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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Certain Forms of Nurture – Makeen Week 3

by Zachery 1 Comment

Men have been able

to give

us

power, support

 

and certain forms of nurture

(as individuals)

 

When

they

choose

…

 

but the power

is always

stolen

power.

 

withheld from

the mass of women

in

patriarchy.

 

– Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (page 246)

 

This quote is one that stood out to me most in Adrienne Rich’s Of Women Borne. It was a favorite of mine because it seemed to capture so much in very few words. More specifically, this passage forced me to reconceptualize power and how I understand its creation and its use. Previously, I always understood power as something that allows people to create and enforce certain constructs. Adrienne Rich asserts power as a construct itself–– a fact I had never thought of. She even goes further to say that power is a patriarchal construct that is in many ways sustained by the ways in which it is distributed. Power does not belong to the patriarchy to give, and the patriarchy thrives off of taking power and redistributing it when it deems necessary.

 

Re-writing the passage as a poem forced me to even further reconceptualize a number of things. Firstly, words that initially struck me as some sort of philosophical theory felt more like natural thought processes in the form of the poem. Before I had written the poem, I wondered if the words would lose their weight, but they did not. If anything, I felt I was able to better understand Rich’s words in this form. They flowed, the words came individually rather than in the form of a wordy phrase as they once existed. In deciding exactly how to restructure the poem, I formatted as I read aloud. Thus, the structure of the poem felt comfortable to speak. Words like us and them that contrasted one another, to me, felt as though they should stand alone. I then had to make smaller decisions like using ellipses in place of a semi colon or even placing the words “as individuals” into parentheses, mostly to find a more natural way to account for the frequent use of commas in the original writing. It became interesting to me that poetry allows for frequent time to reflect within its structure, something that a traditional paragraph form does not allow for. This exerciser finally allowed me to understand Ntozake Shange’s emphasis on the importance of writing existing beyond the page. Whether as movement, speech or song, extending language beyond its written form only strengthens its ability to be understood.

 

The fiction is forever with us

by Keller 0 Comments

The fiction that
most women have both husbands and
money is forever
with us

— Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 247
Edited to be “read like Shange”

“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.”

— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, p. 119

 

Although Rich repeatedly speaks out against “the fiction” that privileged women represent an experience universal to all women (247), her essay contrasts with Ntozake Shange’s semi-autobiographical style in a significant way. Just as she grapples with both her womanhood and Blackness, Shange also confronts the privilege granted English speakers and American nationals like herself. However, Rich’s essay focuses on the oppression of women by men and women (but mostly by men), without granting the same deep interrogation to her own whiteness and the role of white women in perpetrating racist oppression.

Rich sympathetically engages with the burdensome expectations her mother faces as a white woman in the U.S. South to be “pure” like a “gardenia” (220). However, Rich does not necessarily explore how the white fragility granted more readily to women than men can be a privilege. Likewise, to convey an image of her mother, Rich, like her father, references the Botticelli Venus and Helen of Troy (219). These (often ahistorically whitewashed) Greek and Roman references dip into a cultural cache of sympathy for white beauty and innocence rooted in colonialism.

If oppression happens to women who do not look like Diane Kruger, it is not clear that their struggles take on equal importance in Rich’s essay. Her scattered references to women of color and women living outside of Europe and the U.S. are not framed in terms of solidarity, struggle, and family like in Shange’s poem Bocas — “i have a daughter/ mozambique / i have a son/ angola” (Daughter’s Geography, 21). Instead, she presents them as passive victims of backwards regimes, such as the blanket statement that Chinese foot-binding is an “affliction” and a “mutilat[ion]” (243).

 

The hubris, as Gayatri Spivak has put it, that “white men [need to] save brown women from brown men” has been used by colonial governments and continues to be used by neocolonial governments as a justification for violent intervention and conquest (see, for instance, the U.S. invasion in Afghanistan), as Dorothy Ko, Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood have pointed out. In her reflection on sati in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak suggests that it is very suspect when women wish to fight for women’s rights in a society they do not come from without making a lifetime commitment to becoming fluent in the epistemologies, languages, and histories of that society.

