Shange Visit Reflection – Iwu #1

UNTITLED (2004) by Lynette Yiadom Boakye

This week, we had the amazing pleasure of meeting Ntozake Shange in person. There’s something almost unsettling about meeting writers, or any artist one admires in fact, in the flesh. I don’t know if anyone else experiences this. As I watched Shange eat slowly, sip quietly at soda, or struggle to find a page to read from, I was interested in what ways I had constructed her as a mythical figure in my head. And how there was also beauty in these little human moments she gave us casually.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that a text has a living person behind it, not just the voice you use to read the text. I feel as if there is a Shange that exists who has my same voice and lives in my head, who is the haphazard stapling of all of the inverses of my insecurities. Someone who is the embodiment of all of the women and characters her text speaks through. And then there is the Shange in the flesh. Someone breathing and alive and with a history that no amount of text could fully translate. It was hard to look at her at times, since my brain was wrestling with these two images. Above is a painting by Lynette Yiadom Boakye that I think speaks to this distortion, at least what I experience, when I meet the art vs the artist.

Although I wasn’t able to attend a lot of the lunch, there were a few things I found very compelling that Shange spoke about. One moment was when I asked her what other mediums she would like to translate herself through. In response, she began describing the creative relationship she had with cooking. She spoke of “redefining food for myself as a woman”. Rather than viewing food as a female duty, she spoke of reclaiming the practice as a way to connect to her body and to her culture. It reminds me in the way women often reclaim things used to chain them as a way to release themselves.

I think one of the most interesting things I learned about her work was the note Jennell made about how For Colored Girls was originally meant to be a story about women of color. Although I value solidarity as a concept, I wonder if in search of solidarity the specificity of our experiences are lost. I think the notion of solidarity also disturbs me through the ways I see antiblackness and misogynoir play out in other communities of color. I personally take a lot of issue with the term woman of color, and have actively rejected that term when people try to define me in that way. Until this class, I believe Shange’s work to be work for black women, when in reality, she is interested a wider sense of healing.