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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Universality & “Oneness” — Blogpost #2

by Charista 1 Comment

          Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf” struck me to my core. The choreopoem debuted in 1976 which amazes me because it holds so much significance and truth in relation to the age we currently live in. During this time, the choreopoem’s format and subject matter was revolutionary. 

          The stories and emotions of seven black women telling their truths and experiences of abuse, rape, abortion, infidelity, courtship and the bonds that are forged between them is so extremely powerful and made me reflect on the relevance this choreopoem will hold for eternity as a part of history. The content of the choreopoem is not only still relevant to society today, but it’s also shedding a light on the urgent reminder that women of color are still being mistreated and disregarded by society, even during the #MeToo era.

          Something this choreopoem made me think a lot about was theme of universality and “oneness.” After each woman speaks her truth, another woman tells hers, sometimes interjecting for questions. It truly makes you visualize one woman speaking, while the other women stay on stage behind her. This makes “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When The Rainbow Is Enuf” feel like a conversation, as opposed to a set of a few monologues–ultimately reinforcing the message that these experiences are universal, not individual. These struggles were felt by the entire group, not just applicable to that one woman. In moments like this throughout the choreopoem, I was able to feel the power of both individual experience as well as a sense of collective empathy which reminded me that these systematic failures and social problems are deeply rooted in history.

 

nappy edges: the struggle for black womanhood

by Ariel Leachman 0 Comments

As I think about the title nappy edges it was interesting to me as to think about the physical challenge of nappy edges to conform to one’s hair in away that is contained and socially proper. In a way, Shange draws parallels in the black woman’s experience as a poet and as a women to the dilemma of nappy edges when she writes about the restrictions of womanhood that persist with women because of the societal masculine pressures of conformity and acceptance. Shange explores how traditional gender dynamics can exclude women. Through love and relationships as spaces where women should be able to seek their own pleasure, sexual or in motherhood. For Shange, womanhood can sometimes act as a double edge sword in that sex and love can either torment or uplift women. These selection of poems in nappy edges push back against the way in which black women have been allowed a single, monolithic voice and experience. What I appreciate about this piece is the emphasis of self care and love through sexuality, poetry and femininity.

 

For my digital piece I selected a spoken word performance by one of my favorite poets in the arts collective Strivers Row. In this performance Alysia talks about the labels, restrictions on her womanhood by men. Her experience discusses how women are expected to behave and in a sense a form of respectability politic for black women that is created by black men. I enjoyed that at the end of the poem Alysia identifies her identity as a poet and as a woman in her existence stripped away from the labels by the men; yet still she faces challenges of self doubt and questioning her self worth. This poem carried many parallels to the themes in nappy edges in a modern and revived ways from the words and poetry of Shange during the 1970s.

The Colonized Intellectual

by Aissata Ba 1 Comment

“National culture is the collective thought

process of a people to describe,

justify,

and extol the actions

whereby they have joined forces

and remained strong…

National culture in the under­developed countries,

therefore,

must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle

these countries are waging.” (National Culture, Fanon)

This quote was quite interesting to me because it could easily be applied to modern day music and Shange. Awhile back, I had a small discussion with my friends about Nigerian music being called African music or Jamaican music being simply referred to as Caribbean music. Interestingly, the conversation shifted into talking about race, music, locality, etc. This quote also brought up two questions for me: what power does the collective have that an individual would not? To what extent or in what situations is the collective force necessary or needed? Shange And Fanon have two completely different writing styles. Though Shange’s writing might be a bit of an easier read, both writers and thinkers are intellectual and revolutionary thinkers.

Going back to the entire reading by Fanon, Fanon details three stages in what he called the “colonized intellectual”. Fanon explained that in the first stage, the intellectual mimics the colonist and conforms to colonial tastes. This is a stage where the colonized tries to be like the Europeans, extolling and admiring European culture. In the second stage, Fanon explains,  the colonized reacts against this assimilation and desire. This is the Négritude phase in which, in reaction to the European casting of African culture as inferior, the intellectual extols each and every thing about African culture as superior. In the third stage, this love for culture finally moves to a fight for liberation. The intellectual begins to write “combat literature, revolutionary literature” that hopes to galvanize and motivate the people into fighting the colonists. In this stage, Fanon explains is the hope that developing a new culture will begin to shape a new nation.

“My Pen is a Machete”: Transforming English

by Ariel Leachman 1 Comment

it is most clear during

lovemaking

when the separation of everyday life lifts for a while/

when a kiss/ and a stroke/ and enter my lover

i am also a child re-entering my mother. . .

i want to return/ to a womb-state of harmony/ and also to the ancient world

i enter my lover

but it is she in her orgasm who returns

i see her face for a long moment/ the unconscious bliss that an infant carries/

the memory of behind its shut eyes.

then when it is she who makes love to me. . .

the intensity/ is also pushing out

a borning!

she comes in/ and is then identified

with the ecstasy that is born. . .

So i too return to the mystery of my mother/and of the world

as it must have been

when the motherbond was exalted.

