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

Unseen: What do we do now that it is seen?

by Tirzah Anderson 0 Comments

Attending the Unseen event was definitely inspiring for me, especially because I saw so many students, faculty, staff, alum, and members of the broader New York community in attendance, which showed that people are interested in understanding the hidden lives of so many that are now being unveiled. However, as someone who cares about active change and work towards social change, I wondered how the event would actually impact the actions of people in the Barnard Community. The two speakers spoke about how this archive would impact the photo editing practices at the New York Times, as editors will pay closer attention to how they are choosing photos and if those photo choices are in any way shaped by biases. However, I questioned the impact this would have on people outside of the world of photo editing who attended the event. Would they actually change their understandings of how race impacts their every day lives or would this just be another event with an interesting topic but a lack of action to combat racism.

My most pertinent question following the event is how do we as people within an elitist community of Barnard make certain ideas or perspectives unseen as well and I hope that I can answer this with due time. I want to ensure that I am not feeding into the erasure of certain voices or ideologies. I hope that we as a college, and that each person that attended that event is actively thinking about the ways they may be silencing certain perspectives because I think even that as a first step could be helpful. However, this needs to go further and people need to take active steps to ensuring that people and communities are seen. Even in our work in different archives, we should be looking to ensure that they are used in such a way that the most unseen and hidden perspectives are brought to light. It is our duty, especially with the access that we have been granted at Barnard and Columbia that we uncover silenced and undermined people and communities in every way we can.

What’s in a name?

by Tirzah Anderson 0 Comments

Like for many of us, I think a major aspect of my feminism stems from my mother and her influences. For me, I still think I am exploring my own “name” for my feminism. Growing up, my mother didn’t use very explicit language or phrasing when she discussed her feminism. Maybe she didn’t have the language to describe her feminism, or maybe she couldn’t find the perfect word for it. She expressed her feminism in actions, in what she said to people, in how she held strength, despite so many forces trying to make her weak, and so many other little acts of feminism that I am proud to have witnessed and hope to continue. Right now, I struggle to define the feminism that I identify with in one word or phrase, but I hope and strive to be persistent, strong, and an example of  what my feminism is. Despite, being unsure of how I would define my feminism, the closest I have come is womanism, probably because Alice Walker was one of my first examples of Black feminist literature. My mother has always talked about and quoted The Color Purple, making Alice Walker and that book an important part of my household and how we think about Black women and feminism. From a literary standpoint,  Celie, Shug, and Sofia were all important parts of the development of my feminist identity but most importantly, I was and am influenced by my mother and the other Black women in my life.

 

In terms of how I would identify the feminists we have discussed in this course, they all have different identities and are all a part of different feminist classifications, but if I had to identify them all under one word, it would probably be transnational feminists. I think that encapsulates these radical feminists in the best way and would be the most useful term to unify their various identities and positionalities, and how those impact their feminism. I think the term transnational will be useful to my archives project, as an overall term, but I hope that I can still identify the differences among these feminists because I think that understanding how these women were different is important to truly understanding their impact.

 

Can food disconnect you from community and culture?

by Tirzah Anderson 1 Comment

For various communities, connections to family often stem from cultural connections, including language, food, and traditions. It is common across cultures that tradition brings family together. Often, these traditions include food, which can create an integral aspect of how culture is shared, created, and passed along to other people in a community. Ntozake Shange and Verta Mae Grosvenor engage with cooking and food as a means of engaging with culture and passage of culture, as well as a way to find commonality between communities and various cultures. In particular, Shange focuses on the various communities in the African diaspora and the foods they eat and produce. Her work signals to ideas of connectivity, especially in the ways that the diaspora was able to create culture that was in many ways similar in taste, style, technique, and ingredients. However, the aspect of their works that I am curious about  is how associations of food, cooking, and eating can infringe upon the passing of culture and connectivity of community.

