entitlement: moving beyond the bounds

In the past few days I have been reading Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo along side Aimee Cox’ Shapeshifters: Blacks Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship and  Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, and Cox’ highlighted the role of entitlement in solidifying and validating the black girl’s citizenship. Alongside alluding to the importance of entitlement, I have been able to complicate and  rethink the narrative of black girlhood I have been working with. Firstly, Chapter 4, “Mammies, Matriarchs and Other Controlling Images” of Patricia Hill Collins Black Feminist Thought and Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” have allowed me to think about ways that the black girl body has been gendered and ungendered, which leaves room for rethink the limitations that are presented in my original thesis. Thus encouraging me to expand the boundaries and furthering my analysis by thinking about the ways in which black trans girls narratives are black girls  narratives, which means  reimagining and rethinking  our existences within our specific contexts which Xuela, the protagonist of Kincaid’s, The Autobiography of My Mother allowed us to do via dreaming and time traveling.

Cox’s radical and complex application of entitlement is fundamental to the self-determination and self-definition Shange discusses in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, except it goes into the legalities, what I would like to think of as the externalized factors which causes the internalized impacts that Shange tries combat by providing modes and methods to heal. As stated in Shapeshifters:

“Entitlement typically connotes greed and undeserved  favor when used in conversations that mention Black or poor members of society. This is especially true when talking about low-income young Black women. We need only to refer to the Reagan-era discourse that continues to unjustly haunt welfare recipients who happen  to be young, female, and Black. Entitlement as theorized by Janice-the central figure in this ethnography-and the other young Black women in this book, however, is an empowered statement that disputes the idea that only certain people are worthy of the rights of citizenship and the ability to direct the course of their lives.” (viii)

Kincaid:

“I believe I heard small rumblings coming from deep within Morne Trois Pitons, I believe I smelled sulfur fumes rising up from the Boiling Lake. And that is how I claimed my birthright, East and West, Above and Below, Water and Land: In a dream. I walked through my inheritance, an island of villages and rivers  and mountains and people who began and ended with murder and theft and not very much love. I claimed it in a dream. Exhausted from the agony of expelling from my body a child I could not love and so did not want, I dreamed of all the things that were mine.” (89)

Shange:

“Makin cloth, bein a woman & longin

to be of the earth

A rooted blues

some ripe berries

happenin inside

spirits

walkin in a dirt road

toes dusted & free

faces  movin windy

brisk like

dawn round

gingham windows &

opened eyes

reelin to days

ready-made

nature’s image

i’m rejoicin

with a throat deep

shout & slow

like a river

gatherin

Space” (80)

“i am  sassafrass/ a weaver’s daughter/from charleston/i’m a woman makin cloth like all good women do/the moon’s daughter made cloth/ the gold array of sun/ the moon’s daughter sat all night/ spinnin/i have inherited fingers that change fleece to tender garments/ i am the maker of warmth & emblems of good spirit/mama didnt ya show me how” (80)

The selected speaks to  the right, the entitlement, the various  forms of citizenship the black girls should have access to, the re-magination and the imagination of black girlhood. Entitlement through legalities and through dreams and through being. The bounds of entitlement is mobile as well historical and contemporary.

1000 hours of jazz & blues record I discovered thanks to a friend who shared it facebook