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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

The Fire Within the Poet

by Hossain 0 Comments

Shange’s poem “Hijo de Las Americas” is a call to collectivity and communion amongst those people who have been affected by English and American imperialism. It is also a call to protecting Black and Brown intellectual thought, which imperialism tries so hard to dismantle and destroy. A poet’s power lies in one’s way to reach the heart with words. to bring commonality and experience across bodies and minds. A poet’s mind, specifically one writing with the consciousness of liberation and collective struggle, is boundless. And this limitless is a threat to imperialism, which is met with violence. In Shange’s poem, Carlos reads the poems which survive the ruins of imperialist wars. He reads them, and his body feels the hurt which pervades the violence against free Black thought. Shange writes:

“carlos reads the poems he can/the rest

were burned by friends/when the security police

la guardia nacional/came looking for a free black

mind/burned poems cannot return/we

must

fix carlito’s leg/he must be able to stand up/…”

Carlos reads what’s left but the injuries of the war, both physical and mental, leave him impaired, searching for something. He reads these poems and awaits to pen his own, “poet[ing] his black black language.” However, Shange notes the importance of collectivity here, denoting that “we” as a community must help Carlos stand up. We must help him be free for him to create in spite of this constant violence and destruction imposed on the world he lives in. Violence against

intellects of color is not something new in the US. It is a systematic cycle of oppression and violence against “free Black minds.” An example which came

to mind as I was reading this was “Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to Younger Negro Artists”,

which was published during the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Bennet, and Langston Hughes were among some of the creative intellectuals who founded and contributed to this magazine. It was dedicated to being a form of Black creative consumption for Black folk and other people it appealed to. Some of the writings within the magazine were odes to women and sexuality, along with poems reveling in queer love and liberation. However, the systematic violence against people of color in publishing always existed. To my knowledge, it is unknown who committed the atrocity, but the Fire!! printing press was burned to the ground shortly after they began circulating. After the loss incurred from that, the writers discontinued the magazine and existing copies are extremely rare to come by today. I think it is poignant to note the stark commonality between the past and present of Black poetry. While Shange uses burned poems as a metaphor for the stifling of free thought and exchanges of livelihood between people of color in imperialist nations, the Fire!! printing was literally burned down for being a threat to white life during the Harlem Renaissance. Shange poses a break to this system of destruction by reminding communities to band together and help one another make sense of the world, when colonialism tries to take that away from people.

To end my post, I will attach the foreword of the Fire!! magazine. While contextually, it serves as an explanation of where the quarterly name comes from, I think it also speaks to what Shange writes about in her poem. She writes about the burning of poems, one of the many fires, which torches black freedom.Fire is power and fire is pain. However, fire is also that which burns within a poet and within a soul; to keep going and to keep fighting.

to see & be seen — reflections on Gardiner and Brown’s revival of for colored girls

by Johnson 0 Comments

“make sure you have eye contact Brianna!”

“what are you looking at?”

“okay, can you look at me?”

“yeah, I’ve noticed that you don’t look directly in people’s eyes.”

 

Image result for black girl eyes"

Hi everyone,

My name is Brianna Johnson, and I am an actress who finds it difficult to maintain eye contact. Why…? you may wonder. I haven’t taken the time to truly interrogate this anxiety in depth, but I know it definitely has to do with an anxiety around fully connecting to another person in space. In a medium like Theatre, I’ve quickly realized this anxiety doesn’t bode well during rehearsals and performances. Thus, I’ve learned to dedicate some of that anxiety I hold around actually connecting with my scene partners into actually leaning into connecting with my scene partners. However, it is no simple act or one that I am always comfortable with. As my training and experiences in acting progress, its become easier and I’ve realized an important thing about the foundational aims of Theatre.

For me, the Theatrical Space should offer people the opportunity “to see” &/or “be/feel seen”. I am only interested in theatrical work that can allow people to expand their worldviews with variegated experiences and or provide a space for folks (both actors and audience members) to feel represented. Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf as a piece of Theatre is premised on this ability “to see” various Black femme experiences and provide a space for black women to “be/feel seen” or as Shange states in for colored girls “somebody/ anybody sing a black girl’s song bring her out to know herself.” for colored girls came into my life at a time where I was incredibly disillusioned with college theatre and its Eurocentric foundations and not only redefined my view of what Theatre could be, but affirmed to me my right of belonging within that space. Everytime I revisit this text, I discover something new about it and something new about my relationship to it.