Grosvenor, in particular, notes that “some people got such bad vibrations, that to eat with them would give you such bad indigestion”(xiii), highlighting that the food and the preparation of food is a vital part of the vibration she outlines, but that the outcome of that is also an integral part of that vibration. Thinking about food, how can who you eat with or how food is eaten change the way that food impacts a person or how it is passed down? I can think of the ways that food may be associated with negative people or memories and how that can make the food have a different impact on someone. For instance, there are foods that are associated with bad memories, maybe a food that made someone sick, or food someone ate when there was conflict at the dinner table and I wonder how that shifts the vibrations.  This may highlight the ways that our physical and psychological qualities influence our food vibrations, impacting the ways that we understand culture and connections. If this negative association, whether it is natural or developed over time, can exist from bad vibrations food might separate people from cultures or communities with which they may be connected to in some way outside of food. I am curious if those negative vibrations be reversed and given new meaning, allowing connections to continue and grow despite these bad vibrations.  

Language and Poetry..for colored girls

by Ariel Leachman 0 Comments

The play deals with a variety of adult topics such as abortion and rape that would make it difficult to teach in its entirety in a high school. The language is also quite graphic in places. Yet, it’s so real, raw and emotional that I just want to share it with my students at the same time. For example, there’s a scene, told by three of the women at once, discussing date rape, that starts, “a friend is hard to press charges against/if you know him/you must have wanted it.” It continues, “ticket stubs from porno flicks in his pocket/a lil dick/or a strong mother/or just a brutal virgin…lock the door behind you/wit fist in face/to fuck…who make elaborate mediterranean dinners/& let the art ensemble carry all ethical burdens/while they invite a coupla friends over to have you/are sufferin from latent rapist bravado/& we are left wit the scars.”  The intensity of Shange’s words, language and diction makes the experience of reading an personal and intimate violation like abortion and rape harsher. Through her words I feel like I am the protagonist, as I feel all the emotions and tensions that exists throughout each poem. I started writing a journal recently and thanks to Shange, I have started to explore my own truth in the ways that I confide in myself though writing. For so long my personal diaries and journals were polished and felt like I couldn’t be honest with myself. In For Colored Girls… I started to appreciate the value of healing through honesty of emotion and sincerity with myself first. I am interested in how Shange shifted the “explicitness” in poetry. I am not well educated on the history of feminist poetry, but I would assume that Shange contributed a lot to the way Black women wrote in poems as expressive as she does.

 

What’s in a name?

by Asha Futterman 0 Comments
I would describe my identity as a person and as a writer in relationship to feminism with the words Black, queer, Jewish, and woman. Each of these markers is an important qualifier to me because of how exclusionary feminism has been and still can be a tool to exclude and invisiblize women who are not white, cis, and straight. I think I learned to name myself as Black and Jewish and woman from my mom, since I was young my mom showed me that being a Black jewish woman is special and something that made me unique in a way I should cherish and feel proud of. She would tell me that if (this was pre-Obama) I was president I would be the first Black woman and Jewish president. Through learning about feminism in this class and before this class, I have always found myself and empowerment in the writings of Black feminists or feminists who analyze the intersection of identity, especially Kimberley Crenshaw, bell hooks, along with poets and artists who sing and write creatively about Blackness and womanhood like Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, Jamila Woods, Morgan Parker, and Noname. Many of the Black feminists I’m drawn to show their readers experiences of power and strength and also messiness and pain. If I had to specify my writerly standpoint, I think I would say I write from the standpoint of a messy Black woman.

It’s hard for me to pinpoint a few terms for the all radical feminist in the 70s and 80s because I feel like I would use different terms to describe a feminists like Rich and a feminist like Shange or the feminists in the Combahee River Collective. From our readings, I think a lot of the feminism in the 70s and 80s was or tried to be transnational. While some of the transnationalism was hegemonic, feminist in the 70s made strides to include third world countries in their analysis. While many feminists we read were middle class, they were also anti-capitalist and supporters of workers right. I also think many of the radical feminists in the 70s and 80s that we read about were artists or poets like Shange, Rich, and Lorde. So, if I had to give a title to all of the feminists that we read I would say transnational, anticapitalist, and creative feminists.

