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

The Nature of Blood

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

from Michelle Loo

Throughout the poem “We Need a God Who Bleeds Now”, Shange is describing two kinds of gods; one kind of god who bleeds “some small male vengeance” while the other kind of god bleeds birth and life, “whose wounds are not the end of anything”. She argues for the latter kinds of gods. It is interesting that she uses traditionally violent and negative rhetoric to describe both kinds of gods. By traditionally violent and negative, I mean words that are usually used in violent and negative contexts. In describing the kind of gods we do not need, she uses the words “vengeance,” “pitiful,” and “humility”. In one interpretation, she seems to be describing death, murder, war, and politics. I would like to explore her choice to use the same violent and negative rhetoric in describing the kinds of gods we do need. She uses the words “tearing,” “breaks,” “bleeding,” “heaving,” and “mourning” to describe in one interpretation would be the kinds of gods or people that give birth to life. Shange seems to be drawing a parallel between the kinds of people in the world who are killing and those who are giving birth through the similar emotions those actions evoke. Both actions involve bleeding, a certain amount of violence, force, and overall intense and strong emotions. Therefore perhaps Shange is also making a claim about the range of emotions that we feel as people. She is not putting a value system among the different emotions, rather she is putting a value system for the reasons we feel those emotions.

 

The way Shange juxtaposes blood and emotions in the different contexts reminds me a poem in Nayyirah Waheed’s book of poetry, Salt.

why can we never

talk

about the blood.

the blood of our ancestors.

the blood of our history.

the blood between our legs.

 

— blood

 

It seems that Nayyirah Waheed is doing the same juxtaposition with the word “blood”. Asking to talk about the “blood of our ancestors,” and “history” suggest violence, death, and negativity. But “the blood between our legs,” is harmless and even fruitful.

Collectivity and Coalition Building- The Arts Movements and Liberation.

by Dania 0 Comments

In Nappy Edges by Ntozake Shange and “The Art of Transformation:Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movement” a pervasive theme was collective movements that are geared towards “self-determination” and “self-definition”. Ntozake Shange highlighted the ways in which black narratives and more specifically black girls/women narratives in literature can be consolidated, as she mentions “we, as a people, or as a literary cult, or a literary culture/have not demanded singularity from our writers. we cd all sound the same. Come from the same region. be the same gender. born the same year.& though none of the above is true, a black writer can away with/ abscond & covet from him or herself/ the richness of his or her person/long before a black musician cd” (3/), Shange’s acknowledgement about the possibility and ability to consolidate and allow the black narratives into a singular existence draws me to a point made by Victoria Durden in “Monologues for Colored Girls: Shange’s Influence on Barnard’s All Women-of-Color Vagina Monologues” which states “The announcement of our decision generated controversy, enough so that we received a call from V-Day’s national executive board inquiring about the nature of our decision, and how we had come to it as a group. In the announcement, we had stated that we believed the monologues had historically overlooked women of color. We were asked, in our conversations with V-Day board members and Eve Ensler, why we had argued that The Vagina Monologues had done this. We were told that Ensler and board members were confused by such an assertion, as V-Day was a “global movement” that worked to end sexual violence against all women. With regards to the content of the play, we were told that, “women of all races have delivered and were interviewed in the process of writing the monologues.” , Durden’s and the co-directors of the Vagina Monolgue: All Women of Color Cast at Columbia University demanded that the cast of Vagina Monologues be casted with individuals who identified as women of color and were met refusal to have their narratives to be monolithic and condensed entity. Shange’s statement shows that though black naratives may be similar because of ancestry, ethnicity, colonial socialization etc they are indeed different and the directors of the Vagina Monologues: All Women of Color Cast at Columbia University made that very clear by demanding legibility and refusing to have narratives be read as one despite Ensler’s claim about of women of color being included in interviews, which further proves Shange’s point about have the one black individual’s narrative be read as a collective. This also relates to the idea of language and Caribbean Feminism that I brought in my post last week about Edwidge Danticat’s and Victoria Brown’s, though Brown and Danticat both as feminists and are on common grounds about what feminism should be, the way they write and speak and experience their feminisms defer. Collins also acknowledges the role that that “self-determination”and “self-definition” plays in curating movements whether they may be Feminist or Arts movements, which often go together.

