Reading Zaki: Week 5

It’s so magic folks feel their own ancestors coming up out of the earth to be in the realms of their descendants; they feel the blood of their mothers still flowing in them survivors of the diaspora.

Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo

In revisiting Vanessa Valdes’ Oshun’s Daughters, I have been able to re-engage with Afro-spirituality as it appears in Shange’s work, specifically Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo. Valdés illustrates the ways in which each protagonist is associated with a Yoruba or Dahomean deity, sometimes representing more than one entity at a time. These depictions of Afro-spiritualist deities are heterogenous in that they activate a range of traditions manifested in African-descent communities across the western hemisphere. Shange does not limit the characters’ embodiments of Afro-spiritualism to singular practices; at times, we see the Oshun of Santeria, the Gullah-Geechee Blue Sunday, or the different forms of Erzulie in Haitian Vodou. In this effort, Shange is honoring the transcendent quality of Afro-spiritualism, in its limitless iterations across communities and cultural contexts.  

we need a god who bleeds

spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in shades of scarlet

thick & warm like the breath of her

A Daughter’s Geography (51)

My project is concerned with the ways in which Shange’s work moves toward depicting such a god “whose wounds are not the end of anything”, who has found her way across continents and languages to regenerate and renew. While spirituality can encompass religion and organized practices of honoring the divine, it also operates in more subtle and mundane forms that may be recognized as secular, for lack of a better word. Afro-spirituality is a notion of the divine informed by Blackness. It encompasses formally recognized religious practices and mundane interactions with the divine or the spiritual. In their heterogeneity, the concerns and functions of Shange’s work depict an accurate representation of Afro-spirituality in its mobile and malleable forms. The very notion of embodied knowledge or carnal intellectualism is a continuation of Afro-spirituality. It is an instinct that is not limited to singularity of practice or form, but finds its location within the vast and expansive context of Blackness, which is  in itself an unstable identity, further complicating and destabilizing the notion of Afro-spirituality. Shange’s poetic interventions constantly grapple with these multilayered notions.

we have a daughter/ mozambique

we have a son/ angola

our twins

salvador & johannesburg/ cannot speak

the same language

but we fight the same old men/ in the new world

A Daughter’s Geography (52)

Any deterministic interrogation of Blackness commencing from a static locus, desiring a stable culmination or conclusion, is bound to collapse immediately upon utterance. Each moment of collapse offers a point of analysis however and can bring forth new exposures of our collective and individual conditions. The fluid motions of Blackness mirror the liquid quality of Afro-spirituality; in its amorphousness, Afro-spirituality molds to the curvatures and delineations of our imaginations and psyches, constantly taking on a new form based on our needs and locations. We may never speak the same language, but we fight similar battles and call upon gods fashioned within a collective imagination.