 

 

What’s In a Name?

by Makaria Yami 1 Comment

Throughout my life, my understand and my self-identification of feminism has constantly shifted. There was a time when I thought identifying as just a feminist was a bold move and I didn’t even think about adding words to that identity. The first time that I began to feel like the label “feminist” couldn’t capture my identity was when I started exploring all of my different identities and I started learned how they interacted with each other. I would hear and learn about other feminists and realize that I not only couldn’t relate to them, but I also didn’t even want to associate with them. These feminists only shared one thing with me, my identity as a woman.

However, my identity as a woman is not the only important identity I hold. My Blackness, my identity as an Ethiopian immigrant, and my experiences as a Black American are all important to me. For most of my life, I felt like I had to pick one identity, which was difficult to deal with. However, learning more about the possibility of feminism as an all-encompassing identity made me realize that I could hold all of my identities.

If I could label myself, and get away with having an inextricably long label, I would identify as a Black, Ethiopian, Immigrant, Oromo Feminist. The order of the words prior to “feminism” is not significant, but I couldn’t represent myself without these words. I want to keep the word Black because my identity as a Black person in America has played a critical role in my understanding of race and influenced the way I experience my gender. I included Ethiopian because my cultural background and customs have also shaped my understanding of gender. I included immigrant because my gender has determined the way that I, along with other women in my family, experience being an immigrant. For example, my mom came to America two years after my dad because he was getting a Ph.D. and establishing a life for our family. In fact, most immigrant families I know are structured in a way that the father moves to the west to get an education while the wife follows years after with the kids. Lastly, I included the word Oromo, which is the name of the ethnic group I belong to. This group has suffered abuse, torture, and marginalization by the Ethiopian government and Oromo women have been subjected to gendered violence.

All of these components of my life are important to me and I don’t believe anyone is more important than the others. They have all helped me to understand what it means to be a feminist by giving me a racial and global context. I chose to use these words because they are very specific to my identity and I feel more comfortable using words that are specific to my identity to describe myself. For example, I don’t identify as an African feminist, because I only feel comfortable identifying with the Ethiopian and Oromo experience, not the African experience which is too vast.

As for the what terms I am planning on using to classify the radical women for my archival project, I am planning on using the term third world feminist. I believe the writings of Shange indicate that she identifies with the views of third world feminists, as I wrote about in my blog post A Daughter’s Geography and Third World Feminism. As for the other radical women, I will look to see how they themselves identify.

This is a photo of an Oromo woman grieving at an Oromo Protest. The protest was against the Ethiopian government which oppressed Oromos and inflicted violence on those who protested the government’s actions.

Thoughts on Unseen: Unpublished Black History

by Makaria Yami 0 Comments

On Friday the 29th, I had the opportunity to attend Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the NYT Archives. The room was packed and the event organizers had to keep bringing in more chairs for the attendees of the event. It was exciting to see that so many members of the Barnard community were interested in learning more about Black history.

One thing that I found surprising was that photography was not always an important component of the New York Times. In fact, it wasn’t until recently that photography was seen as deserving of space in the paper. The images that were commonly placed in the NYT were ads. This is frustrating because photojournalism is a moving and inspiring way to tell stories and it’s sad that the opportunity to utilize photos as a form of storytelling was often ignored by the NYT.

One of the writers of Unseen: Unpublished Black History said the book was about “who wasn’t there” when stories were being told. She said that the book explored what the New York Times chose to cover or not cover and why.

I wonder why the NYT didn’t believe that these photos were worth publishing when they were taken. If they didn’t think that these photos were worth publishing, why were they taken in the first place?

One of my favorite stories discussed at the event was the story of Lena Horne. Lena Horne was a Black singer, actress, and dancer. Horne had trouble finding an apartment in the city because she was Black. Her good friend Harry Belafonte, who was a Black musician, was also having a difficult time getting an apartment in the city. As a result, Belafonte decided to send his white publicist to rent an apartment for him. When the owners found out Belafonte was Black, they refused to give him the apartment. Furious, Belafonte decided to secretly buy the entire building and give Lena Horne a penthouse in the building. This story is so beautiful and inspiring because I don’t always hear stories about Black people winning.

This story is one of the many that was hidden in the NYT archives and is now being brought back to life by this book. It’s sad that these inspiring stories were hidden for so long. More importantly, it’s frustrating to think about how Americans consuming the news were missing important elements of the stories they were reading about, simply because these images were never printed.

