In “Bocas: My Daughter’s Geography” Ntozake Shange addresses a question: what does it mean to have a shared history of colonization, but exist in different intersections of longitude and latitude (i have a daughter / mozambique, i have a son/ angola p. 21)?
Her work doesn’t hesitate to make different peoples a collective: “we fight the same old men… we have a daughter… we have a son… we embraced & made children of the new world.” In this way the persistence in which these individuals fought to make change for their children by feeding them the sun and encouraging their dreams constructs resistance as a global site. Resistance becomes “the same language” in Mozambique, Angola, Salvador, Johannesburg, La Habana, Guyana, Santiago, Brixton, Trinidad, San Juan, Cape town, and Palestine. Resistance is obvious in the words
“all the dark urchins
rounding out the globe/ primitively whispering
the earth is not flat old men.”
The situation Shange is narrating bases the resistance of colored peoples as an aftermath to the historical occurrences that stole away their location of origin. Furthermore, the end of this three-part poem, New World Core, elucidates the strong opposition of ethnic peoples to their colonization through the two new geographical sites they occupy: Luanda and Chicago.
In New World Core Shange writes
“or language is tactile
colored & wet
our tongues speak
these words
we dance
these words.”
The meaning of this excerpt is rooted in her piece “why i had to dance//”
Dance becomes the discriminate way memory utilizes movement to bring forth an understand of history. The flexibility of location, if it were described as a time and place, is expressed in phrase “a continuity of an aesthetic that is at the heart of blackness//”
Resistance is still a global site, but can instead be viewed through movement: “wherever the colored people were. There were dances i could do & claim as mine/ cause/ i was colored too (52).”
The collective “black dance was alive with the spirit of the caribbean and africa (55)” and subconsciously makes its way into the lives of those living outside of their origins.