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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.

 

Third World Women’s Alliance/Making Use of Digital Archives

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

First edition of Triple Jeopardy, the newspaper of the Third World Women’s Alliance

I wanted to just make a pitch to everyone to remember that  you can find primary sources in rooms beyond those designated as “archives”   cultural institutions like the Schomburg: sometimes they are in main collections or (since digitization is happening at an increasing rapid clip) online. You should be inventive and wide-ranging when looking for accessible copies of works you might want to use.  For example, following up on Michelle’s Archive Task #1, I was trying to see if there was anyplace in NYC that has papers related to the Third World Women’s Alliance.  The main branch of the NYPL (not the “archive” per se) has Triple Jeopardy, the newspaper of the TWWA, in its main collection.  However, that journal is also available online in the Independent Voices database.

Independent Voices is an open-access collection of digitized independent publications. It can be a very rich source for Black Power/”post” Black Power and Feminist materials. For example, I found several pieces by Ntozake (also spelled Ntosake) in the database.  Since some of you are interested in healing, I have a screenshot of  her talking about her work with “injured” women in an extensive interview published in the literary journal,  River Styx.

Screenshot 2015-12-05 10.56.44

Ntozake’s response to interview questions from Students at Harris-Stowe College in Saint Louis (1978). Note the use of the dash in the interview transcription.

I highly recommend this interview, Shange talks about many of the things you are investigating now: Black Power, Spirituality, Third Worldism,  Feminism, childhood, etc.  Independent Voices also suggests that you help with digitization by correcting some of the OCR (Optical-Scanning Recognition) errors.

Shange, Ntozake. “Ntozake Shange: Live from Saint Louis!” River Styx, no. 5 (1979): 91–115.
UPDATE:  I absolutely forgot to share with you Archive Grid, an archive search engine that lets you map searches. for example, when I did a search for Triple Jeopardy, once I moved from the daunting “list view,” the summary view let me know that in Philadelphia (hey Michelle!) there was a copy of one issue located in the “Women’s Health Concerns Committee Records” at the University of Pennsylvania.

Screen Shot 2015-12-14 at 8.20.33 PM

 

Closer to home, I discovered that the Columbia literary magazine, Emanon, published some of Ntozake Shange’s poetry from when she was a Barnard Student (search Paulette Williams).

 

poet as orator/performer/activist; poetry as translation

by Nia 2 Comments

Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography

mozambique
angola
salvador & johannesburg
the atlantic side of nicaragua costa rica
cuba puerto rico
charleston & savannah/ haiti
panama canal/ the yucatan
manila
la habana
guyana
santiago & brixton
near managua/
pétionville
abidjan
chicago
trinidad
san juan
capetown & palestine
luanda
chicago

These are all the places Shange connects alludes to in “Bocas” in A Daughter’s Geography. She names them as her numerous children related though they “cannot speak/the same language.” (Shange). She connects all the children of Africa and the African diaspora through experience not just through heritage. There is the simple explanation for these relationships; the one often invoked by artists and academics alike: that each ethnicity is just a stop on the trade route. Mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons became Basian, Jamaican, American, and Cuban through trade and bartering. They developed new cultures and claimed happenstance for their own.

“but a long time ago/ we boarded ships/ locked in
depths of seas our spirits/ kisst the earth
on the atlantic side of nicaragua costa rica
our lips traced the edges of cuba puerto rico
charleston & savannah/ in haiti
we embraced &
made children of the new world” (Shange)

Shange goes farther than this connection. She unites these ethnicities and nationalities through their experiences of oppression and subjugation at the hands of similar if not the same groups of oppressors.

“but we fight the same old men/ in the new world… the same men who thought the earth waz flat
go on over the edge/ go on over the edge old men”

She credits the experience of being marginalized and overcoming that marginalization as a uniting force of these colored people. The rhythms that emerged, the patios that formed, the food, the names, all point to a common experience. It is no surprise then that she had to make language move. When it moves, no matter what language it is, poems can capture, unite, and uplift her children. It doesn’t matter that one speaks Spanish, the other Portuguese; they use the movement in the poem, the space between the words, the history behind their creation to unite themselves as family.

I added some of my favorite spoken word poets from all over the diaspora.

http://operationelevation.tumblr.com/post/128567513644/bnv15

“Her Sisters Cooked & She Made Spells”: Reflections on meeting Shange

by Amanda 2 Comments

I am really grateful for having the opportunity to meet Shange in such an intimate setting. I think the most stimulating of many pleasant moments were hearing Shange talk about the thoughts and stories behind the creation of some of her major works, realizing she literally lives a choreopoem, and getting to speak to her about i live in music.

