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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Taylor Post #6

by Thompson 0 Comments

From This Bridge Called My Back, Writing By Radical Women Of Color, Cherrié Moraga writing a letter to Barbara Smith about Moraga’s experience at an Ntozake Shange concert:

“There, everything exploded for me. She was speaking a language that I knew—in the deepest parts of me—existed, and that I had ignored… What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother—the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems….The reading had forced me to remember that I knew things from my roots… I knew that then, sitting in that Oakland Theatre (as I know in my Poetry) the only thing worth writing about is what seems to be unknown and therefore fearful (Cherrié Moraga, 31)”

I think that this reading really tied together a lot of moving parts I have been negotiating in our class. For my post I’d like to facilitate a sort of close read of this quote and connect it to some other parts of our assignment for this week as well as the preceding assignments we have had this semester.

Of course it is important to recognize that centrally this quote by Cherrié Moraga, co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back (This Bridge), is speaking directly to the subject of our study, Ntozake Shange. Moraga goes to an Shange concert and is moved. Moraga talks about this movement as something that comes from the “deepest parts” of her, from her “roots” —the way the comment is framed makes me understand that roots and deepest parts simultaneously have to do with the literal deepest parts of her psychic self and also from the roots that constitute her mother and aunts, and perhaps her ancestors.

 

This brought up for me, the content of “For the Color of My Mother” an essay that opens This Bridge by Moraga. In the poem, Moraga speaks of a dream she has in which her mother’s head is being passed around a circle of brown women. To me, based on the way the essay/poem is crafted, it tells me that the dream may have been about the responsibility of birthing into the world what only a brown girl can. It was about rupture and the need to make what spills from that rupture be something that can combat the silencing of brown women globally. It is a responsibility that does not come out of nowhere, it comes from her mother, it comes from her roots.

 

What spills from that rupture, that combats the silence, may in fact be Moraga’s own voice which she says she denied from her brown mother, her brown self. What follows this comment is the idea that she had only claimed the white language from her father and that she needs to pick up the brown poetic language of her mother. This reminded me of the way that Audre Lorde constructs the idea of the“white father who:

  • tell us to “rely solely upon our ideas to make us free”
  • “distorted” poetry into “sterile word play”… “in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight.”
  • “told us, I think therefore I am”

In “Poetry is not a Luxury”, Lorde writes of this figure in contrast to “the black mother in each of us” aka, “the poet” in each of us  who “whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free”. This part of “Poetry is Not A Luxury”, helped me frame and understand Moraga’s comment that the white language her father gave her cannot “speak to the emotions in her poems”.

Finally, I’d like to look at the last segment of the quote that says that the real need in her poetry is to explore things that are unknown and fearful. This reminded me of Shange’s quote in Language & Sound where she writes: “The catastrophe of ignoring the unfamiliar, the exiled, the forgotten, is more than a bit of wrestling with “something missing”, it is the terror of becoming the embodiment of our own folklore set in time, and not defined by our own terms” (133). I think ideally this is a quote by Shange that I would like to continue to explore over the remainder of the semester because it really speaks to the politics of fear that I am interested in in Shange’s work and it also speaks to the idea the importance of self definition in a country, in a language, that has historically worked to render us silenced and a mere caricature of ourselves. It also helps me think about the stakes of the project that we are engaging in, of attempting to write and record and archive the truth of our lives and our connections to each other, so that they don’t become distorted by a culture dominated by white supremacy, so that they don’t  become distorted by a university dominated by whiteness.

 

And to connect it to the separate piece we read for class today, “The Digital Afterlives of This Bridge Called My Back: Woman of Color Feminism, Digital Labor, and Networked Pedagogy” I think I’d like to think momentarily about the pedagogical framework that This Bridge provides the reader with, it is a pedagogy through which the reader and educators can develop their own strategies for growing and helping others grow. If we observe fully the tenants expressed in the essays and poems in the book, how does that change regular and normative curriculum plans and the pedagogical approaches of a given class or social circle? I think I have seen classes function that propagate the pedagogical reference points brought to bear in This Bridge and those classes have without fail changed my life. I wonder how those classes in the past and how this class now are changed by bringing the pedagogy of This Bridge into the digital sphere?

 

I’d like to leave the comment with a picture. Below you will find a picture I took of a painting I painted my senior year of high school in 2016 after reading through This Bridge for the first time. I was moved and spinning with information and poetry and truly, I was moved beyond words. I knew that I had to figure out how to embody what I had felt and what I was processing someway and I chose an acrylic medium to express the movement I was experiencing:

Painting by Taylor Thompson '20 depicting an interpretation of the cover of "This Bridge Called My Back"

May 20, 2016 Chicago, IL

Painting based off of the cover of the original This Bridge Called My Back by Johnetta Tinker.

