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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Work That Sees – Makeen Blog Post #1

by Zachery 1 Comment

Reading Ntozake Shange’s work for this class was far different from a typical experience of completing homework. I began reading “getting to where I haveta be / the nature of collaboration in recent works” from Lost In Language and Sound. I approached this piece as I would any typical reading assignment: pen in hand, notebook opened, and ready to take traditionally detailed notes. I started noting general patterns, listing quotes and overarching themes as I felt I had been trained to do. However, as I progressed, I realized that this writing was far different than anything I had been trained to read. Despite its being different than anything I had previously encountered, the writing still bought a feeling of comfort over me. I had to abandon what I thought was the proper  way to proceed and begin to to analyze and understand in a different manner.  The themes that I had been taught to diligently search for began to emerge on their own, they were themes that I felt were my own. 

 

I began writing down individual words that struck me as profound. I did this in each of the poems in Lost In Language and Sound. I did the same as I read through Jessica Hagedorn’s Beauty and Danger and even as I watched “Her Pen is a Machete: The Art of Ntozake Shange” and “A Conversation with Ntozake Shange and Dianne McIntyre.” A number of thoughts jumped out to me but what rested with me most was the concept of community and collectivity that Shange achieved in her creations. One of the people featured in “Her Pen is a Machete” identified that what makes Ntozake’s work distinct is that “anyone could play that part,” specifically in reference to the wide spread re-production of For Colored Girls. For some reason these words are the ones that helped me to identify just what it was that set Shange’s work so beautifully far apart from those that I most frequently encounter in higher education. It was this exact collectivity that made me identify the themes within her works as my own.

 

Within this theme of collectivity, fall other themes of tradition, ritual and even generational elements of healing that felt oh so familiar. Questions arose for me, specifically in reference to her relationship with her mother grandmother and daughter. What I found most interesting was that in A Daughter’s Georgraphy, Shange spoke of her uncertainty in teaching her baby about the devastations that “this place” ie. this world will bring to her daughter. Yet, Lost In Language and Sound, Shange so wonderfully detailed the exact ways in which her grandmother and mother demonstrated freedom for her. I found this rift to be so odd––  who better to teach coming generations how to be free than Ntozake Shange? Alas, even this demonstration of vulnerability was comforting, to know that these fears arise even within the “best” of us.

Archive Find 2: McIntyre’s Choreodrama

by Nicole 1 Comment

During my visit to the New York Public Library of Performing Arts, I looked at programs from the Sounds in Motion company. One of the more interesting programs was from an adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.

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CAPTION: “Program from May 1987 interpretation of Their Eyes Were Watching God with choreography by Dianne McIntyre: This program is important because it shows how dance and literature can be combined to create a unique experience for the audience. For this performance, McIntyre also collaborated with The Okra Orchestra. In this performance, McIntyre did not only honor Zora Neale Hurston’s literature but also Southern black culture through a celebration of the blues. This performance recognized an experience that was particular to black culture.”

feminine imagination

by Melissa 1 Comment

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Womanspirit is a feminist publication that is made up of collections of short-stories, poetry, manifestos, and essays written by women who were part of a creative and political community that centralized spirituality in anti-oppression work. Their statement of philosophy emphasizes the interconnectedness of social justice, spiritual empowerment, and self-determination. Each piece in the publication is concerned with spirituality as a crucial component of structural anti-oppression work and interpersonal healing and community building. Women offer up spells and rituals in their writing as a mode of imagining new possibilities for collective liberation and as a practice of healing and tending to intimate concerns around relationships between women — which include mother-daughter relationships, romantic partnerships, friendships etc.

 

In a poem titled “Full Moon Ritual”, the author explores the concept of self-making through nature. The moon serves as a symbol of feminine power and as a source of light and energy. Divinity, nature, and womanhood are linked in their life-giving force; a force that fosters utopic imaginings of liberation and collective joy. The moon, in its cyclical rhythms and “distinctive patterns”, parallels the cycle of menstruation, symbolically linking the life-giving cycles of womanhood and nature.

