Header Image - The Worlds of Ntozake Shange
The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

Black Intellectuals and Self Care

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Collage for Claudia Jones by Alexis Gumbs

Folks, I had all but forgotten to tell you that, on behalf of the class, I subscribed to the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus, an initiative by  Alexis Pauline Gumbs BC ’08. I invite you to use these meditations as we go through the rest of the year. (I will give out the password in  class). I think they are a perfect compliment to the kind of work many of you are doing.

If you went to the “Who’s going to sing a black girl’s song” event a few weeks ago, you know that Alexis is a writer, artist and intellectual whose work on black feminist intellectual history and theorizing on gender, race, sexuality and love has been provoking and elevating those of us who follow her work. In 2014, Alexis extended her summer freedom school, “The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind,” online with the Black Feminist Breathing Chorus. One thousand people followed her for 21 days as she created breathing meditations and collage art based sources of inspiration close to her. One of the things I love about her meditations is that she reminds us in how many ways the black women we’ve been reading about all semester were thinking of the world in terms we are only gaining words for now. For example, when she notes that, along with her other work, Fannie Lou Hamer was a food justice activist.

From an early email from Alexis:
This winter people around the United States have been protesting police violence by repeating the tragic last words of Eric Garner: “I can’t breathe.” Here in Durham activists have been diligently drawing attention to acts of police violence and harassment in our own community. As an act of love for a community in transformation, local artists Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace are using a technology they call “Black Feminist Breathing” to offer one strategy for how outraged, and exhausted communities can connect to a legacy of activism and build resources for their long-term spiritual, emotional and physical resilience.​

Gumbs, who has a PhD in English, African & African American Studies and Women & Gender Studies from Duke University, began “Black Feminist Breathing” as a personal resilience practice. Instead of chanting mantras from other cultures, in languages she did not know, she decided to meditate by repeating affirmations and quotations from black historical figures, from Audre Lorde and Pauli Murray, to Bayard Rustin and Harriet Tubman, who have inspired her lifelong commitment toblack feminism.

After chanting these affirmations alone in her office for a year, and sharing them at the community events that her non-traditional school, Eternal Summer of the BlackFeminist Mind, hosts around the United States, in Summer 2014 Alexis decided to share this practice online through a daily “Black Feminist Breathing Chorus” which had nearly 1000 daily participants for 21 days. For this meditation series Gumbs’s primary collaborator and life-partner Sangodare (also known as Julia Roxanne Wallace) composed original music to accompany each affirmation. Gumbs also created intricate visual remixes of iconic images of the historical figures that the meditations honored.

The Holiness of a Cookbook

by Nicole 1 Comment

While reading both Shange and Mae’s cookbooks I took time to think about the ways in which cooking is important in my family. The first thing that came to mind is the cookbook that my mother keeps which contains recipes from my grandmother and great grandmother and some of our current favorite dishes. To be honest, my mother really does not do too much cooking, my grandmother was the cook in our household until she passed away. My grandmother is no longer here to cook for us, so having a catalogue of her recipes is like preserving the memory of her existence in our household. Her recipes are proof that she did not leave us empty, but left behind ways of nourishing our bodies. This way my grandmother can continue to fill our stomachs despite her not physically being here. Now my mother’s cookbook, our cookbook, is not the same book my Nana (great-grandmother) used. My mother has updated the book itself, but the recipes on cards and sometimes scraps of paper are still the same. Shange writes that “[c]ooking is a way of insisting on living,” I also think that recipes themselves are a way our elders insist on continuing to live with us after their passing (If I Can Cook/ You Know God Can, Ntzoake Shange, 70). This is how we refuse the idea that black culture is static and was ruptured during the Middle Passage. The fact that black people can pass down recipes and see the similarities in traditional dishes among different peoples of color prove that “[w]e are not folklore,” (Shange, 32).

It resonated with me when I read that Mae does not cook with measurements and relies on the feel of things. Reading this reminded me of what I’ve seen in my own home.

And when I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I van tell by the look and smell of it. Most of the ingredients in this book are aproximate. Some of the recipes that people gave me list the amounts, but for my part, I just do it by vibration.  Different strokes for different folks. Do your thing your way. 

(Vibration Cooking, Verta Mae, xxiii)

In my family’s cooking all of the recipes from my Nana and many of those from my grandmother are without certified measurements. Many describe using a tea cup as a measure. Now, what size tea cup, I have no idea. I believe that is what Mae describes as “[d]different strokes for different folks” cooking,” (Mae, xiii). Deciding to not use measurements also makes cooking a learning experience instead of following someone else’s formula. I believe that this is how the act of cooking becomes nourishment in itself, that making your own food is akin to the magical-like home remedies in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. Not only is the food nourishing, but the process of cooking and creating on your own terms is liberating.

