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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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gd to be born

by Kiani 1 Comment

TW: mention of body mutilation and rape

Over and over we’ve praised Shange for uplifting us a la “I found god in myself & I loved her/ i loved her fiercely” but not enough for staring danger in the face and saying its name. Shange’s piece is not so gd to be born a girl confronts the emotional and physical violence done to women by the world. In The Black Sexism Debate Ntozake Shange writes,

clitorectomies, rape, & incest/ are irrevocable life-deniers/ life-stranglers & disrespectful of natural elements/ i wish these things wdnt happen anywhere anymore/ then i cd say it waz gd to be born a girl everywhere/ even though gender is not destiny/ right now being born a girl is to be born threatened/ i dont respond well to threats/ i want being born a girl to be a cause for celebration/ cause for protection & nourishment of our birthright/ to live freely with passion, knowing no fear/ that our species waz somehow incorrect.

This passage allows us to interact with the good and bad genesis of the works we’ve been engaging with this semester. It’s interesting that this hard subject matter is treated in the same way as luxurious baths, or cooking greens, or happenings outside of a window. They are treated as matter-of-fact.  We stare at the painful words on the screen and swallow hard as we consider their implications. It’s not pretty and it’s not warming. It’s sobering in its cry. Shange doesn’t ask us to confront the truth for truth’s sake, though. She asks us to confront it in confidence that we will use it to heal. To understand what is wrong and what is right.

The piece ends indicative of Shange’s decision to recognize the pain in growth and healing,

we are born girls & live to be women who live our own lives/ to
live our lives/
to have/
our lives
to live.

The usage of language, specifically gendered language, is interesting in considering people of trans, gender non-conforming, and queer identities feeling seen by this piece. I chose to leave “a girl” out of the title as I am grappling with the implications of the word in a natal context. I wonder, what does it mean to be born a girl? And to live out that girlhood?

 

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.