 

Our power is for creation and recreation of our

lives, of the world,

of life as we live it day to night, night to day

Nature, in its fecundity, is the source of (re)creation and constant rejuvenation. The feminine imagination offers similar possibilities of (re)creation in its life-giving force. “We have the power to create a rebirthing of our own”. I take this to mean that in activating the feminine impulse through creation, we can attain a state of renewal. For me, this feminine impulse and imagination is not one that is bound to corporeal conceptions of menstruation and reproduction, but that also extends to the imaginative realm of creation. Shange’s literature utilizes this feminine impulse to create narratives that gives voice to our memories and hopes. Literature that mobilizes this impulse offer us the opportunity to imagine and (re)create the world according to principles of collective liberation and empowerment.

nia ashley in reflection

by Nia 0 Comments

In my posts I tend to close read Shange’s text to extract themes about the citizens of the African diaspora. I pick up to three themes present in the text we read that week and combine Shange’s text with my own interpretations and opinions of those topics. I’ve raised the issue of the imbalanced politics in interracial intimacy and how its perceived, the importance of poets as orators in the African diaspora, and how Shange “reconstructs language and culture to allow colonized and oppressed people, particularly Black people, to express emotions, discuss experiences, and commiserate with others.” As the semester has progressed, I’ve gotten freer with my forms, more willing to digress from the straight analytical form and embrace more of Shange’s poetics. The one thing I do want to revisit in my work is actually not in my posts, but in my “nappy edges” presentation. I feel that I raised some ideas about the projects and goals of Shange’s work that are worth revisiting and exploring.

I often struggle to write a post on the days that I did not fully connect with the text, especially before class. Reading Shange in my isolation I am often confused or conflicted, I don’t know what to think, what I think, or how to articulate it. It is only after class that I begin to understand the text and developed concrete and coherent thoughts about the work. I think that is visible in the posts I did for texts I did not connect with as strongly as others.

movement and memories in the archival effort

by Melissa 1 Comment

When we defined the archive as a space wherein materials could be preserved for their enduring value, I wondered how the imagination and vitality of literature as it is produced in the human body, spoken language, and patterns of sociality could be preserved in its full essence. For me, the question arose: what is the function of the archive and how does it mirror, encompass, and fall short of the world-making possibilities offered by literature?

I have been thinking about literature as an expansive concept, one that transcends linguistic bounds and regulations. I have also been conceptualizing literature per Shange’s notion of carnal intellectuality, whereby stories and histories are articulated and constantly re-formed via the body’s motions in concert with human imagination. Memories for example, are part of a reproductive effort by the body, and can lend themselves to the archival process.

In literature, I find that there are endless possibilities for struggle against normativity and linearity in our narratives. The fragmented pieces of history take shape in the imaginative realm of literature, allowing for the reconfiguration of our realities and conceptions of self. How then is the archival effort able to encompass literature, and its malleable impulses? Only in thinking of the archive as functioning within the body through motions such as carnal intellectuality, am I able to understand the ways in which language, movement, and the imagination produce archival knowledge.

Shange’s work brings attention to the ways in which the Black woman’s body is shaped by the labor of the archival effort. I found a clip of Ntozake Shange reading from a piece titled “What Does it Mean That Black Folks Can Dance”. The poem conveys the notion of the moving body as a carrier of knowledge, collective sorrows/joys, and the memories that make up Black historical narratives. Here, dance is “how we remember what cannot be said”. The body takes up motion and mobility to recall, to create, and to transcend.

crooked woman/okra meets greens in strange circumstances
the woman dont stand up
straight
aint never stood up
straight/ always bent
some which a way
crooked turned abt
slanted sorta toward a shadow of herself

Bad Girls In Three Parts: Reading “The Black Sexism Debate”

by Tiana Reid 0 Comments

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You bad girl

You sad girl

You’re such a dirty bad girl

— Donna Summer, “Bad Girls” (1979)

What correct analysis of this rotten capitalist dragon within which we live will legitimize the wholesale rape of black women by black men that goes on now within every city of this land?

— Audre Lorde, “The Great American Disease,” in “The Black Sexism Debate” issue of The Black Scholar (May/June, 1979)

 

How are we to read the 1979 special issue of The Black Scholar on the so-called “Black Sexism Debate”? What word in this title is up for discussion? (Hint: It’s the not the “black” part.) What does it mean that we are in the realm of a named dialogue? What does it mean that we have to name this discussion that is always up for debate? How do we confront the seemingly antiquated (read: racist, patriarchal, and biological) language that permeates the occasion for the issue, Robert Staples’s “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists”?

In this post, I’m not going to rehash any of the arguments from the issue or offer any of my own in part because I can imagine June Jordan in her hazy-beautiful voice (see above) saying, as she does in the opening to “Black Women haven’t ‘Got It All,” “All I have time to say to Robert Staples is this: Are you serious?” (39). Instead, I’m going to present a few provisional fragments as guideposts and entryways into this historical text that embodies such a fascinating affective register. I am totally serious.