 

 

 

Art as personal

by Melissa 0 Comments

Lisa Gail Collins explores the ways in which the Black Arts and Feminist Arts Movements are respectively produced from visions of Black and Feminist collective resistance. Both movements symbolize attempts to shape communal consciousness through intellectualism and art as channels of self-awareness and collective identity making. These processes are important cornerstones of political aims of both groups to rupture social order. Collins points out that despite their mirroring ideologies, these two political movements remained disjointed. “Only a vital handful of courageous visionaries…drew from and shaped both movements.” (Collins 274)  Ntozake Shange is found among the brave few listed by Collins. Shange combines the respective values found in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements, creating a new tradition of art –  incorporating poetry, storytelling, and dance – that retains a commitment to collectivity and resistance in its consciousness-raising efforts. Shange requires her readers to remain cognizant of the multivalent voices of Blackness and womanness that cross temporal bounds, creating an interweaving texture of kinship and collectivity. For Shange, the poet’s voice comes from a collective, and through her voice, the poet can “be everywhere/all at once” (5). In “takin a solo/ a poetic possibility/ a poetic imperative”, Shange insists upon unbinding the “energy levels” (5) toward which a poet’s voice extends itself. Meaning, the voice of the poet should remain untethered to expectations of producing an empirical analysis about the collective condition of Blackness, or womanness. But this notion is not to be divorced from Shange’s dedication to connecting all parts of her identity and consciousness to her art. For Shange, the interconnectedness of varying narratives across spatial and temporal bounds contribute to the formation of an individual voice. A voice that is not individual in its conception or existence – as it emerges from, and is forged within a collective model of kinship – but individual in its reliance upon the personal (21) to produce art.

 

I rang the bell/to k’s walkup/

the men/sitting outside/the

bodega in/ a circle/slapping/

dominos

onto a low/round

table/reminding

me of

my father’s wake/men

he knew/gathered underneath the

breadfruit tree

spilling/sips of rum in/

between/cracks

shouts/partaking in their own/

farewell/these men/

brown/lined brows/

these men/

blck/

carry/peaks of rollin

black/mountains

gentle sloping/on

brwn brows/

do i

need help/getting upstairs/

cantanme/a shake

reminding me/

father/

falls quickly/in love

with a brwn girl/her rolling ass/

bronze thighs/

round mouth/curving

hips/wet feet/

in love/heaving

chest warm

home/rippling

home cookin

sizzlin/poppin corn

roasted

open fire/a humid night sky/

do i

need help/

getting home

Having The Bravery To Live In Pairs

by Yemi 1 Comment

In the first paragraph of “Nappy Edges,” Shange writes, “if i asked: is this james brown of clifford jordan? you wd know. if i said: is this fletcher henderson’s band or the black byrds? you wd know. i say/ pick one: ayler or coltrane… most of you wd know. the tone. the lyric. rhythm & cadence of the musician is a personal thing to you. you listen & learn (2).”

This excerpt represents how we are all familiar with our individual preferences, likes, and dislikes. We’re in tune with our hopes, our rage, our passions, but to understand ourselves even deeper it’s necessary to pivot our eyes and attention to the similar or very different experiences of others. “Unite and mobilize (Collins, 274).”

In the same way listening to an uncommon artist can give you more insight to your favorite composer.  We would know the differences between them, but we could recognize that nothing stands alone. Everything can be viewed side by side, reflective of one another.

Another exam of this is the way God dictated that the animals should enter and abide in Noah’s ark in pairs of two. This was not only a divine instruction that aimed to elongate the existence of different species, it was a mandate that allowed animals who were similar to share the experience of the flood together. They could moo, bark, and cuckoo at each other about their fears, the lack of food, and how they were annoyed at Noah for landing on the top of a mountain.