 

Below are some photos of recipes from my family’s cookbook:

 

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(My great grandmother’s recipe with measurements adapted by my mother)

 

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(My grandmother’s recipe)

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(My Aunt Gwen’s Recipe)

 

 

 

La conexión a la madre patria While Living (In Music)

by Yemi 0 Comments

In if I can Cook/ you KNow God can, Ntozake Shange makes reference to the experience of Brixton, London. “When the sun comes out in Brixton, a heavily West Indian working-class neighborhood, all kinda miracles comes about. Colors challenging visions… winter’s mists and rains dance up and down… the heat remind[ing] everyone of home (23).” In a later paragraph she describes the music, “our music” that would blast from the vegetable stands. The two artists she mentions are YellowMan and Youssour N’Dour.

In the process of searching for ingredients of a American type dinner, Zake and her daughter, Savannah, are thrusts into the intricacies of the Brixton market. They experience this transcontinental, transcultural refiguring through people, food, and most importantly music.

Hearing Zungguzungguguzungguzeng by King YellowMan, a Jamaican reggae DJ, completes the experience of food shopping at brixton. The simple rhythm is easy to sway to and calls upon the minds of those listening in order to bridge the now and the then.

“Seh if yuh have a paper, yuh must have a pen

And if yuh have a start, yuh must have a end…

Jump fe happiness and jump fe joy
Yuh nuh fe call Yellowman nuh bwoy…
All a dem, dem have yellow children
Some live a Kingston and dung a Maypenn”

When I researched the music of the other artist Shange mentioned, Youssour N’Dour, I was immediately struck by the song Souvenirs.

What’s perfect about the music video of this song is that the singer himself is caught in this continual moment of recollection. He’s present in the land that his body is physically in (the house/ the pool), but his mind is engaged with a distant location. He can’t shake the thoughts of this place and takes the viewer and listeners through the process of reimagining/ revisiting homeland. What I love is that this act is celebratory and demands the right to be historicized (i.e. when the singer captures a selfie with someone from his vision). That selfie breaks international bounds. Later on in the video the protagonist sings as he looks at photo albums, dvds, and other items that remind him of the place he is deeply connected to. This same process is similar to that of Ntozake when she cooks, writes recipes that call to her ancestors, and pulls the knowledge her daughter will inherit closer by exposing her to these foods.

 

* Date of this post corresponds to my music presentation in class.

studying shange: student interviews parte deux

by Nia 0 Comments

We’ve got a room! We’ve got a schedule! Let’s get down to business!

Reminder: I would like to explore how/why we are”studying shange.” Instead of talking about potential projects (which I am still open to do) we will discuss how students are experiencing this class and reading Shange with “carnal intellectuality” in mind. Students may group together to be interviewed (this is highly encouraged amongst students who read Shange together). The interviews will also attempt to incorporate Shange’s methods into the format. Be prepared to experiment.

Sign Up!

Original “studying shange” post

Creation is everything you do make something

by Melissa 2 Comments

CREATION IS

EVERYTHING YOU DO

MAKE SOMETHING

With this compelling order, I set out to create a zine.

During my reading of Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo, I underwent a series of deeply personal transformations that I wanted to document. I became interested in creating a zine as an archival document. In it, I have included pieces of poetry and stories that I have written as well as pieces written by Shange herself. Creating a zine was a way that I could engage with the work in both tactile and spiritual ways and it illuminated some new aspects of what an archival process means. This archival process sometimes meant reading old love letters aloud. Or cutting out clippings from brochures I had been keeping as souvenirs from significant events.

My guidelines for creating a zine:

  • Everything you do: to walk, and speak, and touch.
  • Make something: rely upon the imagination, engage with memory, insert pieces of yourself into all that you do

The zine has come to life in its own way. It is an embodiment of places, things, memories. It is an ongoing project that I am using to explore different ways of creating literature, encapsulating memory, and fracturing the static notion of time. It has also pushed me to further interrogate the process of engaging with the personal as political and vice versa. How can my personal, intimate interactions with the world be mobilized as political tools?

