In”Artistic Expression was Flowing Everywhere” Alison Mills and Ntozake Shamje, Black Bohemian Feminists in the 1970s . HARRYETTE MULLEN states “Claiming their place as a significant force in U.S. literature in the 1970s, African-American women writers faced difficult choices involving contradictory values within the ashifting terrain of political, cultural, and aesthetic movements”. This quote for me is great but I would argue that there has never been a time for black women in America to not face the damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario as artists.
Two weeks ago we lightly talked about the violence and anger placed on Shange when she did not portray black men in the way that certain people within the black community would have preferred a different portrayal on the real physical, emotional and mental abuse of black women, non binary and trans folxs in our communities. Yet I feel like this is a consistent theme black women face. From Suzan Lori Parks, to Jamaica Kincaid many black female writers in the modern age have been held under the microscope. Roxanne Gay, for example, is a complicated case. She is a bisexual Haitian American woman who grew up with financial privilege as well as being light-skinned but wrote texts about women being brutalized in Haiti. She received severe homophobia, fatphobic, biphobia, sexist and all around trash responses from people. How do we help these women and future writers who may fear brutality in a response to humanity?
I have never thought critically about Ntozake as a bohemian artist and perhaps this is because we’re raised to see black women as simply black female artists. And sure being a black woman comes with so much but there is freedom in being able to write and not think about certain things or not think about other people. Jamaica Kincaid has a really that if you’re going to be a black woman who writes don’t be a black female writer, and to me, this means to color the lines that you want to not necessarily the lines defined for black women.
Here is a bit from “An equation for black people onstage” by Suzan Lori Parks (pulitzer prize winning playwright)
And gee, there’s another thing: There is no such thing as THE Black Experience; that is, there are many experiences of being Black which are included under the rubric. Just think of all the different kinds of African peoples…
So. As a Black person writing for theatre, what is theatre good for? What can theatre do for us? We can “tell it like it is;” “tell it as it was;” “tell it as it could be.” In my plays I do all 3; and the writing is rich because we are not an impoverished people, but a wealthy people fallen on hard times.
I write plays because I love Black people. As there is no single “Black Experience,” there is no single “Black Aesthetic” and there is no one way to write or think or feel or dream or interpret or be interpreted. As African-Americans we should recognize this insidious essentialism for what it is: a fucked-up trap to reduce us to only one way of being. We should endeavor to show the world and ourselves our beautiful and powerfully infinite variety.
So for Shange I think she reaches there, she explores bohemia and sure hers is black but its outside of the stereotypical reach. She allows black women to heal onstage in For Colored Girls which I also believe is not considered in the reach. Do we want to in the future allow discussions of Shange where we ask less of the demeaning “how did u as a negro writee and whyy (cuz everything is 4 your race). I think Shange’s work as stated by SLP is infinite, do we speak of it that way?
Excited to hear your thoughts 🙂