Thus, to SEE this work in action—outside of performing within it—was an experience that I knew would be enormous for me. Walking out of the Public Theatre on that night of October 17th, 2019, the one word that kept returning to my mind was intentional. I could honestly talk about how obviously intentional and collaborative the directing, casting, characterization, choreography, lighting, sound, and costuming among other production elements was, FOR HOURS ON END. However, we do not have the time or word count for my extensive review of this play. What I will say is that the most striking part of this play, outside of the wonderful casting, was the way that the actresses utilized eye contact within their deliverance of the lines. As an actress, I am cognizant of the power that eye contact can have in really raising the stakes of a theatrical moment. However, to experience this as AN AUDIENCE member in a production of for colored girls was such a striking experience for me. Sitting on the stage, I was afforded the experience to hold eye contact with almost all if not all of the colored women for at least 2 seconds, and it was in those moments that I saw and felt seen in a Theatre but in a different way. In their choice to hold direct eye-contact with me, I found our personal identities as performer and audience member to disappear for a couple of moments and instead we were just two humans, two Black girls connecting– seeing each other for who we are and who we can be for a couple of moments. These moments of intimacy between the colored women and myself, compounded with the experience of seeing the choreopoem play out as an audience member for the first time, emphasized to me not only what Theatre can be but in my opinion should be: “a place to see & be/feel seen.”

It still can be uncomfortable for me to hold eye contact with folks in my daily and Theatrical life. However, with this experience in mind I know the impact that something as simple as eye-contact can do for an audience member’s experience of the show.

 

Women of Color Feminisms: Unseen Digitized Labor and Activism

by Hossain 0 Comments

I found Cassius Adair and Lisa Nakamura’s piece, “The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back: Women of Color Feminism, Digital Labor, and Networked Pedagogy” to be incredibly thought provoking. For one, it made me realize I never really stopped to consider legal “fair use” laws, the labor theft of women of color, and internet consumption in the same vein, before this class. It made me contextualize my social media content consumption, along with giving me hope for how these platforms can be used in the future.

Kitchen Table Press was badass. Sorry if that kind of language is prohibited, but not that sorry. These women (pictured below) founded their own publishing press to protect their intellectual theories, ideations, and stories. It was an invention of survival and struggle. These Black and Brown women participated in the creation of a safe space for the longevity of their geniuses. Adair and Nakamura write, “by reflecting, writing, and speaking about the struggles of producing and circulation This Bridge, the members of Kitchen Table Press aligned their emotional, intellectual, and distribution activities as labor” (265). These women fought for their own structure of publishing and reclaimed the metaphysical, mental, and emotional labor, along with the academic production of their own works.

screengrab of @wellreadblkgirl's tweet of this image.

“It was published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Beverly Smith, & Hattie Gosset) in ’83).

The image I have inserted above of Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Beverly Smith, & Hattie Gosset is a widely circulated image that pops up, if you Google, “kitchen table press.” However, I use this screen grab intentionally. This picture was tweeted by the Twitter account @wellreadblkgirl. I had no idea this page existed. I attached a link attached to the image below, which describes the bio of the page, if folks want to check it out. The bio reads, “Well-Read Black Girl: Book club turned literary festival…Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves.” I include this and point out that this account tweeted the image of the Kitchen Table Press because I feel like it’s a perfect example of the coincidence of This Bridge and digital consumption and activism. Black women and other women of color can utilize platforms to bend to their principles and lived experiences detailed in these scholarly works, while educating and sharing with the masses. It also allows for younger women to be empowered by these examples and to see issues surrounding race, gender, sexuality and other intersections of identity to be topics which they can theorize and discuss as well. These kinds of accounts and platforms dismantle the monolith of academia. However, Twitter is another coroporate conglomerate which stands to gain compensation, as opposed to the individual. I wonder what alternative, non-corporate platforms of sharing these kinds of thoughts can be imagined to look like.

