Nappy Edges – The Worlds of Ntozake Shange and Digital Storytelling

the tell-tale sign of living

by Elizabeth on October 6, 2019 1 Comment

For me, Shange’s work is always a bit difficult to read and truly engage with. I find it is often incredibly personal and resonates with me in ways that I am not used to. This week was no different. I was immediately struck by the short blurb after the title.

the roots of your hair / what

mom twisting my hair, 2018

turns back when we sweat, run,

make love, dance, get afraid, get

happy: the tell-tale sign of living

Often, our hair is not talked about in this way. It is something that is straightened, relaxed, brushed down into submission. Even though I would say that I am at a point where I definitely have more appreciation and love for my hair (but maybe not so much about all the time it takes to do it), this was still incredibly impactful. To equate nappy hair with natural acts that are a part of everyone’s lives like sweating and running, to joyous moments like dancing and making love, and to even link it to our feelings like happiness and fear not only naturalizes our happy, but celebrates it.

The power that Shange is naming in this part of Nappy Edges is not inherently sexual, but to me it is an erotic power. Lorde classifies and defines the erotic throughout her piece to expand its definition from simply being sexual. She says it is a false belief that “only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong” (53). When I read this, my mind immediately went to the aforementioned part of Nappy Edges. As Shange links Black hair to the idea of living, our hair can be understood both as a literal object that is suppressed by white supremacy, and as a metaphor for how lives, feelings, and actions are taught to be suppressed as well. Lorde dismantles the idea that the erotic should be suppressed and instead argues that it is a form of power, which is very in line with the work Shange does in Nappy Edges and other pieces. Just as Shange and Lorde are able to recognize the power of the erotic, Blackness, and nappy edges, I can also begin to recognize the power in the discomfort I have with Shange’s work, which in itself is a tell-tale sign of living and living as Black.

Eroticism as Poetic Introspection

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by Eliana on October 3, 2019 1 Comment

In Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Audre Lorde speaks to the importance of autonomy and self-ownership of black female bodies — to be a source of pleasure and introspection “self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society” (Lorde, 59). Lorde writes, “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings” (Lorde, 54). Lorde is discussing something deeply internal, which goes against the common placement of eroticism exclusively in the realm of the external or physical. To both Lorde and Shange, sense of self is paramount, speaking to the inherent bond between poetry and eroticism.

On page 55, Lorde writes, “women so empowered are dangerous.” In Nappy Edges, Shange too puts sexual expression in conversation with danger, but does so to relay an entirely different message. Shange brings out the apparent irony in Lorde’s statement through examples of men using eroticism to put women in positions of physical danger. These instances of danger present through Nappy Edges’ detailed scenes of sexual violence are physical, and yet they are far from erotic.

Shange’s decision to define herself as a poet (rather than a playwright) is powerful in that it establishes ownership of her narrative — she is not writing to put on a performance or to wear a costume of another, she instead writes her own poetic, deeply introspective, narrative. “Some men are poets. They find wonderment & joy in themselves & give it to me. I snatch it up quick & gloat. Some men are poets” (Shange, 20). Shange then closes her piece reaffirming her stance as the poet she is by noting that she will keep writing poems ten years from now and beyond; she will continue to affirm her own selfhood and that of other black women finding their voices and owning their narratives, as this introspection of poetry and eroticism is a luxury not afforded to many women, especially not women of color. Thus, For Shange, poetry is something erotic in the way Lorde uses the word — it’s a source of power through raw recognition of internal consciousness and internal desires.

manifestations of lorde’s erotic within Nappy Edges

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by Johnson on October 3, 2019 1 Comment

“the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that the sensation is enough” (Lorde, 54)

“When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, or history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives”(Lorde, 55).

“Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluation those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives” (Lorde, 57)

What makes Audre Lorde’s text, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” such a compelling text for me every time I read it, is her capacity to isolate the concept of “the erotic” found within all of us and clearly break down its power and its uses. Every time I read this text, I can single handedly point out manifestations of the erotic within my life, and ways that my surroundings confuse the erotic for what she refers to as “the pornographic” (Lorde, 54) and perpetuates it daily.

In my reading selections of Shange’s Nappy Edges, her acute knowledge and acceptance of the erotic within her work shines throughout the piece. A collection of poetry and prose poetry, I find Shange in assessing and communicating the erotic often makes a cleverly biting attack to that which doesn’t serve us—the pornographic. Specifically looking at the poem, “wow… yr just like a man!”, Shange chronicles the experiences of a female poet in a male dominated poetry space, who was initially revered by male poets because of her abstraction from “female” things in her work, until one day she exclaims, “i’ve decided to wear my ovaries on my sleeve/ raise my poems on my milk/ & count my days by the flow of my mensis” (Shange, 16). What makes this moment such a wonderful example of a woman leaning into the erotic is not really rooted in its clearly feminine references, it’s instead to me in her choice of looking within herself and rooting her medium of expression within what moves her. That is powerful. And it is just that practice in speaking to what moves her, that Shange employs within all of her works but particularly Nappy Edges. For some reason, I felt the most connected to Shange as a young woman within this reading of her selections. I saw and felt her throughout all of her poems, and I feel that connection is rooted in her level of comfort with expressing the erotic in her poems.

What I find most wonderful about the connection between Lorde and Shange’s understanding of “the erotic” is their shared experience and understanding of the intimate nature poetry and the erotic. Lorde finds little difference between “writing a good poem and moving into the sunlight against the body of a woman [she] loves” (58), and Shange believes that “a poem shd fill you up with something…a poem shd happen to you like cold water or a kiss” (24). It is in that understanding of the erotic that makes their work so poignant and timeless.

Reconciling the Necessary and the Real

by Ortiz on October 2, 2019 1 Comment

In reading The Art of Transformation, I understood the necessity for a unified culture in the
“struggle for freedom,” as described by Collins, but as I continued reading the accounts of individuals at the time, I was conflicted by what they believed to be a necessity in the movement for freedom, and what I believed to be essential in the creation of an individual identity.

“We stress culture because it gives identity, purpose, and direction. It tells you who you are, what you must do, and how you can do it,” – Maulana Ron Karenga

This dependency on a united, practically homogeneous culture for an identity, on the surface appears to be inclusive, a place where those normally excluded from culture can create and find refuge. Yet, I struggled to understand why culture should dictate the entirety of one’s identity, what they “must do” and how to do it. It’s almost restricting the purpose of an identity and culture to something completely political. What must we do, and how do we do it? What are the tactics that we find in this culture, and how do I execute them? This notion of culture and identity has an agenda, and must we embed our entire being into a political purpose, regardless of how badly we need it?

Also, how can one culture, a culture specifically tied to African descent account for the varied, mixed identities that still identify as Black? In takin a solo / a poetic possibility / a poetic imperative by Ntozake Shange, Shange acknowledges how limiting this concept of a homogeneous, unified culture can be.

“that means there is absolutely no acceptance of blk personal reality. If you are 14, female & black in the u.s.a./ you have one solitary voice/ thought you number 3 million/ no nuance exists for you/ you have been sequestered in the monolith/ the common denominator as a persona”

So how do we reconcile the necessity for a black culture without the violent exclusion of so many? Even now in the age of social media, there is an image of black culture that is entirely too narrow, too limiting. How can we repair this rupture between what is necessary and what is real, as Shange addresses in Nappy Edges?

nappy edges: the struggle for black womanhood

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by Ariel Leachman on October 4, 2018 0 Comments

As I think about the title nappy edges it was interesting to me as to think about the physical challenge of nappy edges to conform to one’s hair in away that is contained and socially proper. In a way, Shange draws parallels in the black woman’s experience as a poet and as a women to the dilemma of nappy edges when she writes about the restrictions of womanhood that persist with women because of the societal masculine pressures of conformity and acceptance. Shange explores how traditional gender dynamics can exclude women. Through love and relationships as spaces where women should be able to seek their own pleasure, sexual or in motherhood. For Shange, womanhood can sometimes act as a double edge sword in that sex and love can either torment or uplift women. These selection of poems in nappy edges push back against the way in which black women have been allowed a single, monolithic voice and experience. What I appreciate about this piece is the emphasis of self care and love through sexuality, poetry and femininity.

