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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Healing Justice and Ancestral Calls – Makeen Blog Post #3

by Zachery 1 Comment

Recently, I have been thinking extensively about how the individual engages with the community. This is largely connected to Ntozake’s emphasis on the prioritizing of individual liberation to achieve communal freedom in Nappy Edges. The concept of the individual role within a community also arose in my reading of the goals of the Black and Feminist Art Movements in The Art of Transformation by Lisa Gail Collins. Many of my thoughts have framed this as a dilemma of the individual vs. the collective. The Healing Justice event encouraged me to think otherwise.

 

The event opened with the calling of the names of our ancestors into the space. Specifically, we were asked to call the names of ancestors that follow us into every room that we occupy. I began thinking of names of my genetic ancestors that I could remember. Then I heard the workshop leaders calling the names of Audre Lorde, of bell hooks, and I began to think more broadly of what ancestry is. I called the names of Ida B. Wells, of Maya Angelou, of the women whose work my mother made sure I was familiar with from an early age. I began to think also what it means for these ancestors to follow us into the spaces we occupy as individuals. For someone to follow you into a space means that you are never alone. And even as we navigate our moments of solitude, our navigation is very much so guided by those who came before us. As a result, I truly did have to deconstruct my former understandings of isolation and solitude.

 

I had come to understand solitude as a being alone, separate and disconnected. This understanding of solitude has bled into my understanding of the individual. However, with this thought in mind of who follows me into the room, I was forced to think of how even my thoughts and how I carry myself have been formed and nurtured by those who came before me. It also forced me to view the individual and the collective not as being in competition with each other but as two entities that need each other to survive. I thrive as an individual because of the communities that existed before I was even here. My contributions as an individual to the communities that I exist within now are fueled by those that allow me to thrive on my own. Being in the space of the Healing Justice event, hearing the names of ancestors exit the mouths of every individual in the room, while seated in a circle truly helped me visually and audibly recognize that the individual does not have to be and is never alone. If it weren’t for this communal space, I would not have come to this realization for myself.

 

It was so wonderfully captivating to watch Ebony Noelle Golden and Tiffany Lenoi Jones embody what I hope to one day be capable of. To honor the past while navigating how to move forward. To acknowledge the many ways in which we’ve been positively influenced while shedding the negative influences that have skewed our perceptions of our past and present.

Reading Zake: The Sacred Never Runs Out

by Amanda 8 Comments

–MUSIC– This is a really long youtube video of David Murray/Black Saint Quartet performing live in Berlin, but the energy shared between the musicians makes it well worth watching.

“There’s no music I hear without sensing you.”

This line is written in a letter Zake addresses to and in memory of her father–later to be used/edited for inclusion in Gloria Wade-Gayles anthology Father Songs. The quote made a circle in my mind that brought me to my first post rewriting Fanon, in which I talked about how laying claim to history and looking to the past as a way of informing one’s future is an important healing practice. This quote brings forth that feeling as truth. It brings forward the feeling that music is an art form capable of being inhabited (by soul/reality/existence/being/life) for healing. & to listen to music//really//listen to the music/ is to open oneself up to the voices & presence of the sacred.

The Holiness of a Cookbook

by Nicole 1 Comment

While reading both Shange and Mae’s cookbooks I took time to think about the ways in which cooking is important in my family. The first thing that came to mind is the cookbook that my mother keeps which contains recipes from my grandmother and great grandmother and some of our current favorite dishes. To be honest, my mother really does not do too much cooking, my grandmother was the cook in our household until she passed away. My grandmother is no longer here to cook for us, so having a catalogue of her recipes is like preserving the memory of her existence in our household. Her recipes are proof that she did not leave us empty, but left behind ways of nourishing our bodies. This way my grandmother can continue to fill our stomachs despite her not physically being here. Now my mother’s cookbook, our cookbook, is not the same book my Nana (great-grandmother) used. My mother has updated the book itself, but the recipes on cards and sometimes scraps of paper are still the same. Shange writes that “[c]ooking is a way of insisting on living,” I also think that recipes themselves are a way our elders insist on continuing to live with us after their passing (If I Can Cook/ You Know God Can, Ntzoake Shange, 70). This is how we refuse the idea that black culture is static and was ruptured during the Middle Passage. The fact that black people can pass down recipes and see the similarities in traditional dishes among different peoples of color prove that “[w]e are not folklore,” (Shange, 32).

It resonated with me when I read that Mae does not cook with measurements and relies on the feel of things. Reading this reminded me of what I’ve seen in my own home.

And when I cook, I never measure or weigh anything. I cook by vibration. I van tell by the look and smell of it. Most of the ingredients in this book are aproximate. Some of the recipes that people gave me list the amounts, but for my part, I just do it by vibration.  Different strokes for different folks. Do your thing your way. 

(Vibration Cooking, Verta Mae, xxiii)

In my family’s cooking all of the recipes from my Nana and many of those from my grandmother are without certified measurements. Many describe using a tea cup as a measure. Now, what size tea cup, I have no idea. I believe that is what Mae describes as “[d]different strokes for different folks” cooking,” (Mae, xiii). Deciding to not use measurements also makes cooking a learning experience instead of following someone else’s formula. I believe that this is how the act of cooking becomes nourishment in itself, that making your own food is akin to the magical-like home remedies in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. Not only is the food nourishing, but the process of cooking and creating on your own terms is liberating.

