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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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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.

embodied responses: what it takes to feel real

by Kiani 2 Comments

“i commenced to buying pieces of gold/ 14 carat/ 24 carat/ 18 carat gold/ every time some black person did something that waz beneath him as a black person & more like a white person. i bought gold cuz it came from the earth/ & more than likely it came from south africa/ where the black people are humiliated & oppressed like in slavery. i wear all these things at once/ to remind the black people that it cost a lot for us to be here/ our value/ can be known instinctively/ but since so many black people are having a hard time not being like white folks/ i wear these gold pieces to protest their ignorance/ their disconnect from history. i buy gold with a vengeance/ each time someone appropriates my space or my time without permission/ each time someone is discourteous or actually cruel to me/ if my mind is not respected/ my body toyed with/ i buy gold/ & weep. i weep as i fix the chains round my neck/ my wrists/ my ankles.” pg 51, Spell #7 of Three Pieces 

For me, Spell #7 was harrowing in its candidness. In between the lines of the banter and bar talk and blackface, the text ate away at me. This quote was particularly salient in my reading of the text. Here, Maxine describes painful experiences of appropriation, disrespect, humiliation, and oppression done to her by her oppressors and by those of her skin kind. Maxine copes with these experiences by materializing them. Her pain is embodied by jewelry that reminds of where she comes from, or where she’d like to be, or where she should be. She identifies with objects of gold from this place with bodies like hers experiencing things like she is. She puts the gold on her body. The implication of any kind of adornment is weighted with questions of identification, self-concept, history, and context. The implications of this diasporic woman putting a diasporic object on her body are huge and almost agonizing as these objects represent a lost connection and a visceral connection to pain in her immediate life. Adornment is thus a historic and revived identification with pain. Maxine wears these pieces of gold to remind herself and others of the pain of being; the realness of being a black body in space, in a world that rejects that realness as often as it can.

The act of adorning one’s self is often seen as this purely positive means of communicating one’s self, one’s means, one’s class, and one’s convictions. This excerpt from Spell #7 shows the reader Maxine’s or anyone’s greater reasons for decorating their bodies in the ways that they do. The quote calls to mind the explicit detail with which Shange describes the women and their colors in for colored girls– their “rhinestones etchin the corners of her (their) mouths” and their “oranges & magnolia scented wrists” … signs of fragility and femininity and also a kind of armor against oppressive forces. A kind of homage to the many sweet ways a body can be and an acknowledgement of why they are that way.

& made herself a bath — Shange evoking and transforming the mundane

by Kiani 2 Comments

What continuously strikes me about Shange’s work is her ability to invoke a world of magic composed of whispers, rituals, dances, objects and practices of the everyday. In for colored girls elements of the everyday take on a new life in what they come to represent.

One’s plant is one’s relationship– tended to, watered, and cared for until burdensome:

“this note is attached to a plant
i’ve been watering since the day i met you
you may water it
yr damn self” (14)

In the wee hours of the morning a woman can soak and soak in a bath until she is transformed:

“at 4:30 AM
she rose
movin the arms & legs that trapped her
she sighed affirmin the sculptured man
& made herself a bath
of dark musk oil egyptian crystals
& florida water to remove his smell
to wash away the glitter
to watch the butterflies melt into
suds & the rhinestones fall beneath
her buttocks like smooth pebbles
in a missouri creek
layin in water
she became herself
ordinary
brown braided woman
with big legs & full lips
reglar” (34)

A woman’s stockings, the glare from street lights, or the last bit of whiskey in the glass are ritual and transformative experiences– yes, coded with Shange’s specific meaning of a time, place, or feeling but mundane enough to evoke entirely different perceptions in those who read her words. In my own work as an artist and photographer, I am inspired by the mundane– my current interest is in the realm of domesticity and the tensions that exist in one’s home space as a place of contrived vulnerability. I return to the above passages over and over again. I’m reminded that the items that are carefully placed on one’s dresser, bathroom sink, or bedside table can be ingredients to a kind of potions or spell. Pictures, lotions, plants, pieces of cloth, stacks of magazines, and tubes of lipstick that induce sleep, soothe an anxious heart, remind you of Spring, and allow you to transform before your own eyes.

  

photos taken by Kiani Ned