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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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From Food to Faith: What’s in a Name?

by Eliana 1 Comment

In If I can cook / you know God can, Ntozake Shange artfully toys with the boundaries of human sensation. Shange’s language forces the reader to experience instead of simply read, reworking thresholds of sight and taste in a conversation of identity. Like other works of Shange’s, If I can cook / you know God can reads as a radical travelogue, tracing identity in diaspora. In her exploration of the role of food in the African-American experience, Shange writes on nations beyond the United States putting recipes in conversation with memory, history, and religion. 

Chapter 8 connects history and religion engaging with African American slaves and Native Americans subject to the brutalization of colonialism. Shange writes, “we changed, made necessary readjustments to our gods and belief systems to accommodate the Christianity thrust upon us as our salvation.” Statements like these, reflecting a truth often neglected in history, challenges both me and Shange similarly. Throughout her works, Shange wrestles with reclaiming spirituality/religion from the colonizer and using it as a liberatory force. As indicated in the piece’s title, the Old Testament holds the notion that humans were created in God’s image. 

Abraham and Sarah are viewed as the patriarch and matriarch for all Abrahamic religions, including Christianity. Like Ntozake Shange, though, their names were not Abraham and Sarah at the start of their story. While Shakespeare may tell us that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” matriarchs Shange and Sarah share a different narrative. Theirs is one in which being created in the image of God means an affirmation of identity constructed through the changing of one’s name — a liberatory tool we see today through name changes affirming gender identity, religious identity, and an act dignifying history of black identity. Sarah’s name is Sarai at the start of the bible (which translates to “my princess”). The grammatically possessive nature of Sarai, and how the change in her name represents an affirmation of identity. Here, being made in God’s image as suggested in Shange’s title of her book, but also her own title, refers to transitioning from Sarai to Sarah —from the possessed to the possessor, entering uncharted maternal waters.

cook by faith, not by sight

by Elizabeth 3 Comments

 

I have always loved to cook. When I was younger, I loved helping my parents prepare for family holiday meals, whether that meant sticking my finger in the bowl to “test” the red velvet cake icing for Christmas, or helping my dad season the burgers on the grill on the Fourth of July. At the time, I don’t think I really processed how important food was to my family. It was culture and community. Like Shange writes, it was a celebration. It was love.

When I got to college, the importance of cooking became clear to me because I was no longer able to enjoy food in the same way. Not only did I not have my family to eat with or the type of food I was used to, but I also did not have a personal kitchen. Not having home-cooked meals is something that I think the majority of college students miss, but I also didn’t feel like I had an easy replacement. There aren’t many places in New York that have food that is both Southern and Black, and I can’t exactly afford to eat out all the time.

my mom’s mac and cheese recipe.

Once I moved to Plimpton and had my own kitchen, I was finally able to start cooking again. I realized almost immediately that there were so many things that I couldn’t quite remember how to make, or had never made without my mom. I got mad at her for being vague and she told me, “I don’t know how to tell you to make your mac and cheese, you have to figure it out.” Reading if i can cook reminded me of all of this. The book connects stories, history to the recipes, which I think is so crucial to the way that many cultures connect with food and cooking, and more importantly, the way that we use these things to connect with each other across generations and distance.

Out solution has been Facetime. She too far away to put her hand over mine as I pour ingredients into a mixing bowl, but she can watch me through the camera and tease me about not “folding” my noodles the right way.

Traditions Feed the Soul

by Perry O'Parsons 2 Comments

The first chapter of If I Can Cook/ You Know God Can gave me some things to think about; like about the varying degrees to which holidays carry meaning for different people. This is something I have never really thought about. It had never occurred to me before that holidays that get the most attention and deference are not for everyone (no holiday is). Placing value on one set of traditions A. creates the expectation that everyone else will feel the same about those traditions and B. that those traditions are somehow superior or more important than any others. This could be incredibly demoralizing to anyone who does not subscribe to those traditions and/or their value-systems.

This makes me think about nationally-recognized holidays. How does that work? Who is deciding what should be recognized as a national holiday? Like… thanksgiving?? I do love cranberry sauce on turkey, but why do we eat it on thanksgiving? And WAY more importantly, WHY do we get a week (or about a week) off for thanksgiving? That week off says “this  holiday is important and should be celebrated” and as we know Thanksgiving has some devastating and violent baggage attached to it.

That all being said, for those who might be ignored or harmed by the observation of certain national holidays, there is great pride and strength to be found in reclaiming holidays. As Shange writes in If I Can Cook/You Know God Can: “And so, black-eyed peas and rice or “Hoppin’ John,” even collard greens and pig’s feet, are not so much arbitrary predilections of the “nigra” as they are symbolic defiance; we shall celebrate ourselves on a day of our choosing in honor of those events and souls who are an honor to us.”(7) I think this quote gets to heart of what If I Can Cook is about. Shange is celebrating her traditions, her loved ones’ traditions, and the traditions of the African Diaspora, by exploring the stories behind these recipes she gives them recognition that that they do not get from, for example, the united states government.

Additionally, by documenting these recipes and their stories, she is creating a record for future generations to refer to in order to understand, and establish their traditions. Holidays such as Christmas, Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, and easter are often discussed or taught in American schools, meanwhile hundreds, probably thousands of holidays which may be practiced/observed by students in an American classroom, are not taught.

