Shange Visit

I found Ntozake Shange’s visit surprisingly light-hearted and funny. I was expecting to engage in a strictly academic conversation intermingled topics with feminism, capitalism, systems of gender and racial oppression, and poetry. To my astonishment, we engaged deeply with all these topics with funny interjections of Shange’s real life experiences that were both profound with amusing undertones. For me, this visit demystified Shange and revealed her soft underbelly of hardships tainted with racism and gender discrimination but she was adamant how these experiences shaped her into the woman she is today and did not hinder her. This courageous attitude was inspiring and really stuck with me. However, Shange shocked me when she said that she could not conceive a world without the degradation and subjugation of Black people and people of color. This attitude caught me off guard and discouraged me slightly. If this self proclaimed and famous Black feminist and activist could not fathom a world of complete freedom, then how naive was I? Although Shange stuck with her statement she re-envisioned artwork and storytelling as moments of material freedom and how these moments, although fleeting, can be worth everything. I agree with Shange that her work is exemplary of imagined freedom and healing for Black woman in particular, but I do not agree that this world is incapable of granting rights to every individual and that people of color can only experience power through the imagination of artists. I know that the world will never be perfect, but I do not think that it is imperfect for us to continue to strive for that ideal. I hope that Shange’s visit at Barnard reminded her of the spirit of activism which aroused her in her youth and how she is a role model to women like me looking to change the world.