For some reason, the Noah’s ark song I heard when I was a child, “The Animals Went In Two By Two” still resonates with me. The animals, who can be viewed as humans, go in together to face the storms that are around them.  The “HooRah, HooRah” of the song emphasizes the collective. A singular breath in, but a unanimous breath out.

expressions of mind/body in response to external voices

by Sophia 1 Comment

“who is setting these priorities?” and “advice” revealed a facet of Shange to me that was almost more (or at least differently) vulnerable than her work I had previously read.

One of the most defining features of her writing to me has always been the confidence with which she makes art, defines herself as an artist, and transitions between mediums so fluidly that the lines between them are called into question. This, just as much as her characteristic syntax, has always been, as she named it in “takin a solo/ a poetic possibility/ a poetic imperative”, “the particular flow of [her] certain somebody.”

The syntax of “who is setting these priorities?” and “advice” immediately inform you that they will be something different than her usual descending stanzas. They look like prose and read more like a rant, inner monologue, or even a conversation, and deal with an anxiety about writing, performing, and simply living that the powerful self or extension-of-self that speaks in most of her work never questions.

The primary question of “who is setting these priorities?” is “What in the hell am I supposed to do with my body every day?”
The primary question of “advice” is “What in the hell am I supposed to do with my mind?”
They are both in response to external noise; in the former: media-noises and existential smallness, in the latter: the “them” of every artist –who make you feel like an alien and are always asking when you’re going to get a real job.

These poems investigate and meld the mind-body question that Shange is always responding to. “who is setting these priorities?” speaks of physical inhibition instead of physical freedom, which is another departure from what I perceive to be her typical approach. The poem is an anxious accumulation of maladies: “today the cosmos satellite fell down over uranium city”, “4 or 3 million american women who take the pill & smoke are 10 times more likely to have heart attacks than women who don’t take the pill or smoke”, “the wilmington 10 are still in jail. there’s only one woman’s survival house in brooklyn.” Instead of describing her physical self as a way to free her from these stresses, she implies that they build up in her –knots that can only loosen with itches:

“i like to fuck. i’m too nervous not to smoke. no one likes to eat pussy if you wear a diaphragm…i need a cigarette cuz this is just too much for me. plus there are women who actually find sex boring/ me/ i’m gonna have a heart attack.”

“advice” takes the opposite to the same problem; it speaks of body inhibiting mind rather than mind halting body. It opens and closes with the mention of the bodies of those who are giving her advice:

“people keep tellin me to put my feet on the ground i get mad and scream/ there is no ground”
“i am gonna write poems til i die & when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind & knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground”

In this case, her physical limitations are not the center of the conversation so much as the others’ are, who are have such tunnel-vision that they can’t acknowledge the preciousness of her lifeblood, and “[can’t] read or understand english anymore” to the point where it makes her feel like “the last survivor of a crew from mars”.

The response to the vulnerability in the two poems synthesizes why Shange must do her work. When everyone is telling her she can’t be a poet, her black body writes for her: “cartwheel and somersault down pages outta my mouth come visions distilled like bootleg whiskey” When there are too many problems, too much noise, and too many voices, she opens another show after the one that just closed, keeps fucking and taking the pill, and catching the 8:00am train.

Side by Side: Ntozake Shange/Langston Hughes

by Danielle 0 Comments

Reading Shange, I’ve been thinking a lot about Langston Hughes. The way her phrases have tones and her poems seem to unfold in the rhythm of song reminds me of Hughes’s prose, infused with the blues. I was excited to see in nappy edges, a reference to the Harlem Renaissance poet: “st. louis was just desegregating herself, while i grew. sometimes a langston hughes poem or a bobby timmons tune was the only safe place i cd find” (19). Like Shange, Hughes makes words dance, and leaves space for music to exist as an external character. Both of their works have strong, vivid connections to place and are in conversation with the roots of diaspora. To delve more into this comparison, I explored two poems that I feel interact nicely: Shange’s “just as the del vikings stole my heart” and Hughes’s “Theme for English B”.