While this is a much more complicated issue of the violent history of uncompensated labor and practice against women of color, this kind of knowledge dissemination and creation of networks allows for a new understanding of how education like third world feminisms can reach the “global cultural flow,” as anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls it. I remember learning about his theory of “technoscapes” in one of my anthropology classes., where he uses it to describe and understand the global economic and cultural flow through different disseminations of knowledge. His term is one in which the increasing speed and advancement of technology can help understand the “increasingly complex relationships between money flows, political possibilities, and the availability of both low and highly-skilled labor” (Appadurai, 298). This can help us better understand how Adair and Nakamura characterize the “Internet [as] animated by cultural and technical labour” structures (263). This is not just a phenomenon limited to America or women of color feminists within the States. The Internet is just a paradoxical example of simultaneous (in)/visibility of the theft of labor and labor divisions created for people of color across the world.

However, as I end my post of rambles, I wonder if a hegemonic Black feminist and third world feminist discourse can be created with the Internet. Edward Said’s Orientialism relies on European hegemony being consolidated through the constant circulation of Western scholarly discourse. Taking “technoscapes” into consideration, a Black/women of color feminism hegemony is not impossible with the use of social media. I use the word hegemony because my vocabulary currently lacks the vernacular to describe a dominant society based on the principles of revolution and freedom. While I understand this issue is way more nuanced than the points I offer, I wonder and yearn to be part of that kind of world. If only…

Feminizm Ve Tarih — Historical Narratives From New York to Eastern Anatolia

by Eliana 0 Comments

When evaluating my own roots, as Shange often pushes me to, I turn to the Turkish academic Ayşe Gül Altınay. Professor Altınay, a personal feminist exemplar, was recently arrested and sentenced to two years in prison after signing a petition criticizing the Turkish government on behalf of the Academics For Peace Group. This serves as a case study in governmental treatment of pedagogy worldwide, and how American challenges of criminalizing, not just bodies, but ideas, are not uniquely American. Today, American discussions of the federal government dictating which news is “fake” and “real” are deeply intertwined with conversations on the mass incarceration, as political power structures force marginalized communities deeper into society’s margins. One can criminalize opposition and create bureaucratic barriers between a writer and publisher, but one cannot stop individuals from sharing their ideas to counter hegemony. 

Last Fall, Professor Altınay gave a lecture on “Bridging Academia and Activism Through Gender Studies,” where she both gave an overview of the feminist movement in Turkey and reflected on her own work as a scholar of gender and sexuality studies in Turkey. The history of female-identified Turkish activists fighting for change is being gradually erased over time, and one can view the treatment of their history as seemingly disposable in the eyes of the government and educators. Gender and Sexuality scholars such as Professor Altınay have been discovering pre-existing Kurdish and Armenian women’s organizations from the times of the Turkish feminist movement, which were excluded from the mainstream documentation of the movement. 

“Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you.” – Gloria Anzaldúa

For Anzaldúa and Altınay, words represent a lifeline. For those fighting tirelessly amidst systemic oppression, writing one’s own history is essential to survival. Complacency emerges when the Third World Woman is spoken for, as these narratives represent the sanctity of her own voice. Through their fierce attempts to safeguard the written word, from eastern Anatolia to New York City, writers like Altınay and Anzaldúa work to reshape and reclaim historical narratives.

Taylor Post #6

by Thompson 0 Comments

From This Bridge Called My Back, Writing By Radical Women Of Color, Cherrié Moraga writing a letter to Barbara Smith about Moraga’s experience at an Ntozake Shange concert:

“There, everything exploded for me. She was speaking a language that I knew—in the deepest parts of me—existed, and that I had ignored… What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother—the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems….The reading had forced me to remember that I knew things from my roots… I knew that then, sitting in that Oakland Theatre (as I know in my Poetry) the only thing worth writing about is what seems to be unknown and therefore fearful (Cherrié Moraga, 31)”

I think that this reading really tied together a lot of moving parts I have been negotiating in our class. For my post I’d like to facilitate a sort of close read of this quote and connect it to some other parts of our assignment for this week as well as the preceding assignments we have had this semester.

Of course it is important to recognize that centrally this quote by Cherrié Moraga, co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back (This Bridge), is speaking directly to the subject of our study, Ntozake Shange. Moraga goes to an Shange concert and is moved. Moraga talks about this movement as something that comes from the “deepest parts” of her, from her “roots” —the way the comment is framed makes me understand that roots and deepest parts simultaneously have to do with the literal deepest parts of her psychic self and also from the roots that constitute her mother and aunts, and perhaps her ancestors.