 

Quoting the Upanishads and ancient Egyptian hymns out of context without understanding the original or explaining who did the translating and why, leads to a loss of opportunity to truly appreciate the dimensions of women’s struggles and everyday experiences in these societies (226). As Spivak points out in “The Politics of Translation,” “if we were thinking of translating […] Emily Dickinson, the standard for the translator could not be ‘anyone who can conduct a conversation in the language of the original (in this case English)’” (188).

 

Rich’s detour to Atwood’s novel about a white woman who, as white women do, finds herself by “going back to nature” in a Rousseau-esque, George-Catlin-esque appropriation of the culture, skills, knowledge systems, and survival strategies of the Creek nation in Canada is particularly troubling because she does not bring up white women’s role in genocide and land theft from First Nations; nor does she acknowledge the violence of the anthropological technology of the “Indian photographs” (240-241). For a useful critique, see contemporary artist Kent Monkman’s work (he has Scots-Irish and Creek ancestry).

Moreover, Rich’s quotes from ancient India, ancient Egypt, ancient China, and ancient Greece are all actually about a tiny elite of rich women, and should not be taken to represent all women in that time period. Rich mourns that women have been historically saddled with the difficulties of raising children and being full-time “homemakers” (236). She describes the specter of “women going mad ‘for want of something to do’” (229). In contrast, Shange is far more concerned with the history of Black American women, who have always had to fight for the right to mother their children and make time to do so amidst enormous work demands.

This history is rooted in from the separation of mothers from children under American white supremacist slavery, a system in which women were an equal or majority proportion of field laborers outdoors, in addition to maintaining food and households in their communities and kinship networks. The experiences of women who worked in white women’s households trouble the distinctions between home and workplace. Aside from the feeling of being trapped in the legal institution of marriage, enslaved women were struggling to have their family relations and marriages, as well as their rights as mothers, be legally and socially recognized and respected at all; and to this day Black American women struggle to live peacefully with their partners without racist government intervention tearing them apart, for instance through police brutality and mass incarceration.

This is a far cry from the enormous privilege of the “pattern” of “close” and “long-lasting” bonds between mothers and daughters in intimate domestic spheres that Rich attributes as “characteristic of the period” of “the 1760s to the 1880s” (233). She does not address the experiences of millions of enslaved women, thus implying that there is something un-“characteristic” about their struggles. Here she loses an opportunity to interrogate her own white privilege as a woman who identifies with the boredom of the household and child care, but free of work demands due to perceived purity and fragility.

On 225, Rich suggests that institutional motherhood incompatible with wage-earning (or more generally, outside-the-house-working) motherhood: “Institutional motherhood makes no provision for the wage-earning mother.” As proof she draws on the constraints given white women and elite women historically. This contrasts with Shange’s work, which is deeply focused on the tangles between women’s unpaid labor as exploitation and their labors of love, and which is invested in contributing to the restoration and new creation of destroyed kinship networks.

 

Through the lens of Shange’s work, it may be worth asking whether institutional motherhood is, for most women, anything but incompatible with being mother-workers who are expected to maintain households, provide sexual labors, and replenish the labor force by raising children, all unpaid, at the same time as working outside the house, for the maintenance of other families’ households, and/or in paid work.

For instance, as Dorothy Ko has pointed out in Cinderella’s Sisters, most ancient Chinese women were peasants who did not undergo foot-binding, in large part because they had to be able to work. Part of what made foot-binding a status symbol was that it meant the woman with “delicate,” “small” feet had servants with “ugly,” “big” feet who waited on her and did her housework for her. In the institution of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman has pointed out, the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem conscripted enslaved women’s wombs as factories to reproduce an unpaid labor force.

 

For most women today, it remains true that we are expected to raise healthy children and bring pregnancies to term while at the same time working around the clock. What would it look like if Rich’s analysis explored the ways in which institutional motherhood is built around the working mother, with rare exemptions for a small elite who thus have a deep personal stake in maintaining patriarchy, racism, and class oppression?