This process of blending the personal and the political is a prominent aspect of Shange’s work. In this effort, Shange has often mobilized the feminine — imposing it upon the realms of art, politics, movement building and organizing. This isn’t merely a gratuitous mechanism aimed at making a “feminist” gesture, any feminist gesture, but a revelatory process. One that uncovers the deeply feminine impulses behind Black resistance, activism, and healing. These feminine impulses are situated in Black women’s knowledge and world-making practices. How we have learned to grow and survive relies upon the ways in which Black women have practiced knowledge and world-making through their crafting, cooking, singing, dancing, loving, birthing, mothering etc.

For me, a zine presents the possibility to build on the practice of creating and resisting via intimacy and the personal.

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This podcast, by BCRW Research Assistant Michelle Chen, discusses the radical (anti white supremacist, anti classist, anti racist) feminist ideology from which zines have emerged.

“The Power of Craft”

The power of  combining the mind and the body to create.

To do — to make do.

The power of the mind, the eye, the hand and the heart

To make the original connections. 

TO create what is needed: a fire, a pot, a hoe, a knife,

A cup, shelter, cloth, tools.

To grasp

The significance of the power of craft 

Is to be eager to create a whole life. 

 

I found this in a Womanspirit publishing that was released during the Summer solstice 1982 while looking through the Barnard Center for Research on Women archives. The piece describes craft as a process that often melds the spirit and body to the object being created. The crafting process diverges from professionalized forms of creating art and is intuitively resistant to mass-production and manufacturing, making it inaccessible to commercialist impulses of capitalism. “The mind and the hand of the creator is part of the end product — “the spirit” of a work is apparent because of these unbroken connections.” (25).

Zines embody the spirit of craft in these feminine, anti-capitalist intuitions.

Ready, Set, Search!

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Larry Neal as a teacher. Image from the Schomburg Photo division

Our next class will be with Steven Fullwood from the Schomburg, but in our usual classroom on campus.  In preparation for his visit, I’d like you to do an archive assignment that encourages you to use the finding aids we’ve gotten in the past few weeks. You can locate the assignment along with the relevant finding aides in Courseworks (Archival materials folder). Below is my attempt at doing the assignment, so you can get a sense of what I’m looking for. You don’t need to blog your answers, but please do write them down on the assignment sheet.

 

 

1). Identify one Schomburg COLLECTION that you might want to review. (The suggested collections list supplied by Steven is in Courseworks).

Collection name and call number: Larry Neal Papers, Sc MG 344

What, if any, restrictions are on this collection? None that I can find

What is interesting to you about the Collection? Larry Neale was an important theorist of BAM who was in Harlem about the same time Shange was at Barnard and published an edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, which suggests he didn’t entirely ignore women wroters. He also was specifically interested in music and theater and wrote about some of the same musicians Shange cites.

2). Identify ONE item from the Schomburg archives that you might want to see (it can be in the collection chosen in #1 or not)

Item Name: The Rise of the Black Consciousness in the 70’s

Give series, sub-series and item number if available b. 21 f. 2

Why did you pick this item?  This seems to be both about the 70s and written in the 70s, so I’m interested to see if this unpublished essay speaks to what was going on artistically/politically when Shange was working on for colored girls. 

3). Identify ONE item from the Ntozake Shange papers that you might want to examine. (The Pathfinder and Collection list are in Courseworks)

Item Name/Title: Flyers for “Ntozake Shange Poetess” at Experience II-Nu’s Black Coffee House in Boston

Give Box and Folder #s: Box 24; folder 3

Why did you pick this item? I was intrigued by the gendered/obsolete “poetess” in the title and am wondering if “Black Coffee House” is also related to some kind of blackness. Since its a flyer, it might be visually interesting as well.

4). Identify ONE item not from the Schomburg or Ntozake Shange papers.

Item Name: I Heard Eric Dolphy in His Eyes 1988

Archive: NYPL Billy Rose Collection

Collection: Circle Repertory Company Papers

Call #, box or other location information: b. 266 f. 7

Why did you pick this item? It says that it’s an unpublished script “with evaluation.” Interested in seeing an unfiltered response to a work in its early stages.

5). What did you discover about the search engines and finding aides while doing this assignment?

Ntozake is occasionally spelled Ntosake! Also, the search by date function is very useful.

6). What were your frustrations in completing this assignment?

Sometimes the NYPL search engine is very slow and I don’t seem to be able to duplicate searches very well. For example, I wrote down the call number of an item, but not the title, went back to the same collection and couldn’t find the item.

