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Eroticism as Poetic Introspection

by Eliana 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

by Johnson 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. 

 

Taylor Post 1: Epistemological Violence & “Going Home”

by Thompson 1 Comment
Excerpt From Wretched Of The Earth p. 210
Colonialism is
         (not)
     satisfied
                   merely
 with holding people in its
 grip and emptying the
native brain of all form and content.
By a kind of perverted
logic,
it turns
to the past
of the oppressed people, and
dis           torts,
   d i s
      f i g u r e
   s,
and destroys it.
This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today.
Why I formatted the way that I did:
I tried to organize the poem on the page to reflect the way my body read the words. The way I annotated the page, I thought first that the following paragraph was to be about ‘What Colonialism Is’. It was, instead, a paragraph on what colonialism is (not). It opened up questions in me around what would ’satisfy colonialism’ and by extension, what would satisfy larger iterations of capitalist settler colonial logics in the country we live in here. I couldn’t stop thinking about how voracious a system this is, how gluttonous and ridiculous and alienating it becomes. How often it distorts the ways I am able to understand the world and the way I want to move through it.
Epistemological Violence & “Going Home”: 
    The passage I chose is talking—to me— about the many forms of epistemological violence constituted through colonial logics. Epistemological violence, to me, constitutes forms of violence which attack, undermine, and erase the ways people understand the world and peoples ways of knowing. When our ways of understanding and translating the world are distorted, it makes it harder to think reflexively, to (as Cherrié Moraga reminded us last week in her BCRW interview) “go home” to one’s origin stories and work out what must be worked out. Perhaps that is the point of this specific system of oppression.
    Thinking critically about forms of epistemological violence, my mind was certainly drawn to the prompt quote of this assignment. Ntozake Shange writes in Language and Sound of the ways in which she often wants to attack and deform that language which attempts to attack her—that language being English. It is a language which “perpetuates the notions that cause pain to every black child as he/she learns to speak of the world & the “self” (19). In many ways, the english language over and over again through series of, what Foucault might call, ‘small punishments’, teaches us that the ways we want to express the world has limits that must be respected if we ourselves want to be respected. For example, in many ways, the manner in which the english language has historically been implicated in the lives of my ancestors has been as a tool to devalue their stories. And I feel that pull, that friction. I know that the very language I use to articulate and read maps of liberation in essays, and novels, and poems, has also constituted great violence upon my ghosts.
What I learned to articulate: 
    In this place, if things cannot be articulated in this language, they are invalidated and distorted. When I mean that I don’t have words but I have a movement or a sound in my chest that can tell you everything, it is with the hope that you (can read beyond this place)/ understand. Audre Lorde tells us “that poetry is not a luxury” and I have to constantly remind myself that that poetry can exist outside of this colonizer tongue. That poetry is bigger than my tongue, mouth and body—that it prompts an overflowing in me.

Reading Zake: “A Scarlet Woman”

by Michelle 10 Comments

For the past few months, I have been going through the works of Third World Women and Peoples collectives from the 70s and this journey began with learning that Ntozake Shange contributed to the first anthology by Third World Women. Titled “Third World Women,” it was published by the collective, Third World Communications in 1972. The editors preface, “We recognize the necessity for Third World people to have accessible to them material written by and for them – we must be able to see, hear, feel, smell, taste portraits of ourselves”. With this mission in mind, Shange submits this poem, “A Scarlet Woman” to the anthology, and at first read, I loved it in the same ways that I loved her poem “We Need a God Who Bleeds Now” (A Daughter’s Geography).

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

by Sophia 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.

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.

poet as orator/performer/activist; poetry as translation

by Nia 2 Comments

Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography

mozambique
angola
salvador & johannesburg
the atlantic side of nicaragua costa rica
cuba puerto rico
charleston & savannah/ haiti
panama canal/ the yucatan
manila
la habana
guyana
santiago & brixton
near managua/
pétionville
abidjan
chicago
trinidad
san juan
capetown & palestine
luanda
chicago

These are all the places Shange connects alludes to in “Bocas” in A Daughter’s Geography. She names them as her numerous children related though they “cannot speak/the same language.” (Shange). She connects all the children of Africa and the African diaspora through experience not just through heritage. There is the simple explanation for these relationships; the one often invoked by artists and academics alike: that each ethnicity is just a stop on the trade route. Mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons became Basian, Jamaican, American, and Cuban through trade and bartering. They developed new cultures and claimed happenstance for their own.

“but a long time ago/ we boarded ships/ locked in
depths of seas our spirits/ kisst the earth
on the atlantic side of nicaragua costa rica
our lips traced the edges of cuba puerto rico
charleston & savannah/ in haiti
we embraced &
made children of the new world” (Shange)

Shange goes farther than this connection. She unites these ethnicities and nationalities through their experiences of oppression and subjugation at the hands of similar if not the same groups of oppressors.

“but we fight the same old men/ in the new world… the same men who thought the earth waz flat
go on over the edge/ go on over the edge old men”

She credits the experience of being marginalized and overcoming that marginalization as a uniting force of these colored people. The rhythms that emerged, the patios that formed, the food, the names, all point to a common experience. It is no surprise then that she had to make language move. When it moves, no matter what language it is, poems can capture, unite, and uplift her children. It doesn’t matter that one speaks Spanish, the other Portuguese; they use the movement in the poem, the space between the words, the history behind their creation to unite themselves as family.

