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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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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

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.

Nappy Edges and the personal/political

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

. . . 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”