The same principle is at work in chapter one when she cooks a traditional New Year’s Eve meal for her daughter. She is giving her daughter a solid ground to stand on, an assurance that someone came before her, and by carrying on their traditions she is supported by them. Lots people in America don’t necessarily have to think about this dynamic. People who unquestioningly subscribe to the holidays and traditions observed by the government, by those currently in power, are given this support. They don’t have to look for it. Some might say, who cares? It’s just a silly matter of holidays and when school is out for winter break. But, as Shange seems to get at in “What’d You People Call That?” the human soul is fed by traditions and history. She says, “Though I ate alone that New Year’s Eve, I knew a calm I must attribute to the satisfaction of my ancestors. I tried to feed us.”(9) She is feeding her daughter’s soul now, and giving her means to feed it for years to come. Something she might not be given otherwise, or may not discover for many years. What a gift to give your daughter! 

 

Below I’ve listed two Wikipedia pages that I make me realize how many different holidays, which many of which are likely practiced by people in America, are ignored by the designation of Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter etc. as national holidays.

Here is a picture of one of the covers of If I Can Cook.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_immigration_statistics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_holidays

decolonizing the diet

by Sophia 0 Comments

The first chapter of If I Can Cook / You Know God Can addresses the effects of food’s presence and absence. When there is a shortage of food, the first efforts made are simply to nourish —in any way possible, as soon as possible. Efforts made to eliminate food insecurity, whether within in the United States or outside of it, almost always move away from native culinary traditions, as the cultural associations that they carry are intimately tied with infrastructures that created and propagated the insecurity in the first place. In other words, attempts to eliminate hunger inevitably lead to the elimination (if merely inadvertent) of culinary traditions personally associated with it. That it is inadvertent is critical; the pain of hunger is urgent, fundamental, and quickly becomes a matter of life or death with the passage of time. The general condition of food insecurity carries with it its own urgency; even if not hungry in a given moment, there remains the looming possibility that one might be thrust into that life-or-death-condition at any time, and be dramatically inhibited from meeting the demands of daily life —the meeting of all of which and more are necessary for the removal of one/one’s family from this position of precarity.
So with this in mind, no one —those who find their home in ‘American food’ and those who don’t— thinks to consider the health lost in the abandonment of native food traditions, and the possibilities of food beyond essential daily calorie replenishment and into realms of spiritual healing, unity within and across cultures, and ritual acts of decolonization. Shange wonders
“if the move to monolignualize this country is a push for the homogeneity of our foods as well. Once we read American will e cease to recognize ourselves, our delicacies and midnight treats?” (5)
Food serves a deeper need than physical nourishment, even when focusing on physical nourishment is all we can afford. Just as African-Americans in Philadelphia hesitated to celebrate the American Declaration of Liberation while the Fugitive Slave Act was in effect, they especially hesitated to do so with potato salad and golden or blanched flesh melon.
In support of the contemporary social justice project to “decolonize your diet,” Native American activist Winona LaDuke emphasizes that
“The recovery of the people is tied to recovery of food, since food itself is medicine—not only for the body but also for the soul and spiritual connection to history, ancestors, and the land.”
In this way, as Shange articulates,
“black-eyed peas and rice or ‘Hoppin John,’ even collard greens and pig’s feet, are not so much arbitrary predilections of the ‘nigra’ as they are symbolic defiance; we shall celebrate ourselves on a day of our choosing in honor of those events and souls who are an honor to us” (6-7).
Even those who are fed —the slaves no longer slaves— are provided food historically tied to victories of their oppressors. Even those who are fed are still hungry for food whose history and semiotics is their own.
She quotes Bob Marley’s “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)” to explain this.
“Dem belly full, but dey hungry/ A hungry man is an angry man.”
The popular interpretation of this is a warning against allowing Jamaica’s poor to go hungry —which is certainly not untrue. But here Shange uses it to better articulate the deeper hunger that remains even after the little Hatian girl eats every one of the cookies in the red-lettered American box. The song asks the listener to forget their troubles, sorrows, sickness, and weakness through dance, which, like cooking, is a personal, pluralizing, and culturally-motivated strategy by which to reclaim the body.

Shange and Radical Farming

by Clarke 2 Comments

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Photos from Soul Fire Farm courtesy of Afropunk and Yes Magazine

One could also say that racism is toxic, so by metaphorically refusing an all-American diet of meat and potatoes, Yvette and thousands of others refuse to swallow what will, in fact, poison them: self-hatred. (Shange 91)

Recognize that land and food have been used as a weapon to keep black people oppressed …Recognize also that land and food are essential to liberation for black people. (Curtis Hayes Muhammed via Soul Fire Farm)

In If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, Shange celebrates food and farming as a global black experience, while pointing to the disregard of black life that informs American food policy. In this way, If I Can Cook shows that decolonizing our minds goes hand in hand with decolonizing our diets. Shange’s statements evoke principles of radical farming, which emphasizes solidarity with people marginalized by food apartheid and reverence of ancestral knowledge of the land.

In fact, we knew something about the land, sensuality, rhythm, and ourselves that has continued to elude our captors (Shange 41)

Soul Fire Farm, a family farm committed to the dismantling of oppressive structures that misguide our food system, partners with Project Growth, a restorative justice program in Albany, in order to continue the literal work of “eluding our captors” via ancestral knowledge of the land and ourselves. The initiative brings convicted teenagers to the farm, both as a way for them to earn money to pay their restitution and “heal relationships with their communities, the land, and themselves.”

By understanding food as both a weapon of oppression and an essential tool for black liberation, we can more fully claim our pasts and envision radical systems today.