Annabella’s Blog Post 1 – Motherhood and culture

by Correa-Maynard 1 Comment

“Loneliness, unshared grief, and guilt often led to prolonged melancholy or mental breakdown.

If the frontier…

offered (some) women

a greater equality and independence, and the

chance

to break out of more traditional roles, it also, ironically, deprived many of the emotional support and intimacy of female community; it

tore them from their mothers.”

I rearranged a portion of the extensive paragraph Rich wrote in “Of Woman Born” with the intention of allowing openness to a culture of mothers, who would not have been previously allowed to share in the loneliness and grief because of Rich’s original white European perspective. I intentionally chose to break up lines from the paragraph, such as “if the frontier” to show that the frontier is borderless and can extend to other mothers and other cultures. Additionally, I decided to leave “tore them from their mothers” as the final line because of the literal and figurative implications of the phrase. Where do we see that through our own experiences, but also where have we seen that throughout history? Essentially, I felt that this version serves as a historical reference, but also an openness to contemporary motherhood.

I was particularly struck by this quote from Adrienne Rich’s “Of Woman Born: Motherhood and Daughterhood” not only because of what it stated, but also because of what it did not state. I was able to resonate with Rich’s opening words regarding the adoration she had for her mother’s body as a sort of mirroring of her own. However, Rich speaks from a white, mostly European cultural connection toward motherhood – one that I, as an Afro-Latina, do not connect to. I found that this cultural disconnect was apparent, particularly on page 234 when Rich describes the immigrant European diaspora mother experience as one riddled with loneliness and isolation.

I understand Rich’s contributions to feminist theory were radical at the time – considering the fact that she came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s – but I feel as though the diaspora of non-European cultures is non-existent. What about the narratives of motherhood that existed during the slave trade? What about the narrative of motherhood that existed during mass genocides, essentially eradicating generations of motherly history? What about the narratives of mothers who were born without ever knowing their mothers?

“Emergency Care of Wounds That Cannot Be Seen”: Healing Justice & Ntozake Shange (Event)

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Free and open to the public!

In the spirit of writer Ntozake Shange (BC ‘71), whose works explored indigenous, black, and folk ways of healing from both immediate emotional wounds and the transgenerational psychic pain wrought by legacies of patriarchal white supremacy, we invite you to a night of conversation, reflection, and embodied practice. According to cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer Cara Page, who coined the term, “healing justice” is a framework that  “identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence and bring[s] collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.” Working with Cara Page, choreographer-writer Ebony Noelle Golden, and Educator-herbalist Tiffany Lenoi, this space introduces attendees to healing justice practices that can promote individual and communal healing and transform the ways we work together. This is the first event of the Healing, Creativity, Envisioning Freedom Project  #ShangeMagic

October 1st, 6pm – 8pm  *  James Room, Barnard Hall, 4th floor

PARTICIPANTS (speaker bios available here)

Cara Page, cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer who coined the term “healing justice”

Ebony Noelle Golden (founder of Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative)

Tiffany Lenoi (of Harriet’s Apothecary)

Moderator Vani Natarajan, Research and Instruction Librarian in the Humanities and Global Studies

**You are welcome to write a blogpost about this event for an Extra Credit / Wild Card blogpost**

Post #1 — One Bloodstream, Two Inheritances

by Eliana 1 Comment

“I am talking here about a kind of strength which can only be one woman’s gift to another, 

the bloodstream of our inheritance. 

Until a strong line 

of love, 

confirmation, 

and example 

stretches from mother to daughter, 

from woman to woman across the generations, 

women will still be wandering in the wilderness.” (246)

 

My arrangement of the lines forces the reader to meditate on the importance of intergenerational love, confirmation, and example paved by a unified line of women throughout time. The breath also shifts the reader’s attention to the power of this intergenerational mothering line being a strong one — which is what spoke to me about the passage as a whole. 