 

All you must hold onto

by Keller 0 Comments

The “Black Sexism Debate” issue of The Black Scholar, Vol. 10, No. 8/9, May/June 1979, reminded me of Nikki Giovanni’s remarkable 1971 dialogue with James Baldwin on Soul!, a TV program that has been called the U.S.’s “first Black Tonight Show.”

While host Ellis Haizlip introduces James Baldwin as “Mr. Baldwin,” he introduces Giovanni as “Nikki.” The dynamic between Baldwin and Giovanni is compelling. At times, when Baldwin calls Giovanni “baby, baby, baby,” and “my dear,” it comes across as approachable; at other times, it comes across as rather patronizing. (Affectionately, and perhaps wryly, she responds by calling him “Jimmy.”) He routinely interrupts and corrects her, blurring the line between his status as an elder and his status as a man.

At one point (51:00), while Giovanni struggles to get a word in about Black women and children’s experiences with domestic violence and lack of support from Black men, Baldwin puts his hand over hers, stopping her hand gestures, and says, “But wait, wait, hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone, baby.” He gives her hand a squeeze before gesturing towards himself. “Look,” he transitions, “I’ve had to learn in my own life…” Divested by racism of the social economic ability to provide for his family, Baldwin suggests, “I’m no longer in my own eyes – it doesn’t make any difference what you may think of me – in my own eyes I’m not a man.” Giovanni does not budge, responding at once, “It does indeed make a difference what I think about it.”

Earlier, Giovanni has explained her position (48:11):

Let’s say a guy’s going with a girl. You’re going with Maybelle and Maybelle gets preg­nant, and all of a sudden you can’t speak to Maybelle because you don’t have the money for a crib, right? Maybelle doesn’t need a crib. […] What Maybelle needs at that moment is a man. […] A man […] is not necessarily a provider of all that stuff. […] You don’t have a job. […] Maybelle understands there is no job. But what she needs is a man to come by and say, ‘Hey baby, you look good.’ And Black men re­fuse to function like that because they say, ‘I want to bring the crib when I come.’ You’re never going to get the crib. Bring yourself. […] I’m a poor woman. […] I’m already deprived of almost everything that we find in the world. Must I also be de­prived of you?

Baldwin responds with a memorable quote (50:16): “You can blame him [the man] on a human level if you like, but I think it’s more interesting to try to – you have to understand it, the bag the cat is in.” His riff on the saying is powerful, but where do Black women fit in? Are Black women responsible for understanding both the social reality men have been stuffed into, and their own? Are men and women’s “bags” separate at all? And if there are two cats in one bag, can they not use their combined strength to discover the shape of their social reality together, to break out together? Why is it an inevitability for the bag to be external to the man, to overdetermine the man’s behavior, and yet an expectation for the woman to understand the bag and accommodate its harmful effects on people trapped inside? Why are women expected to perform unique epistemological labor to understand social realities affecting multiple genders?

The question of how Black men can better understand and support Black women’s struggle against oppression never comes up in Giovanni and Baldwin’s dialogue. I was reminded of Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady”:

Bag lady you gone hurt your back
Dragging all them bags like that
I guess nobody ever told you
All you must hold onto, is you, is you, is you

This resonates with Giovanni’s insistence: “You’re never going to get the crib. Bring yourself.” Whereas Baldwin emphasizes a man’s dependence on the bag in which he has been trapped, and thus “the Black man’s” need to be seen as a man by white society’s standards, Giovanni focuses on “Maybelle’s” radical antimaterialist love for her man. He is already seen as a man by the woman right in front of him; if only he would value her perspective just as much as his own, she wouldn’t pay the price of his needing affirmation elsewhere. As Toni Morrison critiqued Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – “Invisible to whom?”

There is no unmediated relationship, Giovanni and Morrison suggest, between “the Black man” and a larger, uniformly white “society.” Relationships between Black people and their world are also shaped by families, communities, and workplaces in which Black women and Black men can and must support each other, across difference. A Black woman’s perspective is essential to establish this radical commons. Otherwise, Black women become, as Donna Kate Rushin has written so eloquently in Bridge Poem (1981), the bridge between Black men and white society. Who will build Black women’s healing connections to each other, and to themselves? As Audre Lorde challenges, “If society ascribes roles to black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?” (The Black Scholar, “The Black Sexism Debate,” 17).

