with no immediate cause/we love men who are always causing

Thomas Allen Harris

TW: sexual assault

There is a poem in Nappy Edges that particularly haunted me. This poem was “with no immediate cause” (pg.114). In the poem, Shange reveals her inner torment with the ways in which women must engage casually every day with men despite the horrors they commit against them:

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten

every 5 minutes a

woman is raped/ every ten minutes

a lil girl is molested

yet i rode the subway today

i sat next to an old man who

may have beaten his old wife

In this poem, Shange points out that the men who create these statistics are not far away and hidden, living in bushes and allys. They are riding the subway, serving you food, holding the door open for you. They aren’t “hiding” in plain sight. They are simply living. We must smile at them and say good morning when we enter the office. We must have them lecture us in classrooms. The frequency of the statistic proves they are everywhere. This is not to make us fearful that these things could happen us (although they can), but rather in order to be social and “civilized” as women, we must tolerate these atrocities and these evil men, treating them with courtesy and quietness.

However, it was not this poem alone that horrified me, but also how it related to the poem that followed. The poem is followed by “the suspect is black & in his early 20’s”, where Shange defends “ours sons” from the way the media seeks to demonize them for their blackness, assigning guilt to any black man who fits the description of “black and in his 20’s”. A strange effect was created by showing men as both an inherently guilty being that Shange feared, to a being deserving of the sympathy and care society would not afford him.

This is the tragedy, I think, of black women in their relationship with black men. We are taught a duty and feel a desire to protect, love, and defend the very individuals who terrorize us. These are the same men from the first poem, who beat, rape, and molest us. We are called to protect them from the violence that they endure from white society, but who protects us from them?

The juxtaposition of the two pieces also made me think about how there isn’t a man I’ve loved who hasn’t hurt a woman, whether it be physically or emotionally. I know Shange focuses on the physical harm men commit, but their emotional violence is just as prevalent and constant. And how at the end of the day, I still am called to be their sister, their daughter, their partner. I have to hug them when they come hug, kiss them on the cheek in the same casual and quiet way. Are we just in love with the masks they show us, the actions they commit that they know will reward them, the fantasies of them we have created in our minds? No man is innocent, yet we are called to also defend them and love them.