shange, diaz, and gendered expressions of racial injustice
The portion of Shange’s foreword to for colored girls that discusses the reaction of black men to its circulation reminded me immediately of a 2012 interview with Junot Diaz and the Boston Review, in which he dissects the same 1980s conflagration between male and female authors of color.
“The brothers criticiz[ed] the sisters for being inauthentic, for being anti-male, for airing the community’s dirty laundry, all from a dreary nationalist point of view” (10).
Shange opens her discussion of the gender-wars with an essentially identical conclusion:
“The reaction from black men to for colored girls was in a way very much like the white reaction to black power The body traditionally used to power and authority interpreting, through their own fear, my work celebrating the self-determination and centrality of women as a hostile act” (11).
She soon ends with the simple assertion that black men were threatened by the reality that their bodies, stories and the powers that articulate them were not the locus of for colored girls’ narrative voice. It was “man-hating,” airing the community’s dirty laundry —a community which, with the through-line of for colored girls, was seen as effectively, publicly betrayed and dismantled. The issue with the reaction of these men is their inability to visualize subaltern communities with anything other than “a dreary nationalist point of view.” You cannot dismantle one portion of an oppressive matrix with one portion of the oppressed peoples; it must be dismantled wholly or not at all, with forces other than the master’s tools.
Why I, (and I believe most others) find Diaz’s work to be so compelling and radical, is that he is obviously so structurally aware, and instead of using his maleness to tear down women of color or write stories that ultimately champion dreary nationalism, he dwells in and grapples with his identity, and searches for a language
“ ‘to represent most honestly—represent in the language, and represent in the way people talk, and represent in the discourse—what [he], just one person, thought was a racial reality,’ but without endorsing that reality. [He] indicated that [he] aim[s] to realistically represent ‘our entire insane racial logic’ but in a way that ‘the actual material does not endorse that reality’ at the level of structure.”
He says,
“I remember reading these sisters and suddenly realizing (perhaps incorrectly but it felt right to me at the time) that women-of-color writers were raising questions about the world, about power, about philosophy, about politics, about history, about white supremacy, because of their raced, gendered, sexualized bodies; they were wielding a genius that had been cultivated out of their raced, gendered, sexualized subjectivities.”
This, to me, is the gendered issue in racially subaltern art: the formalized English language reinforces prefabricated models of sex, just as it does with race. “Because of their raced, gendered, sexualized bodies,” women of color must seek intersectional art forms in order to effectively communicate their intersectional identities. The work they create, as Shange created the choreopoem, and for colored girls, is an articulation of blackness exclusively available to those with claims to a female body.
Diaz remarks again,
“these sisters were pretty clear that redemption was not going to be found in the typical masculine nostrums of nationalism or armed revolution or even that great favorite of a certain class of writerly brother: transracial intimacy.”
The responsibility of, in this case, black men, but really all men of color, is to resist the legacy of Stanley Crouch, and to recognize that women’s work has the redemptive potential that is no so easily found in first-impulse male-iterations, and that it is their duty, like Diaz, to continue to truthfully use their experiences to chase this redemption, but in a way that does not structurally endorse them.