Reading Zake Week 2: “i talk to myself” from Nappy Edges

i can’t quite remember how many questions or journalists or people have happened to me in the last year. i can’t even remember everything i’ve said. i know i tried to convey my perceptions of the world, of men & women, music & language, as clearly as i cd, but poets who talk too much can trip over their own syllables. can become absurd. like the time i told this woman that the most important thing that ever happened to me was my tail-cutting party. or the time i started crying in the middle of a question cuz the person waz so nasty to me i cd no longer speak. he said i had no right to exist/ so i said/ go speak to a rightfully existing person, a white man, maybe. that’s not good press.

…

tz: well. how do you explain loving some men who write & some men who play music & some men who are simply lovable, when yr work for almost three years has been entirely woman-centered?

i can do a lot of things. we all can. women haveta. i waz not able to establish the kind of environment i that my work needed when i read with men all the time. you haveta remember there’s an enormous ignorance abt women’s realities in our society. we ourselves suffer from a frightening lack of clarity abt who we are. my work attempts to ferret out what i know & touch in a woman’s body. if i really am committed to pulling the so-called personal outta the realm of non-art. that’s why i have dreams & recipes, great descriptions of kitchens & handiwork in sassafrass, cypress, & indigo. that’s why in for colored girls…i discuss the simple reality of going home at nite, of washing one’s body, looking out the window with a woman’s eyes. we must learn our common symbols, preen them and share them with the world. the readings i usedta do with david henderson, conyus, bob chrisman, paul vane, ton cusan, roberto vargas & all the others at the coffee gallery, the intersection, & s.f. state were quite high, but the readings at the women’s studies center, with the third world women’s collective, international woman’s day affairs, with the shameless hussy poets, these were overwhelmingly intense & growing experiences for me as a woman & as a poet.

the collective recognition of certain realities that are female can still be hampered, diverted, diluted by a masculine presence. yes, i segregated my work & took it to women. much like i wd take fresh water to people stranded in the mojave desert. i wdnt take a camera crew to observe me. i wdnt ask the people who had never known thirst to come watch the thirsty people drink.

I am drawn to print media because it exists as a result of us coming together to create something with our hands, and is experienced tangibly, in the solitudes where we meet. I revisited this passage because it addresses writing about oneself, being written about, and writing about others —in essence, the groundwork of all journalistic possibilities.

There’s a tension in the first paragraph that I’ve never thought of before; I was surprised when I saw Michele Wallace’s 1979 Ms. cover, because it was a radically significant amount of “screen time” to give a black woman, especially to talk about her own work. And unfortunately, today we are still focused on the mere incorporation of diverse bodies in our media. But what if the incorporation of those bodies functions to exploit them, as is the case when Shange is interviewed by a white man, probably for some highly circulating and well-funded (therefore “prestigious”) publication? It is mandatory that we write for ourselves. Thus, the creation of zines, independent mags, and other such publications is essential. Whose responsibility is it to circulate them? How do we compare the importance of external voices reading autobiographical subaltern writing to the act of subaltern communities writing themselves? How do we interview without exploiting the subject? Who has the right to witness thirsty women drink? How do we better distribute spaces like the women’s studies center, the third world women’s collective, etc. so more women can experience the feminine and poetic growth they provide? How do we expand the influence of low-or-non-circulating publications made by women and women of color beyond the healing experienced by those involved in its creation?