shange’s transnational inclinations in A Daughter’s Geography

“somebody/ anybody

sing a black girl’s song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you
but sing her rhythms
carin/ struggle/ hard times
sing her song of life
she’s been dead so long
closed in silence so long
she doesn’t know the sound
of her own voice” – Lady In Brown 

(PAGE 2 of TAMARA LEA SPIRA ZINE)

“Self-creation and self-representation of the third world women… complicates representations and challenges a third world woman/woman of color binary.” (Enszer & Beins)

I’ve posited these three quotes together because I find that they effectively represent this incredible desire from and for women of color/third world women to have mediums in which they can be heard, felt, and seen— wherein through representation they can escape for a moment the strictures or biases from label of “third world women/woman of color” and have their personhood recognized. This recognition of our innate personhoods and insistence on drawing lines of connectivity across borders is the world I find Ntozake Shange incredibly dedicated to within all of her works but in specific to A Daughter’s Geography. A collection of poems dedicated to her Daughter Savanna; these poems reach far and wide in terms of subject matter and scope and truly demonstrate Shange’s use of what Enszer and Agatha Beins refers to as “transnational feminist perspective” (24).

Transnationalism by definition is a “scholarly research agenda and social phenomenon grown out of heightened inter connectivity between people and receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states.” Enzer and Beins also draws attention to another “primary use of the term” (24) being actually a “synonym for diasporic” (24). In looking at Shange’s history as one rooted in movement, diaspora, and writing—from her parents’ travels and its impacts on her life, to her own personal travels and its impact on her writing— we find the inherent role Transnationalism plays in all of her texts. In specific to A Daughter’s Geography, Shange quite literally maps out for her daughter through poetry various occurrences that took place both in the past and take place in her present that her Daughter will have to come into contact with. 

I am most profoundly struck by these lines in her poem, “New World Coro”:

“ salvador & johannesburg/cannot speak

the same language

we’re fight the same old men/ in the new world”

“a long time ago/we boarded ships/ locked in 

depths of seas out spirits/kisst the earth

on the atlantic side of nicaragua costa rica

our lips traced the edges of cuba puerto rico 

charleston & savannah/ in haiti 

we embraced &

made children of the new world

but old men spit on us/ shackled our limbs”

“for but a minute…

you’ll see us in luanda or the rest of us in chicago”

In her inclusion of American cities like “Charleston”, “Savannah”, and “Chicago” alongside nations like “Nicaragua”, “Cuba”, and “Luanda”, Shange not only points to a collective and transnational experience of Colonialism and Anti-Blackness and their effects throughout the globe, but she like Enszer and Biens stated above “complicates representations and challenges a third world woman/woman of color binary”.  She foregrounds that these experiences and their effects are bigger than borders could control, and she provides a space for people all over the world despite their cultural or individual distinctions to feel represented and acknowledge their collective experiences of the very visceral effects of Colonialism. She illuminates that it’s deeper than a “third world” problem. Her intentional use of different languages and various references to cities and people throughout the colonized world—as seen in Feminist Publications like Conditions—throughout A Daughter’s Geography, forces the reader within their own experiences of representation to engage with other cultural experiences and employ a diasporic and transnational thought within their experience of the book and hopefully experience of the world.