The first half of Shange’s poem refers to “she”—“her fairy godmother retired”—while the second half relies on the first person “i”. “She” retired after the “brown vs. ferguson decision” (a reference to two cases, one which repudiates the other). By combining the two, Shange speaks to the illusion of the “fairy godmother”, the notion that the latter (Ferguson) made life easier for women of color. The law has never fended for her: “i live my own lil rock/ cover my own back anywhere i wanna go”; “i” is the only person she can rely on to survive. “Theme for English B” is about an assignment that Langston Hughes’s white professor gave the class: “Go home and write a page tonight”. This poem also creates a dichotomy; Hughes writes of “me”—Hughes—and “you”—the professor. The italics that belong to the professor read: “And let that page come out of you—Then, it will be true”. Hughes begs the question, “I wonder if it’s that simple?” His truth is in constant conflict with this man who is “older—and white—and somewhat more free”.

My interpretation of each closing is that both Shange and Hughes resolve to write poems as a form of resistance/as a way to construct identity.  Shange writes “i learned only by breakin the law/ i am separate/ i am equal”. I wonder if she’s, in part, referring to breaking the law of language; by deconstructing the laws of colonialist language, she frees her identity in poetry. She continues, “Crackers are born with the right to be alive/ i am making mine up/ right here in your face”. Perhaps, what she is “making up” is this poem; poetry becomes a song/dance of resistance. These lines remind me of what Shange refers to as “the moral of the story” in the opening choreopoem “wow…yr just like a man!”: “When words & manners leave you no space for yrself/ make a poem/ very personal/ very clear/ & yr obstructions will join you or disappear/” (16). Hughes refers to “the page” in his poem. He writes, “you, me, talk on this page”, this page that is supposed to be “true”. Throughout this poem, Hughes has a dialogue with his professor about identity, and where, specifically, that identity comes from (“New York”, “the Harlem Branch Y”, “Bessie”). The last line—“This is my page for English B”—references the “page” as opposed to “theme” (the title). I’ve read this poem many, many times over the years, and I read this as: the theme comes from within the page; through poetry, Hughes uncovers his identity/his truth. This page is a form of resistance; the poem belongs to him.

I find the rhythms and themes of Shange and Hughes’s work to be in conversation, and I am fascinated with how they re-construct identity through poetry. To read the two poems discussed in full, I’ve included both below…

just as the del vikings stole my heart

(oh auntie emma)

 

my fairy godmother retired

with the brown vs. ferguson decision

she reasoned i waz divested of my separate

but equal status & waz entitled

to whatever lil white girls got

from whoever they got it from

since she waz raised in greener pastures

& knew the devil only in the blues saw-dust

of a raunchy dawn/ a cruel dance on the edge of a dime

so she retired/

she waznt bout to misegenate her powers/

integrate em either/

leavin me to fend for myself

 

i’ve felt her absence from the moment she escaped

with my love of who i am/ conjurin myself

thru catcalls & mailbox cherry bombs was not my forte

i learned only by breakin the law/

i am separate

i am equal

i live my own lil rock/

cover my own back anywhere i wanna go

& i go anywhere i want

crackers are born with the right to be alive

i am making mine up

right here in your face

why don’t you

go on

& push me

 

 

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me—who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.

 

 

As A Woman & A Poet

by Clarke 1 Comment

she said/ as a woman & a poet/ i’ve decided to wear my ovaries on my sleeve/ raise my poems on my milk/ & count my days by the flow of my mensis/ the men who were poets were aghast/ they fled the scene in fear of becoming unclean/ they all knew those verses/ & she waz left with an arena of her own/ where words & notions/ imply ‘she’/ where havin lovers is quite common regardless of sex/ or profession/ where music & mensis/ are considered very personal/ & language a tool for exploring space/

the moral of the story:

#1: when words & manners leave you no space for yrself/ make a poem/ very personal/ very clear/ & yr obstructions will join you or disappear/

#2: if yr obstructions dont disappear/ repeat over & over again/ the new definitions/ til the ol ones have no more fight in them/ then cover them with syllables you’ve gathered from other dyin species/

#3: a few soft words have sent many a woman to her back with her thighs flung open & eager/ a few more/ will find us standing up & speakin in our own tongue to whomever we goddam please.

