Shange, throughout her written work and her life story, demonstrates how everybody can be a change maker, regardless of who you are.

On the Margins

by Makaria Yami 2 Comments

 

The readings this week helped me to learn about the Black Arts Movement and further understand the relationship between Black women and Black men. Prior to this class, I only had a vague understanding of what the Black Arts Movement was. The texts this week not only allowed me to get a better understanding of it, but they helped me learn about some of the criticisms associated with the movement. Going further, I thought about how those criticisms are a continuous theme throughout Shange’s work.

 

In Harryette Mullen’s article, Artistic Expression Was Flowing Everywhere: Alison Mills and Ntozake Shange, Black Bohemian feminists in the 1970s, Mullen talks about how Shange’s book, Sassafrass Cypress & Indigo, is unknown in comparison to her other works. Mullen says that Bohemian Black women “have existed on the margins of mainstream and black cultures” (Mullen 207). She also asserts that “militant revolutionaries of the 1960s tended to conflate their affirmation of blackness with a celebration of black masculinity” (Mullen 213).

 

The criticisms laid out by Mullen portray how Black women, specifically Bohemian Black women, are often overshadowed and their voices are forgotten. This made me think about the relationship between Sassafrass and Mitch in Sassafrass Cypress & Indigo. Shange writes, “Sassafrass caught herself focusing in on Mich again instead of herself, because she did want to be perfected for him, like he was perfected and creating all the time . . . She needed Mitch because Mitch was all she loved in herself” (Shange 80).

 

Just as the Black Arts Movement tended to leave Bohemian Black women on the margins, some Bohemian Black women, like Sassafrass, felt like they had to put themselves in the margins while centering the Black men in their lives. This idea is a common theme among women of color and is also discussed in Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf. The women in Shange’s poem talk about their complicated relationship with men, and how their voice and identity are on the margins, saying that they have “unseen performances” and “lyrics/ no voices.”

All of the work that we have read has shown me how Black women are always at the margins, whether it’s within the relationships Black women have with men or within the Black Arts Movement. What I truly love about Shange’s work is that she does the exact opposite; she crafts beautiful stories with Black women at the center point.

A photo of Black women during the BAM.