 

This brought up for me, the content of “For the Color of My Mother” an essay that opens This Bridge by Moraga. In the poem, Moraga speaks of a dream she has in which her mother’s head is being passed around a circle of brown women. To me, based on the way the essay/poem is crafted, it tells me that the dream may have been about the responsibility of birthing into the world what only a brown girl can. It was about rupture and the need to make what spills from that rupture be something that can combat the silencing of brown women globally. It is a responsibility that does not come out of nowhere, it comes from her mother, it comes from her roots.

 

What spills from that rupture, that combats the silence, may in fact be Moraga’s own voice which she says she denied from her brown mother, her brown self. What follows this comment is the idea that she had only claimed the white language from her father and that she needs to pick up the brown poetic language of her mother. This reminded me of the way that Audre Lorde constructs the idea of the“white father who:

  • tell us to “rely solely upon our ideas to make us free”
  • “distorted” poetry into “sterile word play”… “in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.”
  • “told us, I think therefore I am”

In “Poetry is not a Luxury”, Lorde writes of this figure in contrast to “the black mother in each of us” aka, “the poet” in each of us  who “whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free”. This part of “Poetry is Not A Luxury”, helped me frame and understand Moraga’s comment that the white language her father gave her cannot “speak to the emotions in her poems”.

Finally, I’d like to look at the last segment of the quote that says that the real need in her poetry is to explore things that are unknown and fearful. This reminded me of Shange’s quote in Language & Sound where she writes: “The catastrophe of ignoring the unfamiliar, the exiled, the forgotten, is more than a bit of wrestling with “something missing”, it is the terror of becoming the embodiment of our own folklore set in time, and not defined by our own terms” (133). I think ideally this is a quote by Shange that I would like to continue to explore over the remainder of the semester because it really speaks to the politics of fear that I am interested in in Shange’s work and it also speaks to the idea the importance of self definition in a country, in a language, that has historically worked to render us silenced and a mere caricature of ourselves. It also helps me think about the stakes of the project that we are engaging in, of attempting to write and record and archive the truth of our lives and our connections to each other, so that they don’t become distorted by a culture dominated by white supremacy, so that they don’t  become distorted by a university dominated by whiteness.

 

And to connect it to the separate piece we read for class today, “The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back: Woman of Color Feminism, Digital Labor, and Networked Pedagogy” I think I’d like to think momentarily about the pedagogical framework that This Bridge provides the reader with, it is a pedagogy through which the reader and educators can develop their own strategies for growing and helping others grow. If we observe fully the tenants expressed in the essays and poems in the book, how does that change regular and normative curriculum plans and the pedagogical approaches of a given class or social circle? I think I have seen classes function that propagate the pedagogical reference points brought to bear in This Bridge and those classes have without fail changed my life. I wonder how those classes in the past and how this class now are changed by bringing the pedagogy of This Bridge into the digital sphere?

 

I’d like to leave the comment with a picture. Below you will find a picture I took of a painting I painted my senior year of high school in 2016 after reading through This Bridge for the first time. I was moved and spinning with information and poetry and truly, I was moved beyond words. I knew that I had to figure out how to embody what I had felt and what I was processing someway and I chose an acrylic medium to express the movement I was experiencing:

Painting by Taylor Thompson '20 depicting an interpretation of the cover of "This Bridge Called My Back"

May 20, 2016 Chicago, IL

Painting based off of the cover of the original This Bridge Called My Back by Johnetta Tinker.

 

Taylor on Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Saltwater Apprenticeship” Lecture at Cooper Union

by Thompson 0 Comments

On Tuesday, November 6th , I attended a lecture by Alexis Pauline Gumbs at the Cooper Union. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a black feminist scholar and poet and a graduate of Barnard College ’04. Her work has been really important to me since I was in high school when I stumbled upon her Dissertation “’We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves’”: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996. The dissertation focuses on the pedagogical implications of the work that late 20th century black feminists cultivated as well as the politics of feminist publishing and Black queer survival strategies.  Cooper Union, NYU and Columbia University are hosting her this week in a trilogy of free lectures concerning her work in black feminist studies.

