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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Reading Zaki: Week 5

by Melissa 10 Comments

It’s so magic folks feel their own ancestors coming up out of the earth to be in the realms of their descendants; they feel the blood of their mothers still flowing in them survivors of the diaspora.

Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo

In revisiting Vanessa Valdes’ Oshun’s Daughters, I have been able to re-engage with Afro-spirituality as it appears in Shange’s work, specifically Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo. Valdés illustrates the ways in which each protagonist is associated with a Yoruba or Dahomean deity, sometimes representing more than one entity at a time. These depictions of Afro-spiritualist deities are heterogenous in that they activate a range of traditions manifested in African-descent communities across the western hemisphere. Shange does not limit the characters’ embodiments of Afro-spiritualism to singular practices; at times, we see the Oshun of Santeria, the Gullah-Geechee Blue Sunday, or the different forms of Erzulie in Haitian Vodou. In this effort, Shange is honoring the transcendent quality of Afro-spiritualism, in its limitless iterations across communities and cultural contexts.  

Suturing the rifts within our narratives

by Melissa 2 Comments

For Shange, the dramatic text serves to engender collectivity by mapping out social relations that counter normative constitutions of sociality and by establishing a differential mode of collectivity and group sovereignty. “The touching that opens and closes the drama creates links across and between the individual poems, enabling individual innovation and expression within collectivity.” (Colbert). The bodies through which touch is transmitted are mobilizing new patterns of relationality that descend from traditions fostered among Black women in the interest of healing from and resisting violence.  The choreopoem departs from the idealized white body though a narrative that reasserts Black subjectivity/humanity through the intimacy of touch.

The ways in which pain and sorrow shift and are molded into joy and vice versa through dance, touch, collective relationality creates a fluidity of emotion that mirrors the unstable patterns of racialization and gendering from which Black womanhood emerges. The inherently unstable and wavering aspects of Black identity are informed by the constantly changing and evolving needs of an imperialist, settler-colonialist state. The state’s reliance upon Black women’s bodies to re-establish its power and sovereignty demands an ever-shifting motion and (re)formation of Black women’s placement within complex patterns of social relation. Black women operate within these fluid and unstable networks to make meaning of their own subjective realities. We make use of the inherently contradictory aspects of the individual and collective self to suture the rifts and fragments of our narratives.