#Shange Week 3 – The Worlds of Ntozake Shange and Digital Storytelling

Certain Forms of Nurture – Makeen Week 3

Men have been able

to give

power, support

and certain forms of nurture

(as individuals)

When

they

choose

…

but the power

is always

stolen

power.

withheld from

the mass of women

patriarchy.

– Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (page 246)

This quote is one that stood out to me most in Adrienne Rich’s Of Women Borne. It was a favorite of mine because it seemed to capture so much in very few words. More specifically, this passage forced me to reconceptualize power and how I understand its creation and its use. Previously, I always understood power as something that allows people to create and enforce certain constructs. Adrienne Rich asserts power as a construct itself–– a fact I had never thought of. She even goes further to say that power is a patriarchal construct that is in many ways sustained by the ways in which it is distributed. Power does not belong to the patriarchy to give, and the patriarchy thrives off of taking power and redistributing it when it deems necessary.

Re-writing the passage as a poem forced me to even further reconceptualize a number of things. Firstly, words that initially struck me as some sort of philosophical theory felt more like natural thought processes in the form of the poem. Before I had written the poem, I wondered if the words would lose their weight, but they did not. If anything, I felt I was able to better understand Rich’s words in this form. They flowed, the words came individually rather than in the form of a wordy phrase as they once existed. In deciding exactly how to restructure the poem, I formatted as I read aloud. Thus, the structure of the poem felt comfortable to speak. Words like us and them that contrasted one another, to me, felt as though they should stand alone. I then had to make smaller decisions like using ellipses in place of a semi colon or even placing the words “as individuals” into parentheses, mostly to find a more natural way to account for the frequent use of commas in the original writing. It became interesting to me that poetry allows for frequent time to reflect within its structure, something that a traditional paragraph form does not allow for. This exerciser finally allowed me to understand Ntozake Shange’s emphasis on the importance of writing existing beyond the page. Whether as movement, speech or song, extending language beyond its written form only strengthens its ability to be understood.

The Colonized Intellectual

“National culture is the collective thought

process of a people to describe,

justify,

and extol the actions

whereby they have joined forces

and remained strong…

National culture in the underdeveloped countries,

therefore,

must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle

these countries are waging.” (National Culture, Fanon)

This quote was quite interesting to me because it could easily be applied to modern day music and Shange. Awhile back, I had a small discussion with my friends about Nigerian music being called African music or Jamaican music being simply referred to as Caribbean music. Interestingly, the conversation shifted into talking about race, music, locality, etc. This quote also brought up two questions for me: what power does the collective have that an individual would not? To what extent or in what situations is the collective force necessary or needed? Shange And Fanon have two completely different writing styles. Though Shange’s writing might be a bit of an easier read, both writers and thinkers are intellectual and revolutionary thinkers.

Going back to the entire reading by Fanon, Fanon details three stages in what he called the “colonized intellectual”. Fanon explained that in the first stage, the intellectual mimics the colonist and conforms to colonial tastes. This is a stage where the colonized tries to be like the Europeans, extolling and admiring European culture. In the second stage, Fanon explains, the colonized reacts against this assimilation and desire. This is the Négritude phase in which, in reaction to the European casting of African culture as inferior, the intellectual extols each and every thing about African culture as superior. In the third stage, this love for culture finally moves to a fight for liberation. The intellectual begins to write “combat literature, revolutionary literature” that hopes to galvanize and motivate the people into fighting the colonists. In this stage, Fanon explains is the hope that developing a new culture will begin to shape a new nation.

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Certain Forms of Nurture – Makeen Week 3

The Colonized Intellectual