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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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embodied responses: what it takes to feel real

by Kiani 2 Comments

“i commenced to buying pieces of gold/ 14 carat/ 24 carat/ 18 carat gold/ every time some black person did something that waz beneath him as a black person & more like a white person. i bought gold cuz it came from the earth/ & more than likely it came from south africa/ where the black people are humiliated & oppressed like in slavery. i wear all these things at once/ to remind the black people that it cost a lot for us to be here/ our value/ can be known instinctively/ but since so many black people are having a hard time not being like white folks/ i wear these gold pieces to protest their ignorance/ their disconnect from history. i buy gold with a vengeance/ each time someone appropriates my space or my time without permission/ each time someone is discourteous or actually cruel to me/ if my mind is not respected/ my body toyed with/ i buy gold/ & weep. i weep as i fix the chains round my neck/ my wrists/ my ankles.” pg 51, Spell #7 of Three Pieces 

For me, Spell #7 was harrowing in its candidness. In between the lines of the banter and bar talk and blackface, the text ate away at me. This quote was particularly salient in my reading of the text. Here, Maxine describes painful experiences of appropriation, disrespect, humiliation, and oppression done to her by her oppressors and by those of her skin kind. Maxine copes with these experiences by materializing them. Her pain is embodied by jewelry that reminds of where she comes from, or where she’d like to be, or where she should be. She identifies with objects of gold from this place with bodies like hers experiencing things like she is. She puts the gold on her body. The implication of any kind of adornment is weighted with questions of identification, self-concept, history, and context. The implications of this diasporic woman putting a diasporic object on her body are huge and almost agonizing as these objects represent a lost connection and a visceral connection to pain in her immediate life. Adornment is thus a historic and revived identification with pain. Maxine wears these pieces of gold to remind herself and others of the pain of being; the realness of being a black body in space, in a world that rejects that realness as often as it can.

The act of adorning one’s self is often seen as this purely positive means of communicating one’s self, one’s means, one’s class, and one’s convictions. This excerpt from Spell #7 shows the reader Maxine’s or anyone’s greater reasons for decorating their bodies in the ways that they do. The quote calls to mind the explicit detail with which Shange describes the women and their colors in for colored girls– their “rhinestones etchin the corners of her (their) mouths” and their “oranges & magnolia scented wrists” … signs of fragility and femininity and also a kind of armor against oppressive forces. A kind of homage to the many sweet ways a body can be and an acknowledgement of why they are that way.

A Living Archive: Meeting Zake

by Nia 1 Comment

This post is late.

It took two days, three naps, several sessions of frenzied storytelling, and cataloguing, reviewing, and obsessing over my footage for me to properly reflect on and come to conclusions about Thursday and Friday’s encounters with Ntozake Shange. Last year when Professor Hall gave me Shange’s address so I could write to her and I spent all summer not knowing how I could possibly put into words all the things Shange is for me, I could not imagine meeting and interacting with her.

“provenance:” the beginning, the origin point of an archive; even if two subjects interact, they do not mix

What is an archive? It is and is not a collection of texts that signify a subject: a time, a place, a genre, a person. Objects which illuminate aspects of the subject to which they are attached. This definition, as flimsy and as finite as it is, is constantly under duress. There are politics around what subjects academia deems worthy of an archive (they didn’t collect Basquiat’s journals until the yt gaze on his art had already killed him). There are politics around what can be deemed an archive. An attic full of family heirlooms, a childhood bedroom undisturbed, a quilt of old clothing, can be studied to reveal what they signify, but are they an “Archive.” Capital letters Full Stop. There are even politics around what is kept long enough to signify anything. As Shange pointed out, ” the day they freed the slaves in Brazil they [the government, the slaveowners] were commanded to destroy all the documents about slavery.” Wh(o,y,at) is history? Who has access?

“original order:” trying to maintain text in the order in which it is received. 

