On Wednesday, September 26, four days into autumn, four days into Libra season, I sat down at a table where the incomparable and irreplaceable Ntozake Shange sat at the head, as the star, with her blond cornrows, pierced eyebrows, cerulean blue nails and eyes gleaming with wisdom and willingness to listen to young girls spill over with love and admiration. Questions about her life and her passions were asked, but two hours could not satisfy all the questions I had in me. I wanted to ask about her travels, the experiences of living in different cities, if she ever doubted the artist’s life, if she ever had extended bouts of writers blocks where language failed her and poetry was not an option. But I was in awe, I didn’t want to talk too much or say the wrong thing.

When I got the chance to sit and take a picture with her, I asked for a hug. But even when looking in her eyes, my tongue couldn’t summon from the back of my throat the gratitude I yearned to express. I wanted to cry and tell her how much her poems, like music, have been the soundtrack to the past four, five years of my life. Her words have reached inside and pulled out from the angriest, tiredest, most impassioned places of my spirit a voice and a vision that has blossomed into fulfilling experiences. My learning a new language, traveling to South America, becoming more invested in learning about and connecting to the Diaspora, has everything to do with Ms. Shange’s writings of other cultures. I remember living in Bahia and reading Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo and then being motivated to take an Afro-Brazilian dance class thinking what would Cypress do?

I wanted to express all these things, but all I could manage was a “thank you so much”, realizing that I’m one of a dozen other gaping girls, one of hundreds of thousands of colored girls around the world finding and losing themselves in the language and sound of Ntozake Shange’s poems.

It was hard to re-imagine the legendary, brilliant, and transformative Shange who is more of a symbol than a person to me, to be a human being that exists in the same room that I exist in. I don’t think I’ve ever had the honor of talking to, let alone eating lunch with and asking questions to any other person whose vast creativity shaped a generation. I am deeply shook and grateful to have shared space with Ntozake Shange. Through her bright storytelling, I image she lived the life that every aspiring creative Black radical woman wants to live: running from famous dance class to dance class (being idolized at each), reading poetry to crowds across the country, and celebrating and conversing with other famous and brilliant minds. I’m know I’m idolizing Shange’s life, but it was magical to see a glimpse of that reality and to see a glimpse of her mind, unedited. She didn’t answer questions like I’d expect, she added brilliant twists. When a classmate asked about different feminisms I expected her to go ahead and trash capitalist feminisms as I’ve seen many other radical speakers do before. Instead, while she acknowledged post-question that not all types of feminism are good or actually feminism, she thought of a world in which different people’s feminisms could converse with each other (not become one another), but form a coalition. She said something like this, “If men get to have the United Nations, we should get to have a feminist coalition.” While she says she can’t imagine a world that without oppression, I would think that a world-wide feminist coalition would be a part of that world. This is one of many of her thoughts that stuck with me past lunch.

“Unexamined assumptions: First, that a “natural” mother is a person without further identity, one who can find her chief gratification in being all day with small children, living at a pace tuned to theirs; that the isolation of mothers and children together in the home must be taken for granted; that maternal love is, and should be, quite literally selfless; that children and mothers are the ‘causes’ of each others’ suffering.”

This quote resonated with me because it highlights an idea that I know I have internalized: the expectation that to be a mother, a woman must give up her self, her personhood, to her child. For many years I committed against my mother the injustice of believing this. My mother loves me and has always wanted to give me everything I wanted and needed. As a result, her love and the pressure to be “the perfect mother” (whatever that even means) overwhelmed her. Read More

“There is much to suggest that the male mind has always been haunted by the force of the idea of dependence on a woman for life itself, the son’s constant effort to assimilate, compensate for, or deny that he is “of woman born.”

This quote stood out to me for many reasons. When watching the entire canon of literary work it seems that humanity is haunted by the woman. From the role of Eve in the Bible as an evil seductress who is punished through motherhood, to the entire genre of film noir, it is clear that men are scared. One of my favorite lines of a Kehlani song, a queer biracial singer, who with no doubt has been inspired by Shange is “And I know every man has a fear of a strong-minded woman, but I say she’s a keeper if she keeps it all runnin.” And although, I agree with this quote and I feel that men in many of my personal interactions have tried to make me smaller out of fear of the power I possess as a dark-skinned black lavender goddess. The complexity of trans men being able to, and having given birth is one we must remember. Not every “female” body is one that holds a woman. This entire article is overwhelmingly cis, and even within Ntozake’s work, I question how trans and nonbinary individuals feel about the portrayal of womanhood. I also understand that not every literary source needs to be relatable to every person.