 

Shange writes of the experience of black woman artists who drew from both black and feminist movements in this passage of “wow . . . yr just like a man!” When the “woman and poet” decides to proclaim her womanhood on a stage in front of a partially male audience, her verses are seen as unclean and the men flee the scene. This is indicative of the ways in which women who actively drew from and shaped the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements, and the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements, experienced exclusion and a lack of support from a male-dominated art world in response to a refocusing of womanhood and women’s liberation.

Shange writes that once these men flee, however, the woman poet is standing “with an arena of her own” so that not only does she have more space to share her verses, but also the arena in which she stands becomes a place where language is “a tool for exploring space” rather than simply words, which Shange refers to as “a man’s thing” earlier in the text. The first “moral of the story” reveals what Shange is claiming about the connections between words and men, and how neither may leave you space. It plainly states that when words leave you no space, you should make a personal poem. When the woman poet does this, her “obstructions,” or male audience, disappear, rather than join her. In this way, when she performs her personal poem, she creates space that men’s words never could have provided her.

Immediate Cause: Obscene Questions and Chris Brown Sympathizers

by Michelle 2 Comments

Shange’s “with no immediate cause” in nappy edges is powerful and effective in ridiculing rape culture, wherein people downplay the horrible and frequent violences occurring to women.

For me, the structure of the poem in how it paces how I read it is most powerful. Accustomed to hearing grave statistics in speeches, commercials, and other daily mediums, I read,

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten

every five minutes a

woman is raped / every ten minutes

a lil girl is molested

slowly and with a great pause at the end of each statistic. Shange quickens my reading by following the statistics with a smooth narration of how she encounters these statistics daily in microagressive ways. By smooth I mean that these narrations can be read quickly and easily while still capturing fully what she is saying (which is definitely not always true with Shange’s work). Shange then repeats this sequence of reading pace by slowing down the reader through repeating the statistics and then quickening the reader’s pace through including another narration of violence against women. She repeats this process twice more with perhaps even more graphic instances of violence each time to indicate an overall speeding up in the poem. The height of her poem is reached with the following rhetorical questions,

before i ride the subway/buy a paper/drink

coffee/i must know/

have you hurt a woman today

did you beat a woman today

throw a child across a room

are the lil girl’s panties

in yr pocket

i have to ask these obscene questions

I can feel the urgency and desperation in her voice through these “obscene” questions. Especially in the context of patriarchy and rape culture where women are many times dismissed for their fears and the violences occurring to them, these questions are unsettling because they are both outrageous and familiar at the same time. Women have constantly expressed concern over these violences but are dismissed daily by the law, the media, and their community. Shange effectively draws the truth and gravity out of these violences through embedding these outrageous yet familiar concerns in the statistics and narrations.

Reading this poem reminded me of a Crunk Feminist Collective piece I read last year, titled “How Chris Brown is Effing Up My Sex Life: A B-Side to Dating While Feminist.” The author describes her internal conflict of having sexual and intimate relations with men who do not have the same intentional gender politics as she does. Specifically, she cites an instance where she found out that her partner was a Chris Brown sympathizer and therefore she had to reevaluate her standards. She grapples with the question,

Can you be a good feminist if you have intimate engagements with partners who have diametrically opposed gender politics?

This author uses the same tactic of narrating her relationship and other instances in her life where she had to confront this conflict and then climaxing with a series of outrageous yet familiar questions:

In a culture where sisters are dying in alarming numbers from domestic violence, what responsibility do I have to them and to myself to choose intimate partners whose thinking and actions are sound on these matters?

To what extent is and should my sex life be political?

I mean should I withhold sex from dudes with sexist attitudes as an act of solidarity with my sisters?

How can I get next to you if I can’t get next to your politics?

How can I let you touch me if I wouldn’t touch your politics with a ten foot pole?