Shange’s Colored Creations March Us Deep Inside The Black Reality

by Yemi 0 Comments

A certain aura of fantasy is present when we read the different spells featured in the novel as well as digest Indigo’s relationship to her dolls and to the greater neighborhood. This fantasy has a mystic quality, a magic that shows through the lives of Hilda’s daughter. Each child crafts their femininity and therefore life in a way that is alternative from their mother’s. This is a story about family, but more so a collection, a community of women.

Shange integrates the possessions of these women:  many letters, instructions for Cypress’ home, recipes, spells, journal entries into the novel perhaps because, as Indigo says, “black people needed so many things.” Our job as a reader is not only absorb the lives of the main characters but also to be engaged in the methods of healing that they follow, which is very much ingrained in these pieces of things. The complete consciousness phrase that Indigo came into was that “black people needed so many things” AND so she would “[make] up what she needed. What she thought the black people needed.”

It is this nature of creation, for self, and also for the communal that distinguishes the development of women. One contemporary example of this is the Neo-soul duo band group Oshun which was created in NYC. Their name and their music work to empower women.

Cypress, Sassafrass and Indigo becomes a text where Shange elucidates the experience of African-American women whose lives (though they might be “stuck”) build on and reflect African values: the tradition of the home and cooking, the legacy that a mother passes through to her children, and being “third-world” descendants in various American states. The lives of these four women happens at the same time a slave narrative unfolds. There is also a tie to Nigerian culture that culminates when Sassafrass performs a dance to shake the spirit of Mitch away (because, according to Indigo it “was the spirit of things that mattered (5).” During her dance, Oshun, a supreme divinity, comes to inhabit her body and her step. Moreover, the importance of deities is represented when Shange includes number eight of Cypresses’ house rules: “8. Don’t touch the alter for the Orishas:” minor Nigerian gods. Perfect enough, the name the duo choose as their title honors the work of Yoruba deities in showcasing the virtue of femininity and holiness of womanhood.

In one of their songs, Gyenyame, which means “expect for God/ the supremacy of God,” the duo sings:

“Orishas, we your teachers, open up your eyes and recognize

It’s a, a reason for the demons

Refuse to comply, speak your mind, don’t abide

We the

Orishas, we your teachers, sister deities, the rivers and the seas

Orishas, your teachers, Queens of Africa, Oshun and Yemoja”

The band Oshun more than just calls upon Orishas and embodies them like Sassafrass, they put forward contemporary ideas of African-American empowerment, much of which stems from consciousness. The following video aims to quantify what it means for blacks to be “free somebody[s] (7)” in this moment in time.

The Daughter Identity

by Nadia 4 Comments

WGSBSFor the past few weeks, I have been thinking about the concept of being a daughter and how that is a motif in Shange’s work. My understanding of the saliency of (what I call) “daughtership” was further developed through my reading of Sassafrass, Cyprus and Indigo and during the Africana Department event “Who’s Going to Sing A Black Girl’s Song?” A Conversation on Black Girlhood with distinguished Africana alumnae Asali Solomon ‘95  and Alexis Pauline Gumbs ‘04.

At the event on Black Girlhood, I asked the alumnae about the connotations the word daughter has. They said daughter denotes duty, great gifts, a claim a
nd aspirational dreams that are given to them by their mothers. These terms Asali and Alexis used are relevant to daughters Sassafrass, Cyprus and Indigo. They all have the duties. Indigo put away childish things, like her dolls, to step into womanhood and Cyprus and Sassafrass have to attract particular kinds of men as future husbands.  They each have unique gifts as musicians, dancers and weavers and they all have to negotiate their mother’s aspirations for their lives and futures.

As I reflected back on each of the daughters’ their relationships with their mother, I realized that much of the mother-daughter relationship is dictated by their relationships to men. Hilda Effania’s letters to her daughters often include advice and warnings about men. Also, when one of the daughters gifts her mother with sexy lingerie, Hilda Effania comments on how their father would have come home more often if she owned this article of clothing.

In thinking about the role of men in mother-daughter relationships, Cypress’ dream made me wonder what mother-daughter relationships would look like if men did not exist – in a world where “there were only Mothers and Daughters” (185). I wonder if the fixation on men in mother-daughter relationships has anything to do with mother’s teaching their daughters about how to navigate relationships with men for their own survival and out of a desire to protect their daughters.

This brings me to a concept which I learned of at the Black Girlhood event which is idea of “mothering oneself” as well as daughters mothering their mothers. As each of the daughters in the novel enter womanhood, they begin to mother themselves through self-nurturing and self-care, especially when their actions and beliefs are contrary to those of their mother’s desire for them. While negotiating the limitations of the mothering their own mothers can provide as they become their own woman in the coming of age process, Sassafrass, Cyprus and Indigo being to take on the role of a mother in addition to that of a daughter as they care for themselves and as they look to have daughters of their own.