For my digital piece I selected a spoken word performance by one of my favorite poets in the arts collective Strivers Row. In this performance Alysia talks about the labels, restrictions on her womanhood by men. Her experience discusses how women are expected to behave and in a sense a form of respectability politic for black women that is created by black men. I enjoyed that at the end of the poem Alysia identifies her identity as a poet and as a woman in her existence stripped away from the labels by the men; yet still she faces challenges of self doubt and questioning her self worth. This poem carried many parallels to the themes in nappy edges in a modern and revived ways from the words and poetry of Shange during the 1970s.

Reading Zake Week 2: “i talk to myself” from Nappy Edges

Reading Zake

by Sophia on February 20, 2016 12 Comments

i can’t quite remember how many questions or journalists or people have happened to me in the last year. i can’t even remember everything i’ve said. i know i tried to convey my perceptions of the world, of men & women, music & language, as clearly as i cd, but poets who talk too much can trip over their own syllables. can become absurd. like the time i told this woman that the most important thing that ever happened to me was my tail-cutting party. or the time i started crying in the middle of a question cuz the person waz so nasty to me i cd no longer speak. he said i had no right to exist/ so i said/ go speak to a rightfully existing person, a white man, maybe. that’s not good press.

…

tz: well. how do you explain loving some men who write & some men who play music & some men who are simply lovable, when yr work for almost three years has been entirely woman-centered?

i can do a lot of things. we all can. women haveta. i waz not able to establish the kind of environment i that my work needed when i read with men all the time. you haveta remember there’s an enormous ignorance abt women’s realities in our society. we ourselves suffer from a frightening lack of clarity abt who we are. my work attempts to ferret out what i know & touch in a woman’s body. if i really am committed to pulling the so-called personal outta the realm of non-art. that’s why i have dreams & recipes, great descriptions of kitchens & handiwork in sassafrass, cypress, & indigo. that’s why in for colored girls…i discuss the simple reality of going home at nite, of washing one’s body, looking out the window with a woman’s eyes. we must learn our common symbols, preen them and share them with the world. the readings i usedta do with david henderson, conyus, bob chrisman, paul vane, ton cusan, roberto vargas & all the others at the coffee gallery, the intersection, & s.f. state were quite high, but the readings at the women’s studies center, with the third world women’s collective, international woman’s day affairs, with the shameless hussy poets, these were overwhelmingly intense & growing experiences for me as a woman & as a poet.

the collective recognition of certain realities that are female can still be hampered, diverted, diluted by a masculine presence. yes, i segregated my work & took it to women. much like i wd take fresh water to people stranded in the mojave desert. i wdnt take a camera crew to observe me. i wdnt ask the people who had never known thirst to come watch the thirsty people drink.

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by Kim Hall on December 14, 2015 0 Comments

First edition of Triple Jeopardy, the newspaper of the Third World Women’s Alliance

I wanted to just make a pitch to everyone to remember that you can find primary sources in rooms beyond those designated as “archives” cultural institutions like the Schomburg: sometimes they are in main collections or (since digitization is happening at an increasing rapid clip) online. You should be inventive and wide-ranging when looking for accessible copies of works you might want to use. For example, following up on Michelle’s Archive Task #1, I was trying to see if there was anyplace in NYC that has papers related to the Third World Women’s Alliance. The main branch of the NYPL (not the “archive” per se) has Triple Jeopardy, the newspaper of the TWWA, in its main collection. However, that journal is also available online in the Independent Voices database.