The internet is an archive. One to which everyone (but not everyone) and anyone (but not anyone) can contribute. It is an open and radical space in which laymen’s can contribute their presence to history, can disrupt the canonical/dominant definitions of text, art, knowledge, history, existence; the list is an ever-expanding infinite. Yet, this classification/validation of the capital I “Internet” is often resisted by those who classify. There are divisive politics about what academia, journalism, and other spheres held holy by ytmen and held captive from all others save a few about what can be considered a text. Wh(o,at) is worth study? Collective recognition is what deems a text important, what creates its value. This is why we value autographs and object once owned, worn, touched, and eaten by celebrities and historical figures. How does agency, voice, and access factor into the process? For every text validated as worthy of research and study, there is one used for surveillance and marketing. A text is, as Shannon, the Shange archivist noted, “a piece that we allow to speak.” What we do with its words is up to us?

I drew pumpkins and pineapples and apples and seagulls on the page. I processed.

I napped for three hours after the open session on Friday and my subsequent interview with Shange. I discovered through it not only thing which validated and expanded my own views about womanhood, Black womanhood, love, sex, my body, my aethestic, and many other things which is would take more words than I have to express, but I also discovered that I have more in common with my classmates than I previously thought. Even with some distance, I have only movements and sounds to name the experience I had meeting Shange. Gentle hums in my throat, behind my ears, in the pit of stomach; the wrinkle I surely gave myself from darting my eyes, unable to meet her gaze. The ineffable sadness I felt that I did not hug her to say goodbye. So I offer only my notes from that day for now, my interview with her for later. Provenance of my own archive.

Movement + Lit

“the joy of breathlessness…readies the body for literature” – Zake

“approach language from a state of excitement” – Zake

Begin interviews with an excessive movement/running, dancing, drop swings

“My writing come from a pit, from deep inside of me instead of from my skin” – Zake

“slashes indicate a change in intonation…intent or voice” – Zake

“I wanted to read somebody so I decided I had to read myself” – Zake

poh-ten-see

one kind of god “whose wounds are not the end of anything”

by Michelle 0 Comments

Throughout the poem “We Need a God Who Bleeds Now”, Shange is describing two kinds of gods; one kind of god who bleeds “some small male vengeance” while the other kind of god bleeds birth and life, “whose wounds are not the end of anything”. She argues for the latter kinds of gods. It is interesting that she uses traditionally violent and negative rhetoric to describe both kinds of gods. By traditionally violent and negative, I mean words that are usually used in violent and negative contexts. In describing the kind of gods we do not need, she uses the words “vengeance,” “pitiful,” and “humility”. In one interpretation, she seems to be describing death, murder, war, and politics. I would like to explore her choice to use the same violent and negative rhetoric in describing the kinds of gods we do need. She uses the words “tearing,” “breaks,” “bleeding,” “heaving,” and “mourning” to describe in one interpretation would be the kinds of gods or people that give birth to life. Shange seems to be drawing a parallel between the kinds of people in the world who are killing and those who are giving birth through the similar emotions those actions evoke. Both actions involve bleeding, a certain amount of violence, force, and overall intense and strong emotions. Therefore perhaps Shange is also making a claim about the range of emotions that we feel as people. She is not putting a value system among the different emotions, rather she is putting a value system for the reasons we feel those emotions. It is almost as if we are reusing / refocusing / rebirthing these words and emotions for a different life.

 

The way Shange juxtaposes blood and emotions in the different contexts reminds me a poem in Nayyirah Waheed’s book of poetry, Salt.

why can we never

talk

about the blood.

the blood of our ancestors.

the blood of our history.

the blood between our legs.

 

— blood

 

It seems that Nayyirah Waheed is doing the same juxtaposition with the word “blood”. Asking to talk about the “blood of our ancestors,” and “history” suggest violence, death, and negativity. But “the blood between our legs,” is harmless and even fruitful.