I titled this post after the words Shange used to encapsulate her novel Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo. The simplicity of her synopsis lends to the idea that explication isn’t always necessary—a point that I think is central to Shange’s work. Although the statement is simple and accessible, it also proves complex and in need of dissection. Cooking and making spells are two sides of the same creative coin. While her sisters cook, Indigo makes spells—collectively their crafts render them creators, historians, and even personal archivists.

In thinking of the class’ discussion on the significance of women of color telling and recording their own stories, I am inclined to consider the way Shange communicated throughout the class meeting. While speaking, Shange often tapped her foot on the floor to a rhythm that was in conversation with the swaying of her arms. At some point, I realized that I was listening out for these taps. Not merely out of curiosity, but rather out of necessity. Her stomping music and dancing arms served as means for me to grasp her thoughts, completely. They functioned as beginning, ending, and accent of her ideas. Her life truly is choreopoem in practice.

At the dinner’s conclusion I spoke with Shange about her poem, i live in music and asked about the motivation behind it. Not only did Shange recount that the poem’s creation was an improvisational act—the result of having a band cancel their performance last minute during a radio show she was hosting (?)—she also explained that the line “I got 15 trumpets where other women got hips”—a line that I had to inquire about because of its particular importance to me—came out of the genuine and literal desire to have 15 trumpets playing during her show. The line also spoke to the functionality of horns, like trumpets, as tools for heralding things and people of great importance. Furthering this idea, Shange spoke to the horn and trumpet being analogy to women as heralds of the miraculous—the creation of art and life, for example.

 

This is a short playlist of some of the songs that got me over hurdles while writing this post. Hope you enjoy!

shange, diaz, and gendered expressions of racial injustice

by Sophia 0 Comments
The portion of Shange’s foreword to for colored girls that discusses the reaction of black men to its circulation reminded me immediately of a 2012 interview with Junot Diaz and the Boston Review, in which he dissects the same 1980s conflagration between male and female authors of color. 
“The brothers criticiz[ed] the sisters for being inauthentic, for being anti-male, for airing the community’s dirty laundry, all from a dreary nationalist point of view” (10).
Shange opens her discussion of the gender-wars with an essentially identical conclusion:
“The reaction from black men to for colored girls was in a way very much like the white reaction to black power The body traditionally used to power and authority interpreting, through their own fear, my work celebrating the self-determination and centrality of women as a hostile act” (11).
She soon ends with the simple assertion that black men were threatened by the reality that their bodies, stories and the powers that articulate them were not the locus of for colored girls’ narrative voice. It was “man-hating,” airing the community’s dirty laundry —a community which, with the through-line of for colored girls, was seen as effectively, publicly betrayed and dismantled. The issue with the reaction of these men is their inability to visualize subaltern communities with anything other than “a dreary nationalist point of view.” You cannot dismantle one portion of an oppressive matrix with one portion of the oppressed peoples; it must be dismantled wholly or not at all, with forces other than the master’s tools. 

In Dialogue: “somebody walked off wid alla my stuff” & “sorry”

by Danielle 2 Comments

Giving up a part of the (or even the whole) self to sustain/nourish/love men is a very female experience. For Colored Girls offers the common understanding of sisterhood as a way to uncover and embrace the music of your spirit, and as a way for women—especially women of color—to reclaim their ownership/pride of the self.

I read the choreopoem while watching/listening to a Middlebury College adaptation. Experiencing Shange’s work as a performance completely changed the way I was able to experience and engage with the text. I want to look specifically at the poems “somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff” and “sorry” and how they are in dialogue with each other. The first poem talks about how relationships/men can take from women the very essence of themselves/all that is nourishing (“my laugh”, “my rhythms & my voice” & “my calloused feet & quick language”). The lady in green is the sole woman on the stage, yet watching the performance as a part of an audience, reacting claps and snaps fight the strong presence of isolation onstage. The crowd erupted in snaps after she said, “now you can’t have me less i give me away”. Within the audience exists a common understanding that sometimes for love we—women—give up all of the parts of ourselves that we love. But women need to handle their own stuff. They need to love themselves and stop taking care of themselves last.

There is a blurring of transition to “sorry”. The lights do not dim/there is no re-staging; the other women of color walk out one by one. They talk about how “sorry” isn’t nourishing. “Sorry” doesn’t make up for what men have taken. “Sorry” doesn’t allow women to feel wanted, understood & happy. I think the blurring of borders between the two poems speaks to the narrative as a whole. This isolated experience is easier understood in the company of other women. Shange shows that through sisterhood, women find space to navigate these painful experiences, and are able to find a place to care and love themselves.

Here is the adaptation I watched while reading the choreopoem…

Here are some songs I listened to while watching/reading For Colored Girls…

“Dancing in the Streets”/Martha & The Vandellas

“Stay in My Corner”/The Dells

“Che Che Colé”/ Willie Colón