 

In my case, I’ve received the gift Rich describes here twofold. Of Woman Born helped me understand why, throughout most of my life, I’ve considered having two moms to be a superpower. The inherited gift of strength, passed down to me from both of my parents, has allowed me to become my own hero. My mothers, both born in the 1950’s, gifted me this strength after decades of struggling with the “institutionalized heterosexuality” (218) identified by Rich, coping with the reality of starting a unified life as religious queer women. My mothers both follow the paths of the “unmothered” (243) as described by Rich, having lived most of their lives without their own mothers. This path is one of pain turned fortitude, throughout their motherless process of coming out and building their own family, after the birth of my sibling in 1994. Thus, they carry with them both hardship and immense courage which stretches proudly from mother(s) to daughter. My line of generational inheritance may not be as refined as Rich describes, but it’s just as unified and just as strong. This line comes from both of my mothers, and it’s for me to pass on to my daughters and their daughters. 

 

My mothers treat their title as “mother,” fittingly, like most queens treat their crowns. If ever I refer to one of my parents by their name instead of “mom” or “mommy,” I know I’ll be met with the same do you know how hard I worked to become your mother? that I know all too well, and have grown to love. The labor being described here is not that of pregnancy, suggested by Rich, but the labor of facing intolerance. This is a way in which Rich and I divert. In my poetic rewrite of the quote, the breath and spacing I chose pair bloodstream and inheritance, placing them in an unexpected juxtaposition; my inheritance has little to do with my bloodstream but it’s still strong. I disagree with the notion that “probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies.” (225) Much of what runs through my inherited bloodstream is unknown; anonymous donor #138 may have given me wide brown eyes, but it was my mothers who taught me to see. They taught me to love through the greatest process of confirmation and example – greater than I could have imagined.

Taylor Post 1: Epistemological Violence & “Going Home”

by Thompson 1 Comment
Excerpt From Wretched Of The Earth p. 210
Colonialism is
         (not)
     satisfied
                   merely
 with holding people in its
 grip and emptying the
native brain of all form and content.
By a kind of perverted
logic,
it turns
to the past
of the oppressed people, and
dis           torts,
   d i s
      f i g u r e
   s,
and destroys it.
This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.
Why I formatted the way that I did:
I tried to organize the poem on the page to reflect the way my body read the words. The way I annotated the page, I thought first that the following paragraph was to be about ‘What Colonialism Is’. It was, instead, a paragraph on what colonialism is (not). It opened up questions in me around what would ’satisfy colonialism’ and by extension, what would satisfy larger iterations of capitalist settler colonial logics in the country we live in here. I couldn’t stop thinking about how voracious a system this is, how gluttonous and ridiculous and alienating it becomes. How often it distorts the ways I am able to understand the world and the way I want to move through it.
Epistemological Violence & “Going Home”: 
    The passage I chose is talking—to me— about the many forms of epistemological violence constituted through colonial logics. Epistemological violence, to me, constitutes forms of violence which attack, undermine, and erase the ways people understand the world and peoples ways of knowing. When our ways of understanding and translating the world are distorted, it makes it harder to think reflexively, to (as Cherrié Moraga reminded us last week in her BCRW interview) “go home” to one’s origin stories and work out what must be worked out. Perhaps that is the point of this specific system of oppression.
    Thinking critically about forms of epistemological violence, my mind was certainly drawn to the prompt quote of this assignment. Ntozake Shange writes in Language and Sound of the ways in which she often wants to attack and deform that language which attempts to attack her—that language being English. It is a language which “perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as he/she learns to speak of the world & the “self” (19). In many ways, the english language over and over again through series of, what Foucault might call, ‘small punishments’, teaches us that the ways we want to express the world has limits that must be respected if we ourselves want to be respected. For example, in many ways, the manner in which the english language has historically been implicated in the lives of my ancestors has been as a tool to devalue their stories. And I feel that pull, that friction. I know that the very language I use to articulate and read maps of liberation in essays, and novels, and poems, has also constituted great violence upon my ghosts.
What I learned to articulate: 
    In this place, if things cannot be articulated in this language, they are invalidated and distorted. When I mean that I don’t have words but I have a movement or a sound in my chest that can tell you everything, it is with the hope that you (can read beyond this place)/ understand. Audre Lorde tells us “that poetry is not a luxury” and I have to constantly remind myself that that poetry can exist outside of this colonizer tongue. That poetry is bigger than my tongue, mouth and body—that it prompts an overflowing in me.