Like Giovanni’s Maybelle, June Jordan uses the Scholar‘s conversation around sexism to advance an anticapitalist argument. “The point is not whether he earns a couple dollars more or less than she; the point is that, as a people, our ability to provide for ourselves is under […] white institutional attack,” Jordan stresses (The Black Scholar, “The Black Sexism Debate,” 40). Aspiring to gendered white economic ideals and competing for scraps will not fix this crisis; rather, solidarity and Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” are in order. The ideal man for Giovanni’s Maybelle refuses to buy into the demands of racist capitalist materialism, for he does not measure his worth in dollars or property accumulation. He brings value to Maybelle’s life in himself, by offering to share emotional support and child care responsibilities, and by treating her with respect. He carries his own weight, and they are both freer for it.

 

 

[1] Quentin Lucas has written an excellent analysis of their conversation, with excerpts transcribed, for Medium.

Dilemmas of the Kitchen Table

by Keller 0 Comments

Readings

I was fascinated to learn that, after the racist white feminist press Persephone dropped This Bridge, women of color feminists including Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde worked together to found their own radical feminist press by and for women of color, Kitchen Table, in 1980, with which they kept This Bridge in circulation (Adair and Nakamura, 261). This immediately reminded me of Carrie Mae Weems’s historic exhibition, her Kitchen Table photo series, in 1990. Both the feminist press and Weems’s photo series chose to center the kitchen table in projects that defended women of color’s and queer women’s access to intimate justice.

Picture

Members of the Kitchen Table Press. Source: Kitchen Table Literary Arts. https://www.kitchen-table.org/

For the radical feminist press, the name Kitchen Table immediately announces the editors’ commitment to prioritizing praxis over theory. There are many crucial contrasts with the racist white feminist title “Persephone” – a reference to an ancient Greek goddess and princess who, in a thinly veiled fruit allegory, disobeys injunctions against sex before marriage. “Persephone” appeals to the racist european cult of claiming ancient Greek and Roman slaveholding and colonizing societies as whitewashed cultural forebears to europe and the united states. The white feminist invocation of “Persephone” defines freedom in a very limited and individualistic sense: a princess’s desire to choose heterosexual partners without consequences.

In contrast, Kitchen Table locates freedom in direct action more than theory or myth, in the lives of ordinary women rather than the elite. Persephone is a fictional character; the Kitchen Table is a very real place. Kitchen Table recalls a linkage of necessity and creativity in the full dimensions of Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” that rejects heteronormativity, superficial pornographic consumerism, and freedom without accountability. Rather than representing the name of an individual woman, Kitchen Table names a space that has functioned at once as a home and a workplace for working women throughout history, a space within which women are, through the press, finally invited to define and name themselves.

Similarly, in The Kitchen Table Series (1990), Carrie Mae Weems brilliantly subverts the anthropological gaze of the camera.[1] She acts as both object – that which is captured by the lens – and subject – the framer, editor, and namer of what can be seen. For Weems, the kitchen table does not symbolize political isolation; a lamp illuminates the kitchen table like a stage, or a factory floor. Largely a homosocial space shared by women, in which men feature only as visitors, never as fixtures, the kitchen table represents a political economic arena in its own right. Weems’s kitchen table is entangled with and helps shape the mainstream masculinist, white supremacist political landscape, rather than existing “outside” it.

The fact that the essential work Black women expend in kitchens is perennially unpaid and often required in addition to a full day’s work at a formal job risks refiguring racist and patriarchal exploitation. Weems’s Kitchen Table explores the contradictory potentialities of the kitchen: on the one hand, as a landmark of the ongoing, unredressed labor given by and seized from Black women; and on the other hand, as a radical commons out of which the liberatory possibilities of communities and the sustenance of generations can grow.

In Untitled (Eating lobster), a man at the head of the table hungrily sucks lobster, leaving shells behind. Weems’s food is untouched as she leans over to caress the man. Behind them, a bird sits in a looming cage. Maya Angelou wrote that the bird’s wings are clipped and her legs are tied. But Weems’s limbs are unchained and her kitchen has no bars. What bonds make her stay and pull her towards the man she feeds – force or love, pleasure or obligation, delight or debt? Can either/or questions help us understand her position?

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Eating lobster), 1990 © the artist and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Eating lobster), 1990 © the artist

The kitchen table as a social economic institution analyzed by Weems and Adair and Nakamura’s reflection on the Kitchen Table as a radical feminist press by and for women of color raise similar dilemmas. After recounting women’s struggles to gain access to books by women of color that were routinely abandoned out of print by racist mainstream publishers, Adair and Nakamura in “Digital Afterlives” give credit to online networks of radical free information sharing, while also pointing out troubling continuities with legal systems of exploitation. Spaces for “digital consciousness raising on Tumblr” serve as a

“feminist classroom[,] but one in which nobody – not the authors of This Bridge, not the unknown laborers who scanned and uploaded hundreds of pages, not the feminists of color writing and critiquing the work online – was compensated for providing [this] education. Nobody, that is, except the media corporation Yahoo, which owns and sells advertising space on Tumblr. […] [Thus,] both the legally distributed book and the pirated version online raise ethical concerns about the uneven distribution of work, ownership, and social power in pedagogical spaces” (Adair and Nakamura, 256).

