After watching the ending of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman in class, I wanted to further explore Clay and Lula as symbols of black and white America. The following shot by shot analysis looks at the ways in which camera angles and mise en scène (everything in front of the camera) interact with the dialogue, and ultimately advance this duality…
A. “They’ll murder you, and have very rational explanations. Very much like your own.”
In his final speech, Clay warns Lula that the day will arrive when black America will turn to a forceful/violent response after centuries of being victims of murder. The silver/white appearing subway pole slices through the image in a jarring fashion. The way the pole intrudes on the image seems to undercut his message and foretell that he is Lula/white America’s next victim.
i live in music
. . .
do you live here in music
sound
falls round me like rain on other folks
–“I live in music”
Shange does not speak of a particular kind of music. Instead, she finds music in all sound–from the rhythms of typing, to the particular cadences and intonations of blacks’ speech, to the seductive reticence of a saxophone or bass clarinet. Music, as natural as the elements, releases and sustains full creative energies,
Neal A. Lester, Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays
Neal Lester puts his finger on sound as a specific facet of Shange’s method, something she shares with many Black Arts Movement artists. (Indeed S.O.S. Calling All Black People includes a whole section of music lyrics.) Poet Harmony Holiday’s argument about the intense musicality and orality of Amiri Baraka’s work and influence could speak just as well to Shange’s work:
Perhaps Mr. Baraka can’t be understood fully without recourse to sound — his style of oratory and the range of expression in his voice, whether heard in person or on the records he occasionally made, often with jazz musicians. . . . you can adduce clear relationships between his written and oral phrasing and the playing of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach and Albert Ayler (quoted in “Hearing Amiri Baraka,” NYTimes 1/17/14). You can listen to her conversation with Ben Ratcliffe (and to clips of Baraka) below.
As you know from poems like “I live in Music” (nappy edges) and Shange’s many collaborations with musicians, sound and music are an important part of the physicality of her language: music makes an appearance at key moments in her fiction and verse as well as in her choreopoems. For this blogpost, pick a piece of music or significant sound that is cited or played in one of her works. (You can choose one from the playlists or pick one on your own.) Listen to the song and find out a little about its background. How does the song function in the text? For example, does it create an emotional state, evoke a certain historical period, link to movement, or cite a certain politics? What correspondences can you see between the music and written phrasing? With what sensory experiences is music connected?
This is a post you can do at any point during the year. Feel free to use it if you don’t have a focus. You can also use it in conjunction with your music contribution to class.
. . . 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”