 

Below are some photos of recipes from my family’s cookbook:

 

IMG_6233

(My great grandmother’s recipe with measurements adapted by my mother)

 

IMG_6230

(My grandmother’s recipe)

IMG_6232IMG_6231

(My Aunt Gwen’s Recipe)

 

 

 

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

Collectivity Through Choreopoem

by Clarke 1 Comment

Shange’s work is rooted within the tradition of black women healing through art, speech, and togetherness. In Sister Citizen (2011), Melissa Harris-Perry writes about this tradition through an analysis of Baby Suggs, Janie’s grandmother in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God:

“Her words are the conduit of healing for an entire community of free blacks who are scarred by the world in which they find themselves. Rather than asking them to deny their pain or to bear it stoically in order to prove their strength, Baby Suggs encourages them to release it through song, dance, open weeping, and togetherness. She also asks the black people assembled in her clearing to embrace a new faith based on reimagining their own bodies as something beautiful and worthy of love.” (Harris-Perry 264)

For Colored Girls seeks to heal black women and girls from their pain through “song, dance, open weeping, and togetherness” as well, but does so in the form of the choreopoem. In “Black Feminist Collectivity in … for colored girls…” Soyica Diggs Colbert explains the significance of this choice: “The choreopoem creates collectivity based on the intertwining of bodies in space and words in rhythm in order to counter the displacement and dehumanization of black women’s voice, bodies, and experiences.” Not only does Shange write about black women healing through collective artistic expression, she also reinforces this tradition by placing her ladies in a physical and psychic collective and artistic space via the choreopoem.

The final poem in For Colored Girls, “a layin’ on of hands” demonstrates what this kind of space makes possible. After the lady in red says “i found god in myself & i loved her,” all of the ladies repeat these lines until it “becomes a song of joy” and “the ladies enter into a closed tight circle”. The voice of one woman, affirming herself and practicing self-love, is transformed into a collective affirmation and practice, through song. Their collective healing is then physically displayed by their closed tight circle. Diggs Colbert writes:

“The final piece, “a layin on of hands,” enacts a ritualized mode of performance that draws from spiritual practices and allows women to connect physically and on equal ground. The engagement of touch and speech offers a way to appreciate communal belonging that affirms black women’s humanity.”

Shange’s work, specifically in For Colored Girls, is so important because of what it adds to black women’s healing traditions and, ultimately, what it makes possible for women’s resistance. By affirming black women’s humanity through art, speech, and togetherness, resistance is made stronger and becomes an act of joy.

This week’s readings reminded me of the song titled, “Young Girls” by New York based Puerto Rican artist Destiny Frasqueri, who performs as Princess Nokia. The music video depicts a group of women of color leading young girls of color in a series of movements, dances, and songs. They are sitting in a tight circle, alone in a natural environment. The lyrics intentionally affirm and collectivize these young girls of color.

They Reminisce Over You: Remembering to Heal & Remembering to Prompt Action

by Amanda 1 Comment

“It is not enough to reunite with the people in a past where they no longer exist. We must rather reunite with them in their recent counter move which will suddenly call everything into question; we must focus on that zone of hidden fluctuation where the people can be found. For let there be no mistake, it is here that their souls are crystallized and their perception and respiration transfigured… When the colonized intellectual writing for his people uses the past he must do so with the intention of opening up the future, of spurring them into action and fostering hope.”

Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth (163- 167).

In On National Culture, Fanon highlights the tendency of the “colonized intellectual” to look to the past “in order to escape the supremacy of white culture,” (155). In highlighting this truth, looking to the past becomes understood as a wanting practice. Fanon suggests a larger amount of energies be spent using the past as an aide in centering the present moment where the people become woke, where they define themselves, where their agency molds the future.

Reading this quote makes me think heavily about Harlem and healing. Why I think of Harlem, always, within landscapes of time— Harlem in the future, Harlem as I know it today, and, especially, Harlem in the past—is a reflection of one of the ways I’ve chosen to “escape the supremacy of white culture,” or, rather, one of the ways I’ve chosen to heal. For this reason, reshaping Fanon’s words to communicate the necessity of remembering the past, finding solace in history was most pressing. However, I wanted to do this in a way that recognized the value of centralizing the current experiences of the people and propelling them into action, as Fanon encourages, while placing emphasis on the relationship between remembering to heal and remembering to incite action.

Spaces are where I hear changes in the voice of the speaker; (double) slashes highlight words and connecting phrases; dashes that engulf words are meant to create a level of erasure.

 

it is –not- enuf/

to -re-unite with the people/

in a past/ where they no longer exist

we/       must -rather re-unite with them

in their recent counter move/

which will suddenly call everything into question/

we must focus on that zone/        of        hidden   fluctuation//

where the people can be found/

for let there be no mistake/

it is here           that their soulz are crystallized       & their perception n respiration transfigurd//

when the colonizd intellectual writin

for his people

uses the past he /must/ do so with the intention of openin up the future/

of spurring them inta action         & fosterin hope.

 

*I listened to a lot of beats while going through this week’s reading and while writing this post. Here are a few.

Edit/Update: A link to a definition of  “woke/stay woke” has been added. I also encourage everyone to listen to Erykah Badu’s Master Teacher and to check out staywoke.us