Can I feel safe in the softness of your touch if you don’t feel led to question a culture where other men routinely touch other women violently?

Can we really cuddle if you have the option to not care about women and violence?

Isn’t that choice, the choice to not care about how the world affects the woman you’re spending time with, a violent one?

How can I trust you to hold me when your beliefs hold me down?

Having read “The Art of Transformation: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements” by Lisa Gail Collins and therefore understanding the crucial role Shange played and continues to play in bridging the Black Power and Women’s Liberation movement for black women makes this even more relevant. The Crunk Feminist Collective author pays homage to the black women before her who also bridged these movements:

It wouldn’t be the first time that Black women withheld sex from Black men in service of larger racial interests. After the Civil War, Black men (but not Black women) could vote for a few brief years. Back then, most Black folks voted Republican as they were the more liberal party at the time and the party of Abraham Lincoln. But there were times when some Black men determined to vote Democrat so they wouldn’t be the target of white racial backlash. In addition to accompanying their men to the polls to monitor their votes, Black women banded together and encouraged each other to withhold sex from any man who voted against the community’s interests. These sisters knew how personal the political was long before white women said it. They knew that when it comes to Black women’s quality of life, there is nothing more political or personal than the person we’re sleeping with.

nappy edges was published in 1978, this article in 2011. Black women are still grappling with these internal conflicts today but we must show love to Shange for being a visionary of her time to vocalize the intersectionalities and realities of black women.

 

Engaging Black Masculinity

by Nadia 0 Comments

the suspect is black & in his early 20’s is a poem that causes readers to engage with black masculinity in America by invoking Bigger Thomas, a 20 year old man who accidentally kills a white woman in Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Before engaging Native Son, Shange provides context (in brackets) of real life examples of criminalized black men spoken about in the news in 1974 at the time she was writing the poem. She refers to the criminal activities of a left-wing revolutionary group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (S.L.A.). The S.L.A. kidnapped a white woman named Patricia Hearst and robbed a bank. In addition Shange mentions, “Zebra” killings which were 16 racially motivated murders and 8 attempts by a group of Black Muslim men. In providing this information in the brackets, Shange sets up a clear parallel to the criminalization of Bigger Thomas in Native Son, while simultaneously showing that the content in the brackets could be replaced with content about the criminalization of black men at any point in history. A very poignant example would be the way black men are criminalized in Public Safety security alerts at Barnard about suspects who are most often black and in their early 20s or younger.

Outside of the brackets, Shange uses Bigger Thomas in the rest of her poem as a representative for all black men. Notably, black women are suspected to be implicated by mere association to black men, as seen with Bessie Smith and the mention of “(women included)” in brackets within the brackets in the first stanza.  Shange reveals her complex relationship with black men in this poem by revealing how she went from hating Bigger to sympathizing with him. She writes, “i always hated bigger thomas… till i remembered who mary dalton waz.” Mary Dalton is a stand in for white supremacy which leads black men to commit crimes as their only means of survival. It is noteworthy that there are few slashes in the poem, rather there are gaping white spaces where Mary Dalton is implicated causing us to ponder and dwell on the whiteness of the page between words.

Though Shange reflects on black masculinity and how it has been affected by white supremacy, Shange shows her concern for black women’s agency and well-being through her identification with Bessie. She makes it plain that “mary dalton cost bessie.” She acknowledges that “bigger treated bessie soooo bad.” But at the same time, she invites black women into having a more complex understanding of black masculinity. Shange realizes that her simplistic understanding of Bigger as either “a man” or “a thug,” excludes the role of white supremacy in the expression of their masculinity.  By referring to Mary Dalton as the reason behind Bigger’s crimes, she also shows how black men’s struggles in racist society may cause them to be abusive in romantic relationships, as Bigger was with Bessie.