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The Personal Is The Political

by Nadia 1 Comment

In my Black Scholar readings and my trip to the Schomburg, I was confronted with the message that the personal is the political. The Black Sexism Debate states,

“We cannot solve our “personal” problems individually, nor by pretending they are not real. What is required is a collective struggle to change the social conditions that create so many “personal” and social problems.”

In thinking about my final project, I have been interested in mental health and mental illness in communities of color and how it is dealt with both individually and collectively. During the Schomburg visit, I came across an article written by Vanessa Northington Gamble which referenced mental health issues in the black community. For Gamble, her “personal” issues battling depression are political. When she was having difficulties at her job due to her depression  she said, “I believed that my performance [work] represented not that of an individual, but that of a race.” This illustrates how mental health issues are political issues in communities of color because individual experiences get generalized to be representative of the whole race. As Gamble also writes about her mother’s suicide attempts and thus, her subsequent struggle with depression, there seems to be the idea that mental health issues are in some way generational and/or genetic.

Gamble's article from the Schomburg archives

Gamble’s article from the Schomburg archives

Gamble invokes bell hooks in arguing that the personal is political. When Gamble wanted to start writing about her battle with depression, her colleague criticized her for: “wanting to put her business out on the street.” However, she counters this by emphasizing that voicing our personal struggles is key to liberation. Gamble says,

“Telling our stories, hooks insists, is a crucial strategy for the self-recovery of black women because it allows us to acknowledge our pain, reach out for solace and find ways of healing. There is no healing in silence… hooks views personal transformation through a political lens. She sees self-hate, low self-esteem, and addiction disorders as reflections of a political system that devalues the lives of black people… Personal recovery, hooks argues, must go hand in hand with political struggles, because no level of individual self-actualization alone can sustain the marginalized and oppressed. We must be linked to collective struggle, to communities of resistance that move us outwards, into the world.”

In my readings and encounters with archival material, I was struck by how the two were in conversation with each other. It is my hope that through my final project that I can bring Shange’s experience and that of other black female artists’ to the forefront so that other women of color can be empowered with the knowledge that their “personal” is political.

Shange’s Sentimental Fiction(s), Healing: The Public vs The Private

by Dania 0 Comments

Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo can be described as a Sentimental Fiction, a word that was used by Rafael Vicente whilst in conversation about his work  “White Love: Census and Melodrama in the U.S. Colonizationof the Philippines” and “Colonial Domesticity: Engendering Race at the Edge of Empire, 1899-1912,” which Vicente framed as fictional work that is very political in that it intentionally uses its plot, its characters, its location to convey and represent structures of power within specific context. And thus does critically and analytically engages the everyday life within structures that seem invisible. For example, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo focuses on the politics of black girlhood and black woman, the politics of class and the manners in which it affects black girlhood and black womanhood. The sentimental fiction higlights that personal is political. It does so by using the work of literature to tell historical and contemporary stories. It foreshadows the difficulty in compartmentalizing or differentiating the difference between the real and the imaginative. And Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo does that. As Indigo transitions or realizes her “womanhood”, “Indigo stood by the door watching this bloodletting. Silent. Pretty Man surveyed the situation. Put the evilest eye he could gather up on Indigo, who startled under the power of his gaze. That was all it took. The men slowly came back to themselves. Looked Puzzled” (38), there is an interruption, an unwanted interruption that, that enables and forces Indigo to see her womanhood in the way that her mother describe. Manhood, steps in and gawk at blackgirlhood, and the black girl is forced to see her womanhood, in the midst of her girlhood, an interpellation.

In addition to speaking to the interpellation of black girlhood to womanhood, Shange touches on the politics of seeking healing and resolution within the public versus private In Indigo’s personal spell “To rid oneself of the scent of evil”, the spell is very individualize, which is a very radical and non-binary way of think of healing. With the personal, the phrase that states “Violence or purposeful revenge should not be considered in most cases. Only during wars of national liberation, to restore the honor of the race, or to redress calamitous personal & familial trauma, may we consider brute force/annihilation”, following the spell makes a clear distinction about how-whether violence should be used, in the defense of the race publicly- matter of the community should be addressed. Which leads me to question to efficacy of having a divide between the public and the private when black girlhood and womanhood is jeopardized?

 

Songs I was listening as read this week’s reading:

Nina Simone- My Father

Nina Simone- I shall be released

Nina Simone- Blackbird (cover)