For example, the Kitchen Table press survived in part by taking advantage of personal relationships with people – predominantly women of color – who were committed to the cause of circulating their radical message, which spared the press the cost of hiring paid staff to do the same work. Adair and Nakamura add hastily, “Of course, we do not equate these acts of solidarity with the exploits of racial capital” (262). Ultimately, however, “even ‘revolutionary’ pedagogical networks inevitably reproduce some racial and gendered dynamics of unremunerated work,” including work that is not counted or credited as work (263). Is the kitchen table a home or a workplace? A product of public labor or private love? An appliance serving at a woman’s convenience, or a domineering institution in whose framework her life plays out, like a cross-section of a dollhouse? If it is both, what does that tell us about freedom and the work of getting free?

 

1. My sources for analyzing Weems’s Kitchen Table are: (1) O’Grady, Megan, “How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making,” The New York Times, 2018. (2) Kelsey, Hall, Tillet, Bey, and Blessing, “Around the Kitchen Table,” Aperture, No. 223, Vision & Justice (Summer 2016), 52-56.

this midnight oil / Rewriting Cherríe Moraga

by Ortiz 0 Comments

we write letters to each other / incessantly / across a kitchen table / third wrld feminist strategy / is plotted.

we tlk long hours / into the night / it is when this midnight oil is burning /inthoseafterhours / that we secretly reclaim our goddesses / and our female-identified / cultural tradition

“i got myself home, / lit me some candles / … / put on sum

dinah and / aretha” (rushin)

 

In “Between the Lines: On Culture, Class, and Homophobia” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga describes the limitations of a strictly racialized reading of a woman’s experience. In this passage, Moraga describes the act of turning towards each other for “strength and sustenance” (102) as we search for our desire to have “all [our] sisters of color actively identified and involved as feminists” (102). Adopting Shange’s poetic style of writing, I chose this passage to emphasize the act of coming together through mediums of letters, music, or the spoken word. By deconstructing the original structure, including the quote by Rushin, I can now read Moraga and Rushin’s writing in the way it makes me feel; the words now dance and move and pause in a way that expresses a collectiveness, a warmth inherent in what we desire “third wrld feminist strategy” to be. It is “to write letters / to tlk long hours / put on sum dinah and / aretha” that we move past fractured images of the self, where our “whole” identities can meld into a single movement that acknowledges and is fueled by this “midnight oil,” this difference, that is learned through these mediums.

 

the meaning of legacy

by Elizabeth 0 Comments

“Ultimately, as all people of progressive politic do, we wrote this book for you- the next generation, and the next one. Your lives are so vast before you- you whom the popular culture has impassively termed “Millennials.” But I think the women of Bridge would’ve simply called you, “familia” – our progeny, entrusting you with the legacy of our thoughts and activism, in order to grow them into a flourishing planet and a just world.”

– Cherríe Moraga

my grandmothers in august 2017. this was taken after my senior speech.

The past few months, I have been thinking a lot about my own history and how this has informed who, what, and where I am today. Some of this has taken a very literal sense, such as trying to uncover the names of my enslaved ancestors. In a more abstract sense, I’ve also been trying to understand more of the histories of people who may not be related to me by blood, but are connected to me through culture, tradition, and spirit.

 

 

While reading the new introduction to This Bridge Called My Back, I almost laughed at Moraga’s excerpt she included from a letter she wrote to Barbara Smith. In it, she talks about how uncomfortable her own experience was listening to Shange present her work, and how it caused Moraga to realize that in her “development as a poet, [she has], in many ways, denied the voice of [her] brown mother” (26). Neither this, nor the conversation about her physical discomfort was necessarily funny to me, but it seemed ridiculously ironic that this is not only what I was feeling at the beginningof the semester when reading Shange, but it is also how I felt going to Moraga’s talk at Barnard a few months ago.

This to me only emphasizes the solidarity and commonality that Moraga, Shange, and the other folks that contributed to Bridge write about. Our struggles, love, and consciousness can come from different places and times, but are ultimately united. Those Shange learned from brought her to influence Moraga, who both influence me. I will never actually know them, just like I will never know those in my personal history that have influenced me too. Now, I believe that literally knowing them is not what constitutes our relationship, but it is hearing their stories, remembering their legacies, and carrying their work forward to grow the “flourishing planet and just world.”