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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.

Savannah’s Geography – Ntozake Archive Finds

by Zachery 0 Comments

Our class spent in the archives was without a doubt the most engaged I’ve ever been in a college class. The excitement and honor I felt to look through Ntozake’s personal collection of books, awards, jewelry, manuscripts, etc. was unmatched. Through it all, however, what stood out most to me were the photo albums.

The first photo album that I went through featured a range of photos of Ntozake with what appeared to be friends/family. There is something so personal about photo albums, the ways in which we select and organize which snapshots to hold dear, that made these albums feel personal even to me despite having no connection to the content.

The second photo album, after two visits to the archives, remains my favorite find. This album, unlike the others, was focused specifically on Ntozake’s daughter Savanah. The album was comprised largely of photos that appear to be taken by Ntozake which was truly a beautiful sight–– to see a young Savannah through Ntozake’s eyes . Ones that displayed Ntozake were alongside Savannah…reading a story book or posing for a casual portrait.

What stood out to me more than the photos, however, was a poem that Ntozake wrote to Savannah.

Savannah

brown sugar cookie

how I miss you….

 

The words of her letter lay on top of a river of stamped hearts. As always, Ntozake even in her expressions of love bends traditional form and language. “Guard mi corazon…” Inserting Spanish and coupling her writing with imagery, she seems encourage Savannah to navigate the world freely as she does solely in the form of the writing.

Funnily, my immediate response was to send the letter to my mother. On the phone later that same day, we raved about it together. Our phone call ended with my mom saying “We didn’t have classes like these when I was in college, I feel so blessed to experience them through you now.”

 

Post #1 — One Bloodstream, Two Inheritances

by Eliana 1 Comment

“I am talking here about a kind of strength which can only be one woman’s gift to another, 

the bloodstream of our inheritance. 

Until a strong line 

of love, 

confirmation, 

and example 

stretches from mother to daughter, 

from woman to woman across the generations, 

women will still be wandering in the wilderness.” (246)

 

My arrangement of the lines forces the reader to meditate on the importance of intergenerational love, confirmation, and example paved by a unified line of women throughout time. The breath also shifts the reader’s attention to the power of this intergenerational mothering line being a strong one — which is what spoke to me about the passage as a whole. 

 

In my case, I’ve received the gift Rich describes here twofold. Of Woman Born helped me understand why, throughout most of my life, I’ve considered having two moms to be a superpower. The inherited gift of strength, passed down to me from both of my parents, has allowed me to become my own hero. My mothers, both born in the 1950’s, gifted me this strength after decades of struggling with the “institutionalized heterosexuality” (218) identified by Rich, coping with the reality of starting a unified life as religious queer women. My mothers both follow the paths of the “unmothered” (243) as described by Rich, having lived most of their lives without their own mothers. This path is one of pain turned fortitude, throughout their motherless process of coming out and building their own family, after the birth of my sibling in 1994. Thus, they carry with them both hardship and immense courage which stretches proudly from mother(s) to daughter. My line of generational inheritance may not be as refined as Rich describes, but it’s just as unified and just as strong. This line comes from both of my mothers, and it’s for me to pass on to my daughters and their daughters. 

 

My mothers treat their title as “mother,” fittingly, like most queens treat their crowns. If ever I refer to one of my parents by their name instead of “mom” or “mommy,” I know I’ll be met with the same do you know how hard I worked to become your mother? that I know all too well, and have grown to love. The labor being described here is not that of pregnancy, suggested by Rich, but the labor of facing intolerance. This is a way in which Rich and I divert. In my poetic rewrite of the quote, the breath and spacing I chose pair bloodstream and inheritance, placing them in an unexpected juxtaposition; my inheritance has little to do with my bloodstream but it’s still strong. I disagree with the notion that “probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies.” (225) Much of what runs through my inherited bloodstream is unknown; anonymous donor #138 may have given me wide brown eyes, but it was my mothers who taught me to see. They taught me to love through the greatest process of confirmation and example – greater than I could have imagined.

A Mother’s Dream – Charista Blogpost #1

by Charista 1 Comment

As I was reading through Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Reflections on Motherhood as Experience and Institution, these lines struck me.  I rearranged the lines so the reader can take pauses after each line and so the words look more alive, almost like they’re floating in the air. It reminded me of my own personal experiences with my mother and how she raised me. I am the eldest of three daughters born to an immigrant mother, who arrived here from the opposite side of the world with my grandparents and her two sisters to seek the American dream.

Working double and triple jobs in menial labor despite college degrees in their native land, my grandparents instilled the virtues of education to their children –all three ultimately earning doctorate degrees, including my mother. The adults in my life inspire me. I model my courage, ambition, and kindness after them. My mother is the bravest, strongest, and most hardworking woman I know. She raised my sisters and I with values that prioritize family and education to ensure our lives would be different than her childhood growing up.

She always puts her children first, even still to this day. My mother constantly tells us to live freely and follow our dreams so we can live the lives we want, the lives she always dreamt we’d have. My mother means everything to me. I’d be lost without her and all of her guidance and love. I often reflect on my life and how grateful I am to have such a strong, independent woman as my mother who inspires me to pursue my passions with the mindset that anything is possible.

 

Ntozake Visit and Reflecting on Mother/Daughterhood

by Tirzah Anderson 0 Comments

In reflecting upon our visit with Ntozake, I find myself thinking of mothering. Although that may not have been the main topic of discussion for our conversations with her, I cannot help but think of my own mother after the visit. Ntozake’s work often centers a type of motherhood, not always biological in nature, and after meeting her, I felt a need to call my mom and talk to her about my experience. When I called my mother, after sending her a few photos and a video of Ntozake addressing my mom, her only response was “You are blessed”.

For me, my experience meeting with Ntozake centered me back into the ways that my mother first introduced me to her work and the conversations that I have had with my own mother surrounding identity and the ways that our identities change our experiences in the world. My own mother influences the way I see Ntozake’s work and the way I understand my own lived experiences, so I wanted to share this experience with her as much as possible, because I know if she was granted with the opportunity to meet with Ntozake so openly she would utilize and appreciate it fully.

It is also important to note that although her work focuses on motherhood and ideas of mothering often, it is not just content of her work that highlights ideas of motherhood, but also the ways in which her work is intergenerational and can bring common ground to “mothers” and “daughters”, not only biological ones, but relationships that are created from commonality and experience.

 

 

Philosophical Underpinnings–from movement to breath?

by Kim Hall 0 Comments

Ntozake and Savannah Shange (PBS screenshot)

i can’t count the number of times i have viscerally wanted to attack deform n maim the language that i waz taught to hate myself in/ the language that perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as he/she learns to speak of the world  & the “self”  (LLS 19).

in everything I have ever written & everything I hope to write/ i have made use of what Frantz Fanon called “combat breath” (LLS 19).

 In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
—Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born 

. . . a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create a livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist

—Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (247)

I wanted to tell you a bit about why we are reading Fanon and Rich today. (The readings are now linked to the appropriate week on the syllabus–and we will have presentations from Elizabeth and Anna Bella!)  Shange reads so widely that we could spend an entire semester reading her identified influences from Ngugi wa T’iongo and Edouard Glissant to  Judy Grahn and Jessica Hagedorn.  Fanon’s influence as you will see below, is pretty obvious in Shange’s thoughts about breath and