Her lecture at Cooper Union was Saltwater Apprenticeship: Black Being Beyond the Human. Gumbs is engaging in a project of trying to negotiate her relationship with saltwater and her saltwater relationships—that is, those that are born of sweat and tears. To do that, Gumbs decided to look at other mammals who are similarly hunted and endangered and who have mastered the art of breathing in saltwater. The lecture focused on the work she has begun to engage in concerning Marine Biology and the history, life and survivals of Marine Mammals. She concerns herself with the ways in which the systems of oppression which threaten the survival of Marine Mammals are co-constructive with those systems of oppression which threaten the survival of black folks. She also looks at different categorizing narratives of marine mammals which sound frighteningly similar to the deeply racialized categorizations of black people within white history and STEM texts.

What I found most salient about her lecture as it pertains to our class are two central themes and lecture points in her talk. First, she talked about the sediment at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. She talked about what lies there: So many of our ancestors. She urged the audience to understand that if so many of our ancestors lie there, there must be wisdom in the saltwater. She said “don’t sleep on sediment, at the bottom, knowledge grows”. This comment of course drew me to all of the dialogue we have seen in our texts surrounding the roots of people of color and the knowledge that grows at the roots of people.

Another even more salient discussion she had in the lecture was surrounding rituals. During the question section, someone asked her about her process in writing. She talked about how she gets up at 4am, each morning she can—when people cannot and will not dare disturb her. When she wakes up, she likes to engage in a series of “rituals”. Those rituals included chants that she says to herself in the mirror and breathing exercise, as well as visualization exercise. Her vision practice was particularly important as she spoke of sitting down and visualizing “traveling [somewhere in her mind and imagination] to access the ceremony I need to create for myself and for us”. For example, one ceremony she imagines is a space in which she is spending time with her sister and her nieces and experiencing joy with them.

Her description of the importance of rituals in one’s life to ensure that she grounded and connected with the project of liberation really reminded me of all of the rituals we saw in Sassafras, Cyprus & Indigo. It certainty made me think critically about the rituals that I perform, which ones I know about and practice deliberately and which ones I just do within out realizing it. It made me think of rituals that are perpetuated, for better or for worse in classrooms as well.

At the end of the day, the lecture that I was at was a classroom and we were in an academic building where regular lectures happen each day and where lectures were happening in the room over. But there was something very different about the experience in the space that night. One difference is that each time she would deliver a section of her lecture, as a repeated ritual, she would ask the entire ‘class’ to take a group breath. That was something really radical to experience and something I haven’t had a teacher ask the class to do since high school. I’m not completely sure what to do with the experience yet or how to articulate fully the pedagogical implications of the constructed rituals of her ‘class’ but I certainty believe that the experience opened me up to thinking critically about classroom rituals. I think it would be a really interesting line of discussion to critically approach, in our own class, the rituals we can bee seen performing within our classroom and within other classrooms we engage in.

 

For more info about Alexis Pauline Gumbs: https://www.alexispauline.com

For info about her lecture Series:

-NYU: Nov. 6:

https://tisch.nyu.edu/art-public-policy/events/-with-our-freedom—an-oracle-of-june-jordan

-Columbia: Nov. 7:

http://oralhistory.columbia.edu/calendar/necessary-as-water-queer-black-ceremony-and-the-depth-of-listening-gn5c3

To access Alexis Pauline Gumbs Instagram: @alexispauline

 

The Costs of Liberation

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Barbara Smith, Black Feminist institution builder

As we have been talking abut the labor of printing and digital expression vis-a-vis the Adair/Nakamura essay, I thought it pertinent to point your attention to the activism around creating a retirement fund for black feminist Barbara Smith, who was a co:founder both of The Combahee River Collective AND Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.

This is not a fundraising post, but a reminder that influence and even fame don’t always put food on the table and that caring for the elders who uplifted us is also feminist/activist practice. Very successful feminists like Ntozake needed a circle of care and support as they got older and unpaid /invisible labor isn’t just theory!

Shame and Shameless

by Correa-Maynard 0 Comments

I recently came across an interview that Synne Rifbjerg had with author Zadie Smith at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark in 2017. I’m fascinated by Zadie Smith’s ability to understand the human psyche; I chose this interview because I think there is a pretty significant crossover between shame, writing, and publishing. 