I added some of my favorite spoken word poets from all over the diaspora.

http://operationelevation.tumblr.com/post/128567513644/bnv15

looking further into Felipe Luciano’s “Jíbaro, My Pretty Nigger”

by Sophia 1 Comment

“There’s a move to divide us. It’s being done by Afro-saxons and coconuts. People who would have us believe that there’s a separate gulf between two nations: Black and Latino. This is not the poem, y’all. I’m telling you there’s no difference between Buford, South Carolina and Ponce, Puerto Rico…Mambo is Black, merengue is Black, R&B is Black, joropo is Black, flamenco is Black, guaguanco is Black, bomba is Black, be careful. They will come to you and say be careful with those hoards of Spanish people. Fuck them.”

Felipe Luciano opens his appearance on Def Jam in this way. Audience members cheer as though the poem has already begun before he tells them that he’s just going off. In “To Make a Poet Black,” Wilkinson concludes that Luciano’s place in the Black Arts Movement “should serve less to conceal cultural nuances, but work more to convey a cultural milieu in which poetry by African Americans and Puerto Ricans shared a communal residence” (330). Whether or not this statement applies to his self-image and artistic mission is obviously impossible to glean without consulting him, but judging by this performance, he seems to be acting first and apologizing later –making a radical point by saying that Black and Latino cultures ought not to be divided or even nuanced, but are one and the same.

I speak only intermediate-level Spanish, but for those who don’t at all, I’ve translated his first four lines:

“Jíbaro, mi negro lindo
De los bosques de caña
Caciques de luz
Tiempo es una cosa cómica.”

Jíbaro, my pretty negro
From the cane forests
Chiefs of light
Time is a funny thing

Read about the modern connotations of “jíbaro” here

As was briefly discussed in “To Make a Poet Black,” the poem is about the Black/Puerto Rican/Nuyorican experience as single, fluid, and inclusive. The use of “jíbaro” and “nigger” as relatively interchangeable or at least cohabitating terms suggests a cultural history and relationship so familial that each group is permitted to reappropriate the other’s slurs.
The majority of the poem reminisces about a decolonized state, so outside the realm of present possibility that most of it takes place in the womb of a universal mother. The images he uses are commonly resonant: one set of “mother” and “father,” shared “ancient empires” that have since been lost, “thoughts of freedom,” interchangeable use of “black” and “brown,” “the foul bowels of the ship/That vomited you up on the harbors of a cold metal city to die,” referencing both the colonization of Puerto Rico and The Middle Passage.

It ends with an ardent demand for community, addressing the division Luciano mentions in his preface to the reading, in which everyone ought to live in fear and division, being “careful” of each other –which really translates to “Fuck them.”

Jíbaro, did you know you my nigga?
I love the curve of your brow,
The slant of your baby’s eyes
The calves of your woman dancing;
I dig you!

You can’t hide.
I ride with you on subways.
I touch shoulders with you in dances.
I make crazy love to your daughter.
yea, you my cold nigga man.
And I love you ’cause you’re mine.

And I’ll never let you go.
And I’ll never let you go.
(You mine, nigga!)
And I’ll never let you go.
Forget about self.
We’re together now.
And I’ll never let you go!
Uh’uh
Never, Nigga.

The descriptions of collective love with terms typically reserved for romantic love are particularly effective. I love the use of “baby’s eyes,” as it could be interpreted to literally refer to the subject’s child as well as the image of the subject as pure love-object. The self/other line becomes very blurred (very directly!), as Luciano begs the reader to “Forget about self./ We’re together now.”

“so our children will know…& be proud”: Coltrane and black music

by Nicole 0 Comments

In Jayne Cortez’s poem, “How Long Has This Trane Been Gone,” she writes about the preservation of black legends and of black history. She says that Blues and Jazz artists have been forgotten; that their work of creating music for and about black people has been overlooked.

“Will you remember their names

or do they have no names

no lives—only products

to be used”

Cortez makes a claim for black music and its ability to allow black people to reclaim their history and a culture of their own. She believes that people have begun to forget the importance of the music of black artists who have died and that black people no longer appreciate the meaning of their artistry. There is an anxiety about forgetting, and therefore losing black culture.

one kind of god “whose wounds are not the end of anything”

by Michelle 0 Comments

Throughout the poem “We Need a God Who Bleeds Now”, Shange is describing two kinds of gods; one kind of god who bleeds “some small male vengeance” while the other kind of god bleeds birth and life, “whose wounds are not the end of anything”. She argues for the latter kinds of gods. It is interesting that she uses traditionally violent and negative rhetoric to describe both kinds of gods. By traditionally violent and negative, I mean words that are usually used in violent and negative contexts. In describing the kind of gods we do not need, she uses the words “vengeance,” “pitiful,” and “humility”. In one interpretation, she seems to be describing death, murder, war, and politics. I would like to explore her choice to use the same violent and negative rhetoric in describing the kinds of gods we do need. She uses the words “tearing,” “breaks,” “bleeding,” “heaving,” and “mourning” to describe in one interpretation would be the kinds of gods or people that give birth to life. Shange seems to be drawing a parallel between the kinds of people in the world who are killing and those who are giving birth through the similar emotions those actions evoke. Both actions involve bleeding, a certain amount of violence, force, and overall intense and strong emotions. Therefore perhaps Shange is also making a claim about the range of emotions that we feel as people. She is not putting a value system among the different emotions, rather she is putting a value system for the reasons we feel those emotions. It is almost as if we are reusing / refocusing / rebirthing these words and emotions for a different life.

 

The way Shange juxtaposes blood and emotions in the different contexts reminds me a poem in Nayyirah Waheed’s book of poetry, Salt.

why can we never

talk

about the blood.

the blood of our ancestors.

the blood of our history.

the blood between our legs.

 

— blood

 

It seems that Nayyirah Waheed is doing the same juxtaposition with the word “blood”. Asking to talk about the “blood of our ancestors,” and “history” suggest violence, death, and negativity. But “the blood between our legs,” is harmless and even fruitful.