Independent Voices is an open-access collection of digitized independent publications. It can be a very rich source for Black Power/”post” Black Power and Feminist materials. For example, I found several pieces by Ntozake (also spelled Ntosake) in the database. Since some of you are interested in healing, I have a screenshot of her talking about her work with “injured” women in an extensive interview published in the literary journal, River Styx.

Ntozake’s response to interview questions from Students at Harris-Stowe College in Saint Louis (1978). Note the use of the dash in the interview transcription.

I highly recommend this interview, Shange talks about many of the things you are investigating now: Black Power, Spirituality, Third Worldism, Feminism, childhood, etc. Independent Voices also suggests that you help with digitization by correcting some of the OCR (Optical-Scanning Recognition) errors.

Shange, Ntozake. “Ntozake Shange: Live from Saint Louis!” River Styx, no. 5 (1979): 91–115.

UPDATE: I absolutely forgot to share with you Archive Grid, an archive search engine that lets you map searches. for example, when I did a search for Triple Jeopardy, once I moved from the daunting “list view,” the summary view let me know that in Philadelphia (hey Michelle!) there was a copy of one issue located in the “Women’s Health Concerns Committee Records” at the University of Pennsylvania.

Closer to home, I discovered that the Columbia literary magazine, Emanon, published some of Ntozake Shange’s poetry from when she was a Barnard Student (search Paulette Williams).

nia ashley in reflection

by Nia on November 5, 2015 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.

Black Arts Movement Notes

by Nicole on October 8, 2015 0 Comments

Black Arts Movement Notes

Who are the main players of the black arts movement?

Amiri Baraka (poet) is considered the father of the movement
Baraka was “highly visible publisher, a celebrated poet, a major music critic, and an Obie award winning playwright.”
Larry Neal was an African American theater scholar who worked with Baraka to open the Black Arts Repertory Theater School.

How did it begin, how long did it last?

It lasted from 1965-1975
“emerged in the wake of the black power movement”
The movement born after the assassination of Malcolm X on 2/21/1965
people divided between Political Nationalism (Black Panther Movement) and Cultural Nationalism
Baraka’s symbolic move from the Lower East Side to Harlem in March of 1995.
Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) that year.
Before Malcom X’s assassination Baraka lived successfully in an integrated community.
The black arts movement was inspired by the Umbra Workshop, which was a group of young black writers on the Lower East Side. Another group at the time was the Harlem Writers Guild which included Maya Angelou, but the fact “that Umbra was primarily poetry- and performance-oriented established a significant and classic characteristic of the movement’s aesthetics.”
When Baraka moved back to New Jersey BARTS fell apart but the ideals remained.

What are the main ideologies and goals of the group?

Cultural Nationalism called for the creation of black poetry, literature, theater and visual arts that represented black culture and history. The “autonomy of black artists” was emphasized.
Larry Neal says it is the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.”
Some of the main concepts came from RAM (Revolutionary Action Movement) which was a national organization popular in New York. Larry Neal was a member of this group.
There also was an organization called US (as opposed to “them’) led by Maulana Karenga
Elijah Muhammad’s Chicago-based Nation of Islam.

Where was its locus and what other areas did it reach?

BAM began in the New York area but spread to Detroit (Broadside Press and Naomi Long Madgett’s Lotus Press), Chicago (Negro Digest/Black World and Third World Press ) and San Francisco (Journal of Black Poetry, the Black Scholar).

What is the legacy of the Black Arts Movement?

The Black arts movement is inventive in its use of language and communication (performance, music and actual speech).
“Black Arts aesthetics emphasized orality, which includes the ritual use of call and response both within the body of the work itself as well as between artist and audience.”
“I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don’t have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that,” (Ishmael Reed, 1995).

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