 

The first question that Rifbjerg asks is “What is shame?” to which Smith replies that shame “gets a bad rep these days.” Smith otherwise implies that shame has a negative connotation where the debilitating aspects of shame outweigh the potential for shame to allow you to “propel you on to something.” 

In listening to how Shameless Hussy Press was founded in 1969, I was interested in how Alta settled on the name. She mentions that along with other writers, she had incredible difficulty in getting published. Originally, the press company was supposed to be titled Sisters in Struggle (supposedly to highlight the press company as an alternative for women who were trying to get their work published). However, Alta later changed the name of the press to Shameless Hussy. To me, it seems that Alta was more focused on transforming the “struggle” into an action which, in a way, reclaims the shame surrounding marginalized people who wanted to put their work to print but weren’t given the opportunity to. This is consistent with Smith’s interview where she mentions that there is a “Shame of not being understood, or not being able to make yourself understood is kind of a corrosive type of shame.” Alta suggests that the shame of not being understood challenged her to make her own publishing company, where she was allowed to be shameless. 

 

Furthermore, alternative publishing companies were motivated by the corrosive types of shame that can debilitate writers and began to organize publishing companies that were shameless. This Bridge Called My Back is certainly another example of the intersection between shame, writing and third world feminism. 

 

Yet, Alta mentions later in the interview that women destroyed her machinery and burned all of her books. In response, both Alta’s daughter Lorelai, and the interviewer Remi concur that women were threatened by a feminist press. What’s evident to me is the duality of shame, particularly the duality of being shameless. In this case, these women who destroyed the collective works of these authors, writers, and poets were entirely shameless. In fact, the act of destroying and burning books is reminiscent of when Nazis burnt books as a form of religious, and cultural censorship. According to Zadie Smith, “to be shameless is to be very very dangerous.” In turn, Alta and Shameless Hussy Press were able to internalize the shame imposed on them by women and continue to create work that threatened the status quo. That too, is dangerous, considering the fact that their physical being was being threatened. 

In conclusion, shame and being shameless, can both help and hurt depending on the situation. I find that Smith’s words allow shame to come to the forefront of emotions that are associated with writing rather than just a deeply internalized feeling. 

All you must hold onto

by Keller 0 Comments

The “Black Sexism Debate” issue of The Black Scholar, Vol. 10, No. 8/9, May/June 1979, reminded me of Nikki Giovanni’s remarkable 1971 dialogue with James Baldwin on Soul!, a TV program that has been called the U.S.’s “first Black Tonight Show.”

While host Ellis Haizlip introduces James Baldwin as “Mr. Baldwin,” he introduces Giovanni as “Nikki.” The dynamic between Baldwin and Giovanni is compelling. At times, when Baldwin calls Giovanni “baby, baby, baby,” and “my dear,” it comes across as approachable; at other times, it comes across as rather patronizing. (Affectionately, and perhaps wryly, she responds by calling him “Jimmy.”) He routinely interrupts and corrects her, blurring the line between his status as an elder and his status as a man.

At one point (51:00), while Giovanni struggles to get a word in about Black women and children’s experiences with domestic violence and lack of support from Black men, Baldwin puts his hand over hers, stopping her hand gestures, and says, “But wait, wait, hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone, baby.” He gives her hand a squeeze before gesturing towards himself. “Look,” he transitions, “I’ve had to learn in my own life…” Divested by racism of the social economic ability to provide for his family, Baldwin suggests, “I’m no longer in my own eyes – it doesn’t make any difference what you may think of me – in my own eyes I’m not a man.” Giovanni does not budge, responding at once, “It does indeed make a difference what I think about it.”

Earlier, Giovanni has explained her position (48:11):

Let’s say a guy’s going with a girl. You’re going with Maybelle and Maybelle gets preg­nant, and all of a sudden you can’t speak to Maybelle because you don’t have the money for a crib, right? Maybelle doesn’t need a crib. […] What Maybelle needs at that moment is a man. […] A man […] is not necessarily a provider of all that stuff. […] You don’t have a job. […] Maybelle understands there is no job. But what she needs is a man to come by and say, ‘Hey baby, you look good.’ And Black men re­fuse to function like that because they say, ‘I want to bring the crib when I come.’ You’re never going to get the crib. Bring yourself. […] I’m a poor woman. […] I’m already deprived of almost everything that we find in the world. Must I also be de­prived of you?

