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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Can food disconnect you from community and culture?

by Tirzah Anderson 1 Comment

For various communities, connections to family often stem from cultural connections, including language, food, and traditions. It is common across cultures that tradition brings family together. Often, these traditions include food, which can create an integral aspect of how culture is shared, created, and passed along to other people in a community. Ntozake Shange and Verta Mae Grosvenor engage with cooking and food as a means of engaging with culture and passage of culture, as well as a way to find commonality between communities and various cultures. In particular, Shange focuses on the various communities in the African diaspora and the foods they eat and produce. Her work signals to ideas of connectivity, especially in the ways that the diaspora was able to create culture that was in many ways similar in taste, style, technique, and ingredients. However, the aspect of their works that I am curious about  is how associations of food, cooking, and eating can infringe upon the passing of culture and connectivity of community.

Grosvenor, in particular, notes that “some people got such bad vibrations, that to eat with them would give you such bad indigestion”(xiii), highlighting that the food and the preparation of food is a vital part of the vibration she outlines, but that the outcome of that is also an integral part of that vibration. Thinking about food, how can who you eat with or how food is eaten change the way that food impacts a person or how it is passed down? I can think of the ways that food may be associated with negative people or memories and how that can make the food have a different impact on someone. For instance, there are foods that are associated with bad memories, maybe a food that made someone sick, or food someone ate when there was conflict at the dinner table and I wonder how that shifts the vibrations.  This may highlight the ways that our physical and psychological qualities influence our food vibrations, impacting the ways that we understand culture and connections. If this negative association, whether it is natural or developed over time, can exist from bad vibrations food might separate people from cultures or communities with which they may be connected to in some way outside of food. I am curious if those negative vibrations be reversed and given new meaning, allowing connections to continue and grow despite these bad vibrations.  

Language and Poetry..for colored girls

by Ariel Leachman 0 Comments

The play deals with a variety of adult topics such as abortion and rape that would make it difficult to teach in its entirety in a high school. The language is also quite graphic in places. Yet, it’s so real, raw and emotional that I just want to share it with my students at the same time. For example, there’s a scene, told by three of the women at once, discussing date rape, that starts, “a friend is hard to press charges against/if you know him/you must have wanted it.” It continues, “ticket stubs from porno flicks in his pocket/a lil dick/or a strong mother/or just a brutal virgin…lock the door behind you/wit fist in face/to fuck…who make elaborate mediterranean dinners/& let the art ensemble carry all ethical burdens/while they invite a coupla friends over to have you/are sufferin from latent rapist bravado/& we are left wit the scars.”  The intensity of Shange’s words, language and diction makes the experience of reading an personal and intimate violation like abortion and rape harsher. Through her words I feel like I am the protagonist, as I feel all the emotions and tensions that exists throughout each poem. I started writing a journal recently and thanks to Shange, I have started to explore my own truth in the ways that I confide in myself though writing. For so long my personal diaries and journals were polished and felt like I couldn’t be honest with myself. In For Colored Girls… I started to appreciate the value of healing through honesty of emotion and sincerity with myself first. I am interested in how Shange shifted the “explicitness” in poetry. I am not well educated on the history of feminist poetry, but I would assume that Shange contributed a lot to the way Black women wrote in poems as expressive as she does.

 

What’s in a name?

by Asha Futterman 0 Comments
I would describe my identity as a person and as a writer in relationship to feminism with the words Black, queer, Jewish, and woman. Each of these markers is an important qualifier to me because of how exclusionary feminism has been and still can be a tool to exclude and invisiblize women who are not white, cis, and straight. I think I learned to name myself as Black and Jewish and woman from my mom, since I was young my mom showed me that being a Black jewish woman is special and something that made me unique in a way I should cherish and feel proud of. She would tell me that if (this was pre-Obama) I was president I would be the first Black woman and Jewish president. Through learning about feminism in this class and before this class, I have always found myself and empowerment in the writings of Black feminists or feminists who analyze the intersection of identity, especially Kimberley Crenshaw, bell hooks, along with poets and artists who sing and write creatively about Blackness and womanhood like Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Jamila Woods, Morgan Parker, and Noname. Many of the Black feminists I’m drawn to show their readers experiences of power and strength and also messiness and pain. If I had to specify my writerly standpoint, I think I would say I write from the standpoint of a messy Black woman.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint a few terms for the all radical feminist in the 70s and 80s because I feel like I would use different terms to describe a feminists like Rich and a feminist like Shange or the feminists in the Combahee River Collective. From our readings, I think a lot of the feminism in the 70s and 80s was or tried to be transnational. While some of the transnationalism was hegemonic, feminist in the 70s made strides to include third world countries in their analysis. While many feminists we read were middle class, they were also anti-capitalist and supporters of workers right. I also think many of the radical feminists in the 70s and 80s that we read about were artists or poets like Shange, Rich, and Lorde. So, if I had to give a title to all of the feminists that we read I would say transnational, anticapitalist, and creative feminists.