“Terms like “barren” or “childless” have been used to negate any further identity. The term “nonfather” does not exist in any realm or social categories.

I remember as a child, my parents whoa re still married were separated at one point. My father told me frankly that he felt he lost a part of his life marrying my mother. My father, who at this point had left me at home for months, was absent and had a life of his own from my perspective. While my mother was tethered to me, and although I faced abandonment by both of my parents. My father has never been blamed for anything that has gone wrong in our lives from my extended family. Growing up, I expected nothing but the worst of men. When I was thirteen, I attended my friend Hilda’s birthday party and I could tell her father was a good man who loved her mother dearly. I immediately romanticized this man and in the future any man who did the bare minimum of what was expected of a woman. I have slowly learned that by watching women like my mother, like myself with PCOS and other conditions that make childbirth difficult how little respect we truly have for women. For men, they are not vessels of childbirth. That’s just a fact. But women? We are USELESS until we succumb to being baby makers. This speech by Tracee Ellis Ross was a moment where I realized I might not want to have children, I might not ACTUALLY want to get married, or base my value on these things. And it’s really hard and confusing to ask these questions. I am going to pull this back to Shange, from one of my favorite moments of “For Colored Girls”.

FOR COLORED GIRLS EXCERPT

“but bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical

dilemma/ i havent conquered yet/ do you see the point

my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender/ my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face

my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face

my love is too beautiful to have thrown back on my face

my love is too sanctified to have thrown back on my face

my love is too magic to have thrown back on my face

my love is too Saturday nite to have thrown back on my face

my love is too complicated to have thrown back on my face

my love is too music to have thrown back on my face”

The first time I heard this I cried. I thought about all the love I offer people and how so often I don’t feel there are people there who care for me. In connection to Tracee’s words (which are straight lineage from Shange, I mean cmon shes a trained actress from Brown), I think “My life is my own” and “My love is too/ to be thrown back in my face” all connect to the same thing. Loving ourselves, recognizing our worth and doing the demanding work of taking care of ourselves. I started in one place and I resulted in another. Please bear with me, its how my mind works and a sign of growth I think. This week has been a helpful reminder. Thank you so much. I am so excited to discuss all of this.

A movement/narrowly concerned with pregnancy and birth

which does not ask

questions

and demands

answers about the lives of children, the priorities of the government:

a movement/ in which individual families

rely on consumerism and educational

privilege

to supply their own children with good

nutrition, health care can,

while perceiving itself a progressive or alternative

exist only as a minor contradiction within a society most of whose

children grow up in poverty

and which places its highest priority on the technology of

war.

My decision to turn this quote from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution into a poem was based on the malignancy ingrained in the questions of capitalism and sexism. This excerpt spoke to me heavily because Rich actively acknowledges the power of capitalism when addressing issues of a woman’s body and its relation to society. By integrating conversations of “consumerism” and “government” with topics such as “pregnancy”, Rich is encouraging a holistic approach when addressing 21st century feminism. When constructing this poem I thought heavily about Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story.” Her talk discusses how individuals are composed of complex identities and connections and to reduce someone to a single narrative is to take away their humanity. I believe that capitalism is an all-consuming force and to deny its power would be unjust and ultimately fail to dismantle any systems of oppression. Rich echoes Adichie’s sentiments in her TED talk by refusing to strip away conversations of capitalism when discussing motherhood and feminism.

Furthermore, my stylistic choice in how I turned this quote into a poem was based on words that I deemed the most dynamic. I choose to give words such as “questions,” “privilege,” and “war” their own lines in order to emphasize them. When reading this poem out loud the reader is forced to give intentional breaks and breaths dedicated to these three words. I this because I I believe these breaks force both the reader and the listener to reconcile with these words and think deeper about the meaning behind them.