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

breaking language

by Nia 1 Comment

blog post #1

what i was listening to while reading: to pimp a butterfly by Kendrick Lamar

what i watching while typing: black-ish

 

the dominant administration/solemnly/

undertook to defend this/woman, pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered… it described the immense possibilities of woman/unfortunately/ transformed by the Algerian man into an inert, dem(one)tized, indeed dehumanized object… (Fanon 38)

 

in an initial phase (it is the action) the plans of the

occupier that determine the/

centers/

of resistance around which a people’s will

to survive becomes

organized/it is the white man who creates

the Negro/But it is

the Negro who creates negritude. (Fanon 47)

 

In Algeria Unveiled, Fanon points to the ways in which dominant culture and resistance operate. In the first quote I choose to “Shange-tize,” Fanon illustrates the way the colonizer, in his attempt to control and regulate the behaviors of the colonized, attempts to use their culture and moralities against them. Fanon utilizes the custom of the veil in Algeria explain this practice. By positioning the veil as a mode of oppression, the British hoped to present Algerian women as victims to themselves and to the outside world. They position her as a symbol, an object to liberated from her archaic society in order to sow discord within the community and encourage assimilation. In the second quote, Fanon dissects how colonized people form modes of resistance. Since the colonizers determine what will be prioritized by dominant culture, what will be the center, the colonized determines what they will prioritize about their own culture and promote as their own self-identity.

 

I picked this two quotes to juxtapose these two quotes, and by extension, these two ideas because I think they say a lot of Ntozake Shange’s mode of artistic production. One of her works many purposes, as she expresses in “my pen is a machete” is to reconstruct language and culture to allow colonized and oppressed people, particularly Black people, to express emotions, discuss experiences, and commiserate with others. By breaking down the constructions of centrist language, Shange both dismisses its value and creates new language for black people.

Philosophical Underpinnings

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

i can’t count the number of times i have viscerally wanted to attack deform n maim the language that i waz taught to hate myself in/ the language that perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as he/she learns to speak of the world  & the “self”  (LLS 19).

in everything I have ever written & everything I hope to write/ i have made use of what Frantz Fanon called “combat breath” (LLS 19).

Ladies, we have a blog!!!!! If you have problems publishing your post, you can submit it as a document in this Dropbox folder.

I wanted to tell you a bit about why we are reading Ngugi and Fanon today. As you can tell from “my pen is a machete,”  Shange’s use of the term “combat breath,” very explicitly refers to the appendix of the chapter “Algeria Unveiled” in Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism,* which has become central –and hotly–debated in discussions of colonial rule, traditionalism in colonized societies and the role of women in revolution. Obviously I’d like us to spend some time specifically talking about that concept, but also to talk about the essay as a whole.

Shange told me that reading Ngugi wa Thiong’o was very important to understanding her work. Although personally I am more familiar with The Barrel of a Pen (1967) [which perhaps Shange flags in her title, “my pen is a machete”?] and A Grain of Wheat (1983), I chose Decolonising the Mind because it’s the culmination of Ngugi’s thinking on imperialism, language, anti-colonial struggle, the role of art and culture in political struggle as well as on the future of Africa. Ngugi himself says, “This book, Decolonising the Mind  is my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings. From now on it is Gikuyu and Kiswahili all the way” (xiv). At the end of his introduction and throughout the book, Ngugi references Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, particularly the chapter “On National Culture,”  thus, I included the latter so that you could have some sense of a Pan-African conversation about Negritude and-imperialism.

“Over the years I have come to realise more and more that work, any work, even literary creative work, is not the result of any individual genius, but the result of a collective effort.” (Decolonising x)

“This book is part of a continuing debate all over the continent about the destiny of Africa” (Decolonising 1)

But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against the collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves.” (Decolonizing 3)

 

Plan for class:

  • Announcements (5 mins)
  • Discussion of blog/twitter 10 minutes)
  • Nadia Presentation & discussion
  • Break
  • Sophia Presentation

The Collective Black Dance Was Alive (9/17/15)

by Yemi 0 Comments

 

In “Bocas: My Daughter’s Geography” Ntozake Shange addresses a question: what does it mean to have a shared history of colonization, but exist in different intersections of longitude and latitude (i have a daughter / mozambique, i have a son/ angola p. 21)?

Her work doesn’t hesitate to make different peoples a collective: “we fight the same old men… we have a daughter… we have a son… we embraced & made children of the new world.” In this way the persistence in which these individuals fought to make change for their children by feeding them the sun and encouraging their dreams constructs resistance as a global site. Resistance becomes “the same language” in Mozambique, Angola, Salvador, Johannesburg, La Habana, Guyana, Santiago, Brixton, Trinidad, San Juan, Cape town, and Palestine. Resistance is obvious in the words

 

“all the dark urchins

rounding out the globe/ primitively whispering

the earth is not flat old men.”

 

The situation Shange is narrating bases the resistance of colored peoples as an aftermath to the historical occurrences that stole away their location of origin. Furthermore, the end of this three-part poem, New World Core, elucidates the strong opposition of ethnic peoples to their colonization through the two new geographical sites they occupy: Luanda and Chicago.

 

In New World Core Shange writes

 

“or language is tactile

colored & wet

our tongues speak

these words

we dance

these words.”

 

The meaning of this excerpt is rooted in her piece “why i had to dance//”

Dance becomes the discriminate way memory utilizes movement to bring forth an understand of history. The flexibility of location, if it were described as a time and place, is expressed in phrase “a continuity of an aesthetic that is at the heart of blackness//”

Resistance is still a global site, but can instead be viewed through movement: “wherever the colored people were. There were dances i could do & claim as mine/ cause/ i was colored too (52).”

The collective “black dance was alive with the spirit of the caribbean and africa (55)” and subconsciously makes its way into the lives of those living outside of their origins.