 

Going through this exercise of rewriting prose as if it were a poem  required me to thing through the purpose of each word, and its significance within a sentence and its purpose. The use of pauses through punctuation is a process that took many attempts to figure out the impact of the word as a function of the authors message. In my decision to create a poem of emotion with the prose from Rich’s “Of Woman Born”, I chose to also create a structural relationship of the words. Each sentence that Rich creates in her prose is a completion of an idea or a continuation of words that relate to one another. In this week’s reading from Shange in ” My Pen is a Machete, she creates intentional responses of the reader to the words in her poems through the pauses in the form of “/” or breaks in stanzas. While reading the pauses made me focus in on particular words and how they related to her overall message in the poem. When re-writing my prose I created the purposeful meaning and emotion of words that otherwise was not captured in prose form, but became more vivid in the form of poetry.

As A Woman & A Poet

by Clarke 1 Comment

she said/ as a woman & a poet/ i’ve decided to wear my ovaries on my sleeve/ raise my poems on my milk/ & count my days by the flow of my mensis/ the men who were poets were aghast/ they fled the scene in fear of becoming unclean/ they all knew those verses/ & she waz left with an arena of her own/ where words & notions/ imply ‘she’/ where havin lovers is quite common regardless of sex/ or profession/ where music & mensis/ are considered very personal/ & language a tool for exploring space/

the moral of the story:

#1: when words & manners leave you no space for yrself/ make a poem/ very personal/ very clear/ & yr obstructions will join you or disappear/

#2: if yr obstructions dont disappear/ repeat over & over again/ the new definitions/ til the ol ones have no more fight in them/ then cover them with syllables you’ve gathered from other dyin species/

#3: a few soft words have sent many a woman to her back with her thighs flung open & eager/ a few more/ will find us standing up & speakin in our own tongue to whomever we goddam please.

 

Shange writes of the experience of black woman artists who drew from both black and feminist movements in this passage of “wow . . . yr just like a man!” When the “woman and poet” decides to proclaim her womanhood on a stage in front of a partially male audience, her verses are seen as unclean and the men flee the scene. This is indicative of the ways in which women who actively drew from and shaped the Black Power and Women’s Liberation Movements, and the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements, experienced exclusion and a lack of support from a male-dominated art world in response to a refocusing of womanhood and women’s liberation.

Shange writes that once these men flee, however, the woman poet is standing “with an arena of her own” so that not only does she have more space to share her verses, but also the arena in which she stands becomes a place where language is “a tool for exploring space” rather than simply words, which Shange refers to as “a man’s thing” earlier in the text. The first “moral of the story” reveals what Shange is claiming about the connections between words and men, and how neither may leave you space. It plainly states that when words leave you no space, you should make a personal poem. When the woman poet does this, her “obstructions,” or male audience, disappear, rather than join her. In this way, when she performs her personal poem, she creates space that men’s words never could have provided her.

Immediate Cause: Obscene Questions and Chris Brown Sympathizers

by Michelle 2 Comments

Shange’s “with no immediate cause” in nappy edges is powerful and effective in ridiculing rape culture, wherein people downplay the horrible and frequent violences occurring to women.

For me, the structure of the poem in how it paces how I read it is most powerful. Accustomed to hearing grave statistics in speeches, commercials, and other daily mediums, I read,

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten

every five minutes a

woman is raped / every ten minutes

a lil girl is molested

slowly and with a great pause at the end of each statistic. Shange quickens my reading by following the statistics with a smooth narration of how she encounters these statistics daily in microagressive ways. By smooth I mean that these narrations can be read quickly and easily while still capturing fully what she is saying (which is definitely not always true with Shange’s work). Shange then repeats this sequence of reading pace by slowing down the reader through repeating the statistics and then quickening the reader’s pace through including another narration of violence against women. She repeats this process twice more with perhaps even more graphic instances of violence each time to indicate an overall speeding up in the poem. The height of her poem is reached with the following rhetorical questions,

before i ride the subway/buy a paper/drink

coffee/i must know/

have you hurt a woman today

did you beat a woman today

throw a child across a room

are the lil girl’s panties

in yr pocket

i have to ask these obscene questions

I can feel the urgency and desperation in her voice through these “obscene” questions. Especially in the context of patriarchy and rape culture where women are many times dismissed for their fears and the violences occurring to them, these questions are unsettling because they are both outrageous and familiar at the same time. Women have constantly expressed concern over these violences but are dismissed daily by the law, the media, and their community. Shange effectively draws the truth and gravity out of these violences through embedding these outrageous yet familiar concerns in the statistics and narrations.

Reading this poem reminded me of a Crunk Feminist Collective piece I read last year, titled “How Chris Brown is Effing Up My Sex Life: A B-Side to Dating While Feminist.” The author describes her internal conflict of having sexual and intimate relations with men who do not have the same intentional gender politics as she does. Specifically, she cites an instance where she found out that her partner was a Chris Brown sympathizer and therefore she had to reevaluate her standards. She grapples with the question,

Can you be a good feminist if you have intimate engagements with partners who have diametrically opposed gender politics?