Baldwin responds with a memorable quote (50:16): “You can blame him [the man] on a human level if you like, but I think it’s more interesting to try to – you have to understand it, the bag the cat is in.” His riff on the saying is powerful, but where do Black women fit in? Are Black women responsible for understanding both the social reality men have been stuffed into, and their own? Are men and women’s “bags” separate at all? And if there are two cats in one bag, can they not use their combined strength to discover the shape of their social reality together, to break out together? Why is it an inevitability for the bag to be external to the man, to overdetermine the man’s behavior, and yet an expectation for the woman to understand the bag and accommodate its harmful effects on people trapped inside? Why are women expected to perform unique epistemological labor to understand social realities affecting multiple genders?

The question of how Black men can better understand and support Black women’s struggle against oppression never comes up in Giovanni and Baldwin’s dialogue. I was reminded of Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady”:

Bag lady you gone hurt your back
Dragging all them bags like that
I guess nobody ever told you
All you must hold onto, is you, is you, is you

This resonates with Giovanni’s insistence: “You’re never going to get the crib. Bring yourself.” Whereas Baldwin emphasizes a man’s dependence on the bag in which he has been trapped, and thus “the Black man’s” need to be seen as a man by white society’s standards, Giovanni focuses on “Maybelle’s” radical antimaterialist love for her man. He is already seen as a man by the woman right in front of him; if only he would value her perspective just as much as his own, she wouldn’t pay the price of his needing affirmation elsewhere. As Toni Morrison critiqued Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – “Invisible to whom?”

There is no unmediated relationship, Giovanni and Morrison suggest, between “the Black man” and a larger, uniformly white “society.” Relationships between Black people and their world are also shaped by families, communities, and workplaces in which Black women and Black men can and must support each other, across difference. A Black woman’s perspective is essential to establish this radical commons. Otherwise, Black women become, as Donna Kate Rushin has written so eloquently in Bridge Poem (1981), the bridge between Black men and white society. Who will build Black women’s healing connections to each other, and to themselves? As Audre Lorde challenges, “If society ascribes roles to black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?” (The Black Scholar, “The Black Sexism Debate,” 17).

Like Giovanni’s Maybelle, June Jordan uses the Scholar‘s conversation around sexism to advance an anticapitalist argument. “The point is not whether he earns a couple dollars more or less than she; the point is that, as a people, our ability to provide for ourselves is under […] white institutional attack,” Jordan stresses (The Black Scholar, “The Black Sexism Debate,” 40). Aspiring to gendered white economic ideals and competing for scraps will not fix this crisis; rather, solidarity and Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” are in order. The ideal man for Giovanni’s Maybelle refuses to buy into the demands of racist capitalist materialism, for he does not measure his worth in dollars or property accumulation. He brings value to Maybelle’s life in himself, by offering to share emotional support and child care responsibilities, and by treating her with respect. He carries his own weight, and they are both freer for it.

 

 

[1] Quentin Lucas has written an excellent analysis of their conversation, with excerpts transcribed, for Medium.

Dilemmas of the Kitchen Table

by Keller 0 Comments

Readings

I was fascinated to learn that, after the racist white feminist press Persephone dropped This Bridge, women of color feminists including Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde worked together to found their own radical feminist press by and for women of color, Kitchen Table, in 1980, with which they kept This Bridge in circulation (Adair and Nakamura, 261). This immediately reminded me of Carrie Mae Weems’s historic exhibition, her Kitchen Table photo series, in 1990. Both the feminist press and Weems’s photo series chose to center the kitchen table in projects that defended women of color’s and queer women’s access to intimate justice.

Picture

Members of the Kitchen Table Press. Source: Kitchen Table Literary Arts. https://www.kitchen-table.org/

For the radical feminist press, the name Kitchen Table immediately announces the editors’ commitment to prioritizing praxis over theory. There are many crucial contrasts with the racist white feminist title “Persephone” – a reference to an ancient Greek goddess and princess who, in a thinly veiled fruit allegory, disobeys injunctions against sex before marriage. “Persephone” appeals to the racist european cult of claiming ancient Greek and Roman slaveholding and colonizing societies as whitewashed cultural forebears to europe and the united states. The white feminist invocation of “Persephone” defines freedom in a very limited and individualistic sense: a princess’s desire to choose heterosexual partners without consequences.

