Reading Zake: This Would Change Over Time

In the following passages from “why i had to dance//” Shange speaks of the relationship between her dancing and her writing process:

this is a critical moment/ when i decided that dance was as important to me as writing/ that in order to write, i had to sweat/ to reach some endorphin high to get to the truth/ which was the word/ this would change over time// (56)

in my early adulthood/ politics and the arts were truly wed at the hip or thereabouts// (57)

our commitment to the movement meant that all our resources intellectual as well as physical had to be dedicated to the liberation movement/ which is one of the reasons i had to dance/ (57)

it is possible to start a phrase with a word and end with a gesture/ that’s how i’ve lived my life/ that’s how i continue to study/ produce black art/ (58)

We return to parts of these quotes frequently in our class discussions on Shange’s work, and I think this is because they allow for a lot of interpretative space. Over the past two semesters, I’ve interpreted these words in a number of ways, but as I think more about my project, I am interested in the ways Shange’s discussion of movement relates to ideas about change and growth. My project is concerned with the ways we can understand Shange’s growth as an artist, as well as the growth of the Black Arts Movement and/or black feminisms over time. This kind of growth can be seen in the case of Michelle Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Super Woman. 

These images represent the 1980 and 2015 covers of Wallace’s book. The 2015 copy includes a Foreword that centers Black Lives Matter and the 1990 Introduction by Wallace titled, “How I Saw It Then, How I See It Now” in which she writes:

It has been my intention in writing this new introduction to Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman to talk about why my views have changed and how I came to write some of the things I wrote in 1978. It has been much harder than I expected. When I first re-read the book in preparation for writing this, my immediate gut response was to destroy the book so that no one would ever read it again. How many black women writers, in the twentieth, nineteenth, or even eighteenth centuries have thought and done precisely this? (1990)

Wallace is not only centering her self-revision and growth as a writer and black feminist in this Introduction, but also pointing to her experience with self-critique, and the potential dangers associated with it. She then evokes the legacy of black women writers within which she firmly exists, and their processes of self-critique, and perhaps self-revision and growth. Wallace’s writing reminds me of the importance of the archive in preserving the edits and revisions of black women’s work, particularly as this manifests in the Shange Papers.

When Shange writes, “this would change over time” in the earlier passages, she could be referring to “the word” or to her need to sweat to “get to the truth.” Either way, she is acknowledging that her needs or her artistry changed with time. She also refers to the ways things were in her “early adulthood” and refers to her “commitment to the movement” in the past tense. Knowing this, I understand the possibility “to start a phrase with a word and end with a gesture” as not only a celebration of movement, but also a celebration of development. “A word” or an idea, belief, practice, etc., is not static, and can result in some kind of gesture of change and growth. As we continue to explore the archives of Shange and other black artists, it is critical that we remember all the ways their “words” end in “gestures” as well as the importance of celebrating our individual and collective growth and development processes.