Suturing the rifts within our narratives
For Shange, the dramatic text serves to engender collectivity by mapping out social relations that counter normative constitutions of sociality and by establishing a differential mode of collectivity and group sovereignty. “The touching that opens and closes the drama creates links across and between the individual poems, enabling individual innovation and expression within collectivity.” (Colbert). The bodies through which touch is transmitted are mobilizing new patterns of relationality that descend from traditions fostered among Black women in the interest of healing from and resisting violence. The choreopoem departs from the idealized white body though a narrative that reasserts Black subjectivity/humanity through the intimacy of touch.
The ways in which pain and sorrow shift and are molded into joy and vice versa through dance, touch, collective relationality creates a fluidity of emotion that mirrors the unstable patterns of racialization and gendering from which Black womanhood emerges. The inherently unstable and wavering aspects of Black identity are informed by the constantly changing and evolving needs of an imperialist, settler-colonialist state. The state’s reliance upon Black women’s bodies to re-establish its power and sovereignty demands an ever-shifting motion and (re)formation of Black women’s placement within complex patterns of social relation. Black women operate within these fluid and unstable networks to make meaning of their own subjective realities. We make use of the inherently contradictory aspects of the individual and collective self to suture the rifts and fragments of our narratives.
From her diasporic consciousness, Shange creates transnational bounds to encapsulate the voice(s) of Black womanhood. “There is no incongruence in her depiction of lives lived throughout the New World: all helong to the American experience. Throughout her oeuvre, then, Ntozake Shange provides her audience with a more full representation of African Diasporic life, suggesting an alternative, more ample definition of blackness.” (Valdes 143). Shange expands and reconfigures languages of the New World to reflect the “fullness of Blackness” (Valdes). She cultivates a collective transnational identity in the voice of “we”; the “children of Africa, dispersed throughout the New World, we once again, regain our ability to live, to move poetry, which is the written word.” (Valdes 138). In the form of the choreopoem – which demands attention to the Black female body, voice, and livelihood – paradigms of poetry and movement are defied. Shange creates an intentional framework that counters anglo-American traditions of language and storytelling.
Keeping with Shange’s tradition of creating transnational Black diasporic connections and relations, I offer this song performed by Martha Jean Claude and Celia Cruz. Martha Jean Claude was a Haitian folk-singer and playwright who lived in exile in Cuba during the Magloire and Duvalier regimes. There, she continued to write and perform music, blending the Haitian and Cuban forms of meringue and collaborating with prominent Cuban musicians and artists like Celia Cruz. Her music continues to be important as a way of exploring Haitian folklore and honoring the Afro-spiritual traditions that have fostered Haitian resistance and revolutionary consciousness across the Caribbean. Her music gives new voice to the subaltern collective and renders legible the struggles and experiences of the Haitian folk populace. This particular song, “Choucoune”, offers a narrative that follows the tradition of a Haitian country ballade. It was adapted from a love poem written by Oswald Durant while he served a jail sentence in 1883. The form of the dark-skinned Black woman, a marabou, or una morena, is exalted and immortalized, becoming “Choucoune”. As pointed out by Dady Chery, the melody of “Choucoune”, adapted from the Haitian folk song “Ti Zwazo” has been appropriated throughout the Caribbean, muddling and mis-crediting its origins within a Haitian, Kreyol, afro-spiritualist, and folk tradition.
Listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gg1WSKIvdBw
Biography of Martha Jean-Claude: http://kreyolicious.com/chapo-ba-martha-jean-claude/1260/
Full original text and translation and history of Choucoune: http://www.dadychery.org/2011/09/24/choucoune-story-and-song/
Original Creole Lyrics, As Written By Oswald Durand
Courtesy of Gage Averill
- Dèyè yon gwo touf pengwen
Lot jou mwen kontré Choukoun
Li souri lè li wè mwen
Mwen di : « Syèl a la bèl moun »
Mwen di : « Syèl a la bèl moun »
Li di : « Ou trouve sa chè ? »
(Chorus:) Ti zwazo nan bwa ki t’ apé kouté (x2)
Kon mwen sonjé sa
Mwen genyen lapen
Ka dépi jou-sa
De pyé mwen nan chen
Kon mwen sonjé sa
Mwen genyen lapen
De pyé mwen nan chen
- Choukoun sé yon marabou
Jé li klére kon chandèl
Li genyen tété debou
A si choukoun té fidèl
A si choukoun té fidèl
Nou rété kozé lontan
Translated from the Creole by Dady Chery
- Behind a thick cactus grove
Yesterday I found my Choucoune
Oh! That smile when she saw me
I said “Heaven, what beauty!”
I said “Heaven, what beauty!”
She said, “Dear, do you think so?”
(Chorus:) Little bird, who listened deep in these woods (2X)
When I think of this
It brings me such pain
Ever since that day
Both my feet in chains
When I think of this
It brings me such pain
Both my feet in chains
- Choucoune is a marabout,
Eyes as bright as candlelight
Her breasts ever so perky
Ah! If Choucoune had been true!
Ah! If Choucoune had been true!
We stayed and talked a long while
This is a personal reflection that came from my engagement with Shange’s work this week:
At home, tea is a communal experience. As the sun starts to set, I am sent to gather citronelle, mélise, tibóm from my mother’s herb garden. The smells of cinnamon and brown sugar simmering on the fire are already drifting in the air. My aunt has brought fèy corossol from the country; for my mother’s nerves and to help me sleep. The neighborhood medicine man, who will sweep our front yard for a plate of food and spending money, has brought me fèy zoranj. I will use these for a bath before I return to Ne Yòk.
But this evening, my mother is making tea. Citronelle, mélise, tibóm, and corossol. I know that I will sleep well tonight. The medicine man has also brought pen ralé, this we dip in our tea, softening it to to a mushy sweetness. We drink underneath the stars, having escaped to the roof where the mosquitos are less of a nuissance. My mother is telling a story about the witch who tried to rob her of her first born child. My sister had been almost white as a baby; my mother had to keep a close eye on her around strangers and neighbors. I am craving mango. I know I will sleep well tonight.
In my shared college suite, I make tea. It is a lonesome experience. This lemongrass is not from my mother’s herb garden. But I am warmed with the memory of our late night talks, telling stories of what it used to be like under Duvalier, what the St. Jean Bosco massacre had been like, what I remember of the coup, who survived goudou-goudou and who we’re still waiting to hear from. I sleep well that night.
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