On Wednesday, September 26, four days into autumn, four days into Libra season, I sat down at a table where the incomparable and irreplaceable Ntozake Shange sat at the head, as the star, with her blond cornrows, pierced eyebrows, cerulean blue nails and eyes gleaming with wisdom and willingness to listen to young girls spill over with love and admiration. Questions about her life and her passions were asked, but two hours could not satisfy all the questions I had in me. I wanted to ask about her travels, the experiences of living in different cities, if she ever doubted the artist’s life, if she ever had extended bouts of writers blocks where language failed her and poetry was not an option. But I was in awe, I didn’t want to talk too much or say the wrong thing.
When I got the chance to sit and take a picture with her, I asked for a hug. But even when looking in her eyes, my tongue couldn’t summon from the back of my throat the gratitude I yearned to express. I wanted to cry and tell her how much her poems, like music, have been the soundtrack to the past four, five years of my life. Her words have reached inside and pulled out from the angriest, tiredest, most impassioned places of my spirit a voice and a vision that has blossomed into fulfilling experiences. My learning a new language, traveling to South America, becoming more invested in learning about and connecting to the Diaspora, has everything to do with Ms. Shange’s writings of other cultures. I remember living in Bahia and reading Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo and then being motivated to take an Afro-Brazilian dance class thinking what would Cypress do?
I wanted to express all these things, but all I could manage was a “thank you so much”, realizing that I’m one of a dozen other gaping girls, one of hundreds of thousands of colored girls around the world finding and losing themselves in the language and sound of Ntozake Shange’s poems.