“A Dying Colonialism” and its ties to “Porque tu no m’entrende”- Chelsea Blogpost #1

by Chelsea A. 1 Comment

Every rejected veil disclosed to the eyes of colonialists horizons

until then forbidden

piece by piece- the flesh of Algeria laid bare

Every veil that fell,

every body that became liberated from the traditional embrace of the haïk–

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.

Algerian society– with every abandoned veil,

seemed to express its willingness

and attend to the master’s school,

and to decide to change its habits-

under the occupier’s direction and patronage.

-Algeria Unveiled, “A Dying Colonialism” by Frantz Fanon (42-43)

Reading this passage by Frantz Fanon captured my attention in the way that Fanon details the impact of colonialism on the women in Algeria under France’s rule. The pressures that many Algerian women were faced with between what was their normal ways of dressing and what the native culture accepted, versus what the infiltration of European colonialism deemed restrictive and having tp adapt to the new culture. This passage has added onto my already existing knowledge of what life was like for many African nations under the rule of European powers. And these restrictions expanded beyond the continent as well. Even during the times of slavery and Jim Crow, black women were (and still are) subjected to the European standard of beauty. The way that white women looked and dressed was to be envied and copied.

It’s interesting to see that the pressures of fitting into the societies that white people have crafted, is a dilemma that women of color have been facing for over 400 years now. What was normal for women prior to European contact is now seen as uncultured and barbaric. When white people come into a society and try to change what was already there, it seems that what they bring to a country and its culture is the “right way” to do things. When the European standard of beauty is forced upon women of color, we tend to doubt ourselves and eventually give into the standards. In the case of the Algerian women, the decision to take off the haïk and wear less clothing is like accepting defeat and allowing the colonizer to dictate how women should be allowed to dress. Anything that is traditional is barbaric and “limits” the rights of women.

As Shange says in “Porque tu no m’entrende?”, we must “break through the grids of colonial contrivance and discover who has truly been round and about us, who is round and about us”. This is how I relate both of these examples to my own life. As a curvy black woman with type 4 natural hair living in America, I still face these colonial restraints that stemmed from my great great grandmothers all the way down to me. If one thing has not changed, it’s the fact that we all dealt with the pressures of the European standard of beauty. It causes you to doubt yourself. How will people think of me when my hair is in its natural state? Am I less desirable because I am not on the thinner side of the weight spectrum? Am I not worthy enough because my skin is darker? Should I become something that I am not? These are the questions that I am faced with as I walk through this world. One thing for certain that I have learned from both texts is that the European standard of beauty has always been there, but it is now my job to break the grids of colonial contrivance and love me for who I am.

the most heartbreaking epiphany// a personal reflection on Shange’s “Justice”

by Johnson 1 Comment

“Far/and away/

 the most painful aspect/

 of this wishful absenting of Africans from “our”/own history/is the terrible/

 

isolation 

experienced by those of us/ who are descendants of Diaspora/

In the New World.” (Shange, 125)

 

I met with my father on Monday to purchase my mom’s birthday gift. On the drive home from Best-Buy, we landed on the topic of the historical situations of black people across the Western Hemisphere. How our collective experiences seem to all “begin” at point of pickup from the Bight of Benin and how throughout history there has been a concerted effort to sabotage the progress of African-descendant peoples. There is also a concerted effort to both keep us ignorant of our inherent right to justice and humanity and find a way to gaslight us when we get too riled up, too knowledgeable about our historical situations. In the chapter, “Justice” within Lost in Language and Sound Shange stated, “justice is inconceivable where there is ignorance” (125). This statement reverberated the inner core of my being.