The Nature of Blood

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

from Michelle Loo

Throughout the poem “We Need a God Who Bleeds Now”, Shange is describing two kinds of gods; one kind of god who bleeds “some small male vengeance” while the other kind of god bleeds birth and life, “whose wounds are not the end of anything”. She argues for the latter kinds of gods. It is interesting that she uses traditionally violent and negative rhetoric to describe both kinds of gods. By traditionally violent and negative, I mean words that are usually used in violent and negative contexts. In describing the kind of gods we do not need, she uses the words “vengeance,” “pitiful,” and “humility”. In one interpretation, she seems to be describing death, murder, war, and politics. I would like to explore her choice to use the same violent and negative rhetoric in describing the kinds of gods we do need. She uses the words “tearing,” “breaks,” “bleeding,” “heaving,” and “mourning” to describe in one interpretation would be the kinds of gods or people that give birth to life. Shange seems to be drawing a parallel between the kinds of people in the world who are killing and those who are giving birth through the similar emotions those actions evoke. Both actions involve bleeding, a certain amount of violence, force, and overall intense and strong emotions. Therefore perhaps Shange is also making a claim about the range of emotions that we feel as people. She is not putting a value system among the different emotions, rather she is putting a value system for the reasons we feel those emotions.

 

The way Shange juxtaposes blood and emotions in the different contexts reminds me a poem in Nayyirah Waheed’s book of poetry, Salt.

why can we never

talk

about the blood.

the blood of our ancestors.

the blood of our history.

the blood between our legs.

 

— blood

 

It seems that Nayyirah Waheed is doing the same juxtaposition with the word “blood”. Asking to talk about the “blood of our ancestors,” and “history” suggest violence, death, and negativity. But “the blood between our legs,” is harmless and even fruitful.

expressions of mind/body in response to external voices

by Sophia 1 Comment

“who is setting these priorities?” and “advice” revealed a facet of Shange to me that was almost more (or at least differently) vulnerable than her work I had previously read.

One of the most defining features of her writing to me has always been the confidence with which she makes art, defines herself as an artist, and transitions between mediums so fluidly that the lines between them are called into question. This, just as much as her characteristic syntax, has always been, as she named it in “takin a solo/ a poetic possibility/ a poetic imperative”, “the particular flow of [her] certain somebody.”

The syntax of “who is setting these priorities?” and “advice” immediately inform you that they will be something different than her usual descending stanzas. They look like prose and read more like a rant, inner monologue, or even a conversation, and deal with an anxiety about writing, performing, and simply living that the powerful self or extension-of-self that speaks in most of her work never questions.

The primary question of “who is setting these priorities?” is “What in the hell am I supposed to do with my body every day?”
The primary question of “advice” is “What in the hell am I supposed to do with my mind?”
They are both in response to external noise; in the former: media-noises and existential smallness, in the latter: the “them” of every artist –who make you feel like an alien and are always asking when you’re going to get a real job.

These poems investigate and meld the mind-body question that Shange is always responding to. “who is setting these priorities?” speaks of physical inhibition instead of physical freedom, which is another departure from what I perceive to be her typical approach. The poem is an anxious accumulation of maladies: “today the cosmos satellite fell down over uranium city”, “4 or 3 million american women who take the pill & smoke are 10 times more likely to have heart attacks than women who don’t take the pill or smoke”, “the wilmington 10 are still in jail. there’s only one woman’s survival house in brooklyn.” Instead of describing her physical self as a way to free her from these stresses, she implies that they build up in her –knots that can only loosen with itches:

“i like to fuck. i’m too nervous not to smoke. no one likes to eat pussy if you wear a diaphragm…i need a cigarette cuz this is just too much for me. plus there are women who actually find sex boring/ me/ i’m gonna have a heart attack.”

“advice” takes the opposite to the same problem; it speaks of body inhibiting mind rather than mind halting body. It opens and closes with the mention of the bodies of those who are giving her advice:

“people keep tellin me to put my feet on the ground i get mad and scream/ there is no ground”
“i am gonna write poems til i die & when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind & knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground”

In this case, her physical limitations are not the center of the conversation so much as the others’ are, who are have such tunnel-vision that they can’t acknowledge the preciousness of her lifeblood, and “[can’t] read or understand english anymore” to the point where it makes her feel like “the last survivor of a crew from mars”.

The response to the vulnerability in the two poems synthesizes why Shange must do her work. When everyone is telling her she can’t be a poet, her black body writes for her: “cartwheel and somersault down pages outta my mouth come visions distilled like bootleg whiskey” When there are too many problems, too much noise, and too many voices, she opens another show after the one that just closed, keeps fucking and taking the pill, and catching the 8:00am train.