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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Reading Zake: This Would Change Over Time

by Clarke 9 Comments

In the following passages from “why i had to dance//” Shange speaks of the relationship between her dancing and her writing process:

this is a critical moment/ when i decided that dance was as important to me as writing/ that in order to write, i had to sweat/ to reach some endorphin high to get to the truth/ which was the word/ this would change over time// (56)

in my early adulthood/ politics and the arts were truly wed at the hip or thereabouts// (57)

our commitment to the movement meant that all our resources intellectual as well as physical had to be dedicated to the liberation movement/ which is one of the reasons i had to dance/ (57)

it is possible to start a phrase with a word and end with a gesture/ that’s how i’ve lived my life/ that’s how i continue to study/ produce black art/ (58)

Bad Girls In Three Parts: Reading “The Black Sexism Debate”

by Tiana Reid 0 Comments

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You bad girl

You sad girl

You’re such a dirty bad girl

— Donna Summer, “Bad Girls” (1979)

What correct analysis of this rotten capitalist dragon within which we live will legitimize the wholesale rape of black women by black men that goes on now within every city of this land?

— Audre Lorde, “The Great American Disease,” in “The Black Sexism Debate” issue of The Black Scholar (May/June, 1979)

 

How are we to read the 1979 special issue of The Black Scholar on the so-called “Black Sexism Debate”? What word in this title is up for discussion? (Hint: It’s the not the “black” part.) What does it mean that we are in the realm of a named dialogue? What does it mean that we have to name this discussion that is always up for debate? How do we confront the seemingly antiquated (read: racist, patriarchal, and biological) language that permeates the occasion for the issue, Robert Staples’s “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists”?

In this post, I’m not going to rehash any of the arguments from the issue or offer any of my own in part because I can imagine June Jordan in her hazy-beautiful voice (see above) saying, as she does in the opening to “Black Women haven’t ‘Got It All,” “All I have time to say to Robert Staples is this: Are you serious?” (39). Instead, I’m going to present a few provisional fragments as guideposts and entryways into this historical text that embodies such a fascinating affective register. I am totally serious.

Male Criticisms of Black Womanhood

by Nadia 0 Comments

Last class, Amanda posed the following question:

“In recognizing the importance of for colored girls centralizing collectivity among black women, or what Soyica Diggs Colbert describes as “creating alternative sites of belonging,” how can we begin to explore and deconstruct criticism of the play’s presentation of black men?”

I cannot help but want to answer this question in light of this week’s reading. Though there is an incredible sense of community and sisterhood between the women in for colored girls and part of the glue that binds them is their experiences (whether positive or oppressive) with black men.

In a world without men, for colored girls would cease to exist. Poems such as “latent rapists,” “sorry,” “abortion cycle #1” in for colored girls speak to neglect, rape and misfortune in black women’s lives that is a result of black men’s behavior. Probably the reason why the criticism hits home for the male critics of for colored girls is because the women are not abused by an abstract, distance entity, but are “bein betrayed by men who know [them]” (33) and those have been “considered a friend” (34).