That statement took me not only back to that Monday evening car ride with my father, but also to the moment where I realized the historical underpinnings of my existence within the Western world. I was sixteen years old and really began to lean into my identification as a black person in this country. Where before, I clung to my Caribbean heritage as my most salient identity, now I’d begin to love my Blackness. One day in particular, I was laying in my bed and in deep rumination about my race and then it dawned on me. I had this deep realization that my entire existence within this Western hemisphere was dictated for me generations ago as a result of slavery. I’d like to be clear, I always had an understanding that my ancestors were slaves because of the way American history classes are structured but  my parents’ status as Caribbean-immigrants along with my status as an American person of the 21st century allowed me a level of distance within conversations and interactions with American slavery. In that moment, that distance that allowed me not to get too close to the truth dissipated. And what hurt me so much in that moment, was this deep feeling of displacement, this feeling of true “isolation”, much like what you see in my poetic interpretation of Shange’s sentiment. I was ashamed to not have fully situated myself in that truth until then, but also found myself disillusioned by the progress we have made as a society and skeptical of the reasoning behind my ignorance, for me to have this specific quite affective epiphany at 16 years old. It is from that moment on, however, that I had fully understood the true gravity of seeking out and understanding where you come from as a Black individual.

Like Shange, I still don’t know what that means for justice but I do know it must begin with knowledge production and exchange.

My Take “On National Culture”- Samaha Blogpost One

by Hossain 1 Comment

“On National Culture” 

“The native intellectual nevertheless sooner or later will realize that

you do not

Shaheed Minar in Bangladesh erected in honor of the Language Movement

show proof of your nation from its culture, 

but that you substantiate its existence

in the fight, which the people wage,

against the forces, of occupation.

No colonial system draws its justification from the fact that the territories are

culturally non-existent.

You will never make colonialism blush

for shame, by spreading out little-known cultural treasures, under its eyes.

 

what he [the native intellectual] ultimately intends to embrace are

in fact, the castoffs of thought,

Women resisting during the Bengali Liberation War in 1971

its shells, 

and corpses, a knowledge

which has been stabilized once and for

all.

 

he must go

on until he has found the seething pot–

of which the learning of,

the future will emerge” 

(Fanon, 223 and 225).

For this week’s blog post, I chose Frantz Fanon’s piece, “On National Culture.” It stood out to me because it seemed to have a lot in tandem with what Shange was writing about in “my pen is a machete.” Throughout her piece, she was writing to dismantle the oppressive imposition of the English language unto Black people and those oppressed within the United States, which was evident in the way she chose to spell her words and use breaks that felt familiar to her. Fanon had similar feelings as he continually expressed his discontent with colonial efforts to erase national identities. He suggests that the cultural identity of a nation emerges after its liberation. From my understanding, he poses liberation as distancing one’s  identity from European hegemonic entanglement. He also suggests that searching for an identity solely connected with one’s ancestry and past, may leave one feeling unfulfilled in the present. Thus, he suggests that breaking free from these binary thoughts may foster a new national and cultural identity.

The excerpt I chose to rearrange into a poem delineates these three phases that he speaks in a beautiful way, while depicting the struggle and the extent needed to combat the oppression of not just the English language and art, but European impositions upon colonized people. I inserted a picture of Bangladeshi women carrying guns and protesting during the Bengali Liberation War in 1971. This example resonates with me and this post because it exemplifies radical protest and revolution against the colonial Pakistani rule during that time. I think that it also connects back to Shange’s readings for this week because the liberation war grew out of the Bengali language movement, during which, Bengalis fought for their mother tongue, under Pakistani rule. Thus, all of these moments in history coincide in the way that they struggle and radicalize around an identity and against an oppressive, often, colonial force. This is meaningful to me because as someone non-white born in America and having never visited my mother country, I sometimes debate the politics of  my belonging in the U.S. I think Shange’s rearrangement and ownership of the English language to serve her work is radical and inspiring, and it is a direction towards continuing decolonial projects. Her pen is her machete, and I await to find my own.