This author uses the same tactic of narrating her relationship and other instances in her life where she had to confront this conflict and then climaxing with a series of outrageous yet familiar questions:

In a culture where sisters are dying in alarming numbers from domestic violence, what responsibility do I have to them and to myself to choose intimate partners whose thinking and actions are sound on these matters?

To what extent is and should my sex life be political?

I mean should I withhold sex from dudes with sexist attitudes as an act of solidarity with my sisters?

How can I get next to you if I can’t get next to your politics?

How can I let you touch me if I wouldn’t touch your politics with a ten foot pole?

Can I feel safe in the softness of your touch if you don’t feel led to question a culture where other men routinely touch other women violently?

Can we really cuddle if you have the option to not care about women and violence?

Isn’t that choice, the choice to not care about how the world affects the woman you’re spending time with, a violent one?

How can I trust you to hold me when your beliefs hold me down?

Having read “The Art of Transformation: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements” by Lisa Gail Collins and therefore understanding the crucial role Shange played and continues to play in bridging the Black Power and Women’s Liberation movement for black women makes this even more relevant. The Crunk Feminist Collective author pays homage to the black women before her who also bridged these movements:

It wouldn’t be the first time that Black women withheld sex from Black men in service of larger racial interests. After the Civil War, Black men (but not Black women) could vote for a few brief years. Back then, most Black folks voted Republican as they were the more liberal party at the time and the party of Abraham Lincoln. But there were times when some Black men determined to vote Democrat so they wouldn’t be the target of white racial backlash. In addition to accompanying their men to the polls to monitor their votes, Black women banded together and encouraged each other to withhold sex from any man who voted against the community’s interests. These sisters knew how personal the political was long before white women said it. They knew that when it comes to Black women’s quality of life, there is nothing more political or personal than the person we’re sleeping with.

nappy edges was published in 1978, this article in 2011. Black women are still grappling with these internal conflicts today but we must show love to Shange for being a visionary of her time to vocalize the intersectionalities and realities of black women.

 

Engaging Black Masculinity

by Nadia 0 Comments

the suspect is black & in his early 20’s is a poem that causes readers to engage with black masculinity in America by invoking Bigger Thomas, a 20 year old man who accidentally kills a white woman in Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Before engaging Native Son, Shange provides context (in brackets) of real life examples of criminalized black men spoken about in the news in 1974 at the time she was writing the poem. She refers to the criminal activities of a left-wing revolutionary group, the Symbionese Liberation Army (S.L.A.). The S.L.A. kidnapped a white woman named Patricia Hearst and robbed a bank. In addition Shange mentions, “Zebra” killings which were 16 racially motivated murders and 8 attempts by a group of Black Muslim men. In providing this information in the brackets, Shange sets up a clear parallel to the criminalization of Bigger Thomas in Native Son, while simultaneously showing that the content in the brackets could be replaced with content about the criminalization of black men at any point in history. A very poignant example would be the way black men are criminalized in Public Safety security alerts at Barnard about suspects who are most often black and in their early 20s or younger.

Outside of the brackets, Shange uses Bigger Thomas in the rest of her poem as a representative for all black men. Notably, black women are suspected to be implicated by mere association to black men, as seen with Bessie Smith and the mention of “(women included)” in brackets within the brackets in the first stanza.  Shange reveals her complex relationship with black men in this poem by revealing how she went from hating Bigger to sympathizing with him. She writes, “i always hated bigger thomas… till i remembered who mary dalton waz.” Mary Dalton is a stand in for white supremacy which leads black men to commit crimes as their only means of survival. It is noteworthy that there are few slashes in the poem, rather there are gaping white spaces where Mary Dalton is implicated causing us to ponder and dwell on the whiteness of the page between words.

Though Shange reflects on black masculinity and how it has been affected by white supremacy, Shange shows her concern for black women’s agency and well-being through her identification with Bessie. She makes it plain that “mary dalton cost bessie.” She acknowledges that “bigger treated bessie soooo bad.” But at the same time, she invites black women into having a more complex understanding of black masculinity. Shange realizes that her simplistic understanding of Bigger as either “a man” or “a thug,” excludes the role of white supremacy in the expression of their masculinity.  By referring to Mary Dalton as the reason behind Bigger’s crimes, she also shows how black men’s struggles in racist society may cause them to be abusive in romantic relationships, as Bigger was with Bessie.

Ultimately, Shange deals with the experience of black people in America through this poem. Mary Dalton, “her drunken ashes / her wanton charred / bones sent thousands of / bullets looking for a blk boy / any one nigger wd do.” Black people are not seen as individuals, but one suspect mass: “the suspect is our sons / again prey to whims & caprices of / grande dame white ladies.” And Mary Dalton is resurrected every time a black person is criminalized. (slashed in quotes were added by me)

 

Bigger Thomas holding lifeless Mary Dalton: Bigger’s burden to carry. 

Mary Dalton,

“you are ashes

you are dry bones

you are the bringin of death to our sons

the suspect is black & always in his early 20’s”