Nappy Edges: Beauty standards around the world

the daughters believed they were ugly dumb & dark

like hades/ like mud/ like beetles/ & filth…

a daughter convinced her beauty an aberration

her love a fungus/ her womb a fantasy/

left the asylum of her home on a hunch

she wd find someone who cd survive tenderness

she wd feed someone who waz in need of her fruits

she wd gather herself an eldorado of her own making

a space/ empty of envy/ of hate

she a daughter refused to answer her mother’s calls

she refused to believe in the enmity of her sister

The second line was the most important to me. The line alone refers to two determinants of the definition of beauty. Shange emphasizes that the daughter is the individual who convinced herself that her beauty is unwelcome, unusual and far from normal. However, at the same time, we have to think about what or who defines the normal, the usual and the welcomed and who these definition are meant for. In that one single line, we witness the importance of self and social definitions of what and who is beautiful. When consistently looking and seeing beauty be manifested by people who do not look like you, then you come to accept or view yourself as not beautiful.

What I also find interesting is Shange’s continuous refusal to follow the rules of the English grammar. Shange’s style remains just as integral a part of her poetry as the content. In keeping with her focus on the importance of cultivating a personal writerly voice, she uses grammar, spelling, language, and tone to emphasize her themes. As she does in most of her poetry, Shange uses slashes to separate clauses, rather than line breaks. She also chooses not to use standard punctuation like apostrophes, capitalizations, and removes the letters from certain words, for example writing “wd” instead of “would” or “cuz” instead of “because”. This is all part of her mission to express herself the way that she chooses to, not the way that she is expected to by both the confines of standard English and by those who associate poetry with a specific way of expressing oneself.

Though I find this video very fascinating, I am hesitant on the use of the word “unusual.”  Unusual to whom? Why is it unusual? I realize that this video was meant for a certain audiences who are unfamiliar with these cultures, but also Americans have the tendency to “other” anything that is not theirs. Being that this is a topic about beauty around the world, I would have advised against the usage of the word “unusual.”