Ultimately, Shange deals with the experience of black people in America through this poem. Mary Dalton, “her drunken ashes / her wanton charred / bones sent thousands of / bullets looking for a blk boy / any one nigger wd do.” Black people are not seen as individuals, but one suspect mass: “the suspect is our sons / again prey to whims & caprices of / grande dame white ladies.” And Mary Dalton is resurrected every time a black person is criminalized. (slashed in quotes were added by me)

 

Bigger Thomas holding lifeless Mary Dalton: Bigger’s burden to carry. 

Mary Dalton,

“you are ashes

you are dry bones

you are the bringin of death to our sons

the suspect is black & always in his early 20’s”

Nappy Edges and the personal/political

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

. . . the political values inherent in the Black Power concept are now finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American dramatist, poets, choreographers, musicians, and novelists. A main tenet of Black Power is the necessity for black people to define the world in their own terms. The black artist has made the same point in the context of aesthetics. –Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement“

Underlying their calls for self-examination, reflection, and scrutiny was the belief that increased knowledge of the self and the collective in society, past and present, would lead to a strong communal consciousness which, in turn, would lead to an empowered and unified activist community ready to transform —  Lisa Gail Collins, ““The Art of Transformation: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements”

 

cuz we don’t ask a poet to speak personally / we want a 

poet to talk like an arena/ or like a fire station/ to be everywhere/

all at once/ even if we never been there

Nappy Edges, Shange’s first collection of poetry, is also her first extended published meditation on what it means to be a black woman/feminist poet in America.  It demands a space for the “personal” in black poetry, not just for the expression of the “personal in the sense of the subjective, the emotional, the sexual, but also personal in the sense of “the individuality of the word,” (9); that is, the unique expressiveness and “voice”/sound of the writer.  We will want to think about the this question of uniqueness in two (or more) contexts: (1) the importance of collaboration in Shange’s work and (2) the importance of connection to community in Black Arts ideology.

when i take my voice into a poem or a story / i am trying desperately to give you that.

In “The Black Arts Movement,” Larry Neal, a chief BAM theorist, avers that “the black artist’s primary duty is to speak to the spiritual and cultural needs of Black people,” a sentiment of responsibility and connectedness that Collins sees in both the Black Arts Movement and Feminist Art Movement. Does this ideological drive preclude poetry like Shange’s that is intimate and “promiscuous” in its influences? Does the attention to the “folk” mean that middle class writers like Shange need to ventriloquize another’s voice rather than refining their own? (heads up: this issue of class will come up again in Michelle Wallace and Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo).

What are your thoughts about the extended analogy between music and poetry in “takin’ a solo/ a poetic possibility/ a poetic imperative,” particularly the discussions of Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed(3ff)? What are we to make of the volume’s mix of genres–parables, self-interviews, lyric, and literary criticism? How effective is the mix of poems spoken seemingly in Shange’s voice and poems that try to develop specific characters and stories?

Finally, how do we continue to integrate music into our discussions of movement and dance? In an early review of Nappy Edges, Poet Michael Harper faulted the discussion of music in this collection, arguing “her analogy between jazz musicians and poets is weakened by their lack of a shared vocabulary and the different technical demands of their art” (NYTimes 10/21/79).  Might we come to a different conclusion if we think about music, movement and language simultaneously? Is Shange developing the shared vocabulary as she writes about the collection? (Or is that a question better asked of her collaboration with with David Murray?)

A note on music

“My ‘yes’ will never be Tina’s ‘yes’. and that’s what I want to discuss with you this evening” (2)

So this week I learned that Tina Turner has a lot of “yesses” or “yeahs.” When I read that line,  I immediately thought of her deep,  unrestrained “yeah, yeah, yeah,” in “River Deep, Mountain High” (her first solo hit while married to Ike Turner)

 

But then I found this mike drop “yea” at the end of  this classic “Fool in Love” clip. Unfortunately the “for research only” stamp is covering up some of Tina’s hip action:

Sadly, when I watch vintage clips of Tina, I think of Ike Turner’s violence, which then led me back to “with no immediate cause”

the

victims have not all been

identified/

 

NOTE for class: Gabrielle Davenport and I are still working out the music issues, but here’s a mix I did for “lotsa body and cultural heritage”