In contrast, Kitchen Table locates freedom in direct action more than theory or myth, in the lives of ordinary women rather than the elite. Persephone is a fictional character; the Kitchen Table is a very real place. Kitchen Table recalls a linkage of necessity and creativity in the full dimensions of Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” that rejects heteronormativity, superficial pornographic consumerism, and freedom without accountability. Rather than representing the name of an individual woman, Kitchen Table names a space that has functioned at once as a home and a workplace for working women throughout history, a space within which women are, through the press, finally invited to define and name themselves.

Similarly, in The Kitchen Table Series (1990), Carrie Mae Weems brilliantly subverts the anthropological gaze of the camera.[1] She acts as both object – that which is captured by the lens – and subject – the framer, editor, and namer of what can be seen. For Weems, the kitchen table does not symbolize political isolation; a lamp illuminates the kitchen table like a stage, or a factory floor. Largely a homosocial space shared by women, in which men feature only as visitors, never as fixtures, the kitchen table represents a political economic arena in its own right. Weems’s kitchen table is entangled with and helps shape the mainstream masculinist, white supremacist political landscape, rather than existing “outside” it.

The fact that the essential work Black women expend in kitchens is perennially unpaid and often required in addition to a full day’s work at a formal job risks refiguring racist and patriarchal exploitation. Weems’s Kitchen Table explores the contradictory potentialities of the kitchen: on the one hand, as a landmark of the ongoing, unredressed labor given by and seized from Black women; and on the other hand, as a radical commons out of which the liberatory possibilities of communities and the sustenance of generations can grow.

In Untitled (Eating lobster), a man at the head of the table hungrily sucks lobster, leaving shells behind. Weems’s food is untouched as she leans over to caress the man. Behind them, a bird sits in a looming cage. Maya Angelou wrote that the bird’s wings are clipped and her legs are tied. But Weems’s limbs are unchained and her kitchen has no bars. What bonds make her stay and pull her towards the man she feeds – force or love, pleasure or obligation, delight or debt? Can either/or questions help us understand her position?

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Eating lobster), 1990 © the artist and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Eating lobster), 1990 © the artist

The kitchen table as a social economic institution analyzed by Weems and Adair and Nakamura’s reflection on the Kitchen Table as a radical feminist press by and for women of color raise similar dilemmas. After recounting women’s struggles to gain access to books by women of color that were routinely abandoned out of print by racist mainstream publishers, Adair and Nakamura in “Digital Afterlives” give credit to online networks of radical free information sharing, while also pointing out troubling continuities with legal systems of exploitation. Spaces for “digital consciousness raising on Tumblr” serve as a

“feminist classroom[,] but one in which nobody – not the authors of This Bridge, not the unknown laborers who scanned and uploaded hundreds of pages, not the feminists of color writing and critiquing the work online – was compensated for providing [this] education. Nobody, that is, except the media corporation Yahoo, which owns and sells advertising space on Tumblr. […] [Thus,] both the legally distributed book and the pirated version online raise ethical concerns about the uneven distribution of work, ownership, and social power in pedagogical spaces” (Adair and Nakamura, 256).

For example, the Kitchen Table press survived in part by taking advantage of personal relationships with people – predominantly women of color – who were committed to the cause of circulating their radical message, which spared the press the cost of hiring paid staff to do the same work. Adair and Nakamura add hastily, “Of course, we do not equate these acts of solidarity with the exploits of racial capital” (262). Ultimately, however, “even ‘revolutionary’ pedagogical networks inevitably reproduce some racial and gendered dynamics of unremunerated work,” including work that is not counted or credited as work (263). Is the kitchen table a home or a workplace? A product of public labor or private love? An appliance serving at a woman’s convenience, or a domineering institution in whose framework her life plays out, like a cross-section of a dollhouse? If it is both, what does that tell us about freedom and the work of getting free?

 

1. My sources for analyzing Weems’s Kitchen Table are: (1) O’Grady, Megan, “How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making,” The New York Times, 2018. (2) Kelsey, Hall, Tillet, Bey, and Blessing, “Around the Kitchen Table,” Aperture, No. 223, Vision & Justice (Summer 2016), 52-56.