A photo of Lena Horne in her apartment.

What’s in a name?

by Aissata Ba 1 Comment

Before even understanding the term, I already described myself as a feminist and I easily got upset when people misuse the term. A student from a class I took during my freshmen year stated ” I am not a feminist because feminism only creates a farther gender imbalance. I identify more as an equalist.” Not to invalidate her being an equalist, but I think she had a deep misunderstanding of what feminism is and aims for. For me, feminism was never about women overpowering men or stating “off with their heads,” but it was more about fixing the gap and creating an equal understanding that all humans deserve. Coming from a Senegalese family where patriarchy is still dominant, I had to learn about feminism independently. I have a very strong yet traditional mother who still holds the believes ingrained in gender roles. I have come to consider myself as a learning feminist because I am learning that different women want different things. There are women who want to remain in a patriarchal home and there are those who seek modern reinventions of gender differences and gender roles. Learning that as a form of feminism is where I am in my journey as a so called feminist.

I think there is a great misunderstanding of feminism and a great misuse of the term. For some reason, there are women activists who refused to identify with feminism though their ideas are similar in thought. The radical women who organized around feminist issues are still, to me at least, feminists as they sought to liberate women in whatever form that takes. The works of the women we have discussed mainly pays attention to feminism for women of color.  There is an obvious difference between white feminism and WOC feminism. I like to explain this difference by saying “white feminism concern equal pay but WOC feminism concern more with getting the job first before the equal pay.”

Intersectionality

by Ariel Leachman 0 Comments

Like in our discussion two weeks ago on “dismantling the patriarchy” it is not possible without the influences of masculinity and how the dominant cultural forces of patriarchy. There is a continual challenge to include all identities in In the same way there is a challenge for our understanding of feminism to capture all identities, as feminism in my view is a localized experience. The fight for “equality” for women is not only racially or socioeconomically specific; but it is also grounded in one’s own experience through culture, ethnicity and personal encounter with their identity as a woman or as other. However, our readings highlight an important effort in the theory of feminism and how it is important to consider the intersectional influences and effects. Without an intersectional lens movements cannot fully fight oppression. Racism for women of color cannot be separated from their gendered oppression.

From an artistic lens, I think that Shange captures this challenge of intersectionality. Her work, and the works of many racially diverse feminist artist draw parallels of the plight of black women and people of color; yet they are able to capture the distinct and unique experience of black women and women of color. One modern artist that I appreciate is Mickalene Thomas. Her art is a process of revisiting and recreating art centered and focused on black women.

Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo

by Ariel Leachman 0 Comments

Shange and this writer, is measured in the impact it made on Black women’s lives. I am still in the mindset of dissecting For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf . I think looking at that text in tandem with Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo is a celebration of both cultural and gender identity in Shange’s work. It is intended by Shange as a handbook for Black girls in order to understand their own lives and Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo seems to be the possibilities that exists through the same healing she talks about in “For colored girls…”.

Shange uses the analogy of a “layin on of hands,” to suggest healing through the support of other women. It is clear within the poem as Sbange writes, ‘hot a man,” and “not my mama,” that she is asking women to pull themselves up fom the ground. The power to continue and hd one’s self must come fom inside a Black woman, and not fom society. Society does not offer a woman control, but rather a feeling of powerlessness. One of the last phrases written in the play is an affirmation for Black women and it gives them power, “I found god in mysew & I loved her/ I loved her fiercely.” The very last line of the play restates Shange intentions, “& this is for colored girls who have considered suicide but are movin to the ends of their own rainbows”. The text sends the message to love and heal yourself because nobody else can do it for you. In the end, the friendships are renewed, as these women do not need this man, but rather each other. This celebrates the Black woman’s ability to support each other in the light of personal tragedy. Therefore, Shange’s perspective views women’s lives and bodies as a source of power and vision; she creates a memorable mystical woman of power in the youthful Indigo in Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo. Indigo’s experiences argue against the concept of menstruation as “the curse” and present it as a part of the legacy and beauty of womanhood.