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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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Ntozake Shange and Joan Vollmer: The Missing Beat Poets

by Eliana 0 Comments

When discussing the literary identities as “Black Bohemian Feminists” honed by Ntozake Shange and Alison Mills, Harryette Mullen alludes to the poetry of the Beat Generation — a literary staple of 1950’s and 1960’s bohemia. Mullen’s analysis of Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo in part revolves around defining the black woman relative to the man, characterized by allegiance to the family and serving as “passionate lovers of black men” (205). This comment allowed me to interrogate, not just the well-known poets of the Beat Generation, but their families and lovers as well. A central name in among the Beats was William S Burroughs. A less central name is Joan Vollmer, his wife who he ‘accidentally’ murdered one night in Mexico. Unlike Shange and Mills, Vollmer is recognized as one of the few female voices of the Beat Generation. In this regard, focusing on the lovers of the great figures of the Beat Generation sheds light on the apparent disposability of the female voice and female body. While Shange was falsely criticized for negatively depicting black men through her work, the murder of of Joan Vollmer is scarcely discussed and hardly tarnished Burroughs’ pristine literary reputation.

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo concludes with the powerful image of Sassafrass giving birth to a “free child” after she has freed herself from Mitch after suffering from his abuse. This freedom is not just from the male literary gaze, but from systemic violence of any sort targeting the black female body and voice. Mullen mentions that Shange chose art over family in contrast to the bourgeois feminist “who wants to have it all,” but I challenge this with the notion that Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo alongside Daughter’s Geography conveys the bohemian rawness of the Beats through the lens of a mother, sister, lover, and poet. Shange’s art instead honors her family just as authentically as Allen Ginsberg does in Kaddish. Shange’s black bohemian rawness does indeed deserve to be captured and praised poetically alongside Ginsberg and Kerouac, two key figures of the Beat Generation who met at Columbia just over ten years before Shange enrolled at Barnard. While Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac write of mothers and lovers respectively, one is forced to question why the female lover, particularly within a familial context, must be seen only as the subject. When will black women have an equal platform to tell their own stories of motherhood and womanhood? Perhaps this discrepancy explains why there are no black female voices of the Beat generation and why the glorified bohemian literary life of the Beats left Joan Vollmer writing from her grave.

the girl-child: finding a way to have/ her life

by Danielle 1 Comment

At first glance, I read “is not so gd” as “g-o-d” vs. “g-o-o-d”. I wonder if the abbreviation is supposed to make us think of god/ the idea of god at all. Does god exist from the moment a girl is born? Or is god a kind of love women must find within themselves? I thought about these questions as I read “is not so gd to be born a girl” closely.

For the first time, I read the slashes as the word “slash”. The imagery of violence in this choreoessay is more potent than any other I’ve read thus far that verbalizing the word “slash” felt relevant. Shange’s pen feels visceral—the slashes like machetes—carving a rhythm of violent protest. Her word choice—abominable, cutting, glass, scissors—conjure images of a war on the “girl-child”.

at least women cd carry things & cook/ but to be born a girl is not good sometimes

At the start, Shange makes a striking comparison between women and girls. Women can “carry things” (they have physical strength) and “cook” (they know how to care for/sustain themselves), while girls cannot; they are old enough to be taken advantage of but too young to fathom how to carry the weight of their experiences. Instead of writing “sex” and/or “rape”, Shange chooses the juvenile “you know what” to invoke a child’s perspective; it can be difficult for a girl/child to imagine a concept too mature for her age even if she has experienced it.

As violent as the choreoessay is, Shange does not sensationalize the physical threats of being born a girl. She defines words, like ‘infibulation’, and works out an equation, “virginity insurance = infibulation” to be matter-of-fact about the reality. Scientific descriptions of the way female genitals are maimed feel akin in tone to ingredients/ steps in a recipe, a recipe for a “girl-child” born to have the ‘child’ murdered. Her delivery is raw and compact. The paragraphs are long, and without any blank spaces Shange sometimes crafts; only the last few lines relieve some space.

we are born girls & live to be women who live our own lives/ to

live our lives/

to have/

our lives/

to live.

We’ve talked a lot in class about how her work often finds magic in the mundane. In this choreoessay, I’m curious whether the structure suggests that the mundane can also be suffocating and painful for a “girl-child” who has no control. Hope seems to live in the future of womanhood  (“we are born girls & live to be women who live our own lives”), a time when girls will have grown able to respond to the threat of their destinies. I’m struck by the slash between “to have” and “our lives”. I think back to Shange’s title/phrase “my pen is a machete”. My interpretation of the ending is that women have the tool to write the connection between having/owning their own lives.

Some questions I still have…in the choreoessay, Shange writes “for some of us & we go crazy/ or never go anyplace”…is crazy juxtaposed with anyplace? Can crazy be a place a person goes to? What does it mean to go crazy?

Immediate Cause: Obscene Questions and Chris Brown Sympathizers

by Michelle 2 Comments

Shange’s “with no immediate cause” in nappy edges is powerful and effective in ridiculing rape culture, wherein people downplay the horrible and frequent violences occurring to women.

For me, the structure of the poem in how it paces how I read it is most powerful. Accustomed to hearing grave statistics in speeches, commercials, and other daily mediums, I read,

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten

every five minutes a

woman is raped / every ten minutes

a lil girl is molested

slowly and with a great pause at the end of each statistic. Shange quickens my reading by following the statistics with a smooth narration of how she encounters these statistics daily in microagressive ways. By smooth I mean that these narrations can be read quickly and easily while still capturing fully what she is saying (which is definitely not always true with Shange’s work). Shange then repeats this sequence of reading pace by slowing down the reader through repeating the statistics and then quickening the reader’s pace through including another narration of violence against women. She repeats this process twice more with perhaps even more graphic instances of violence each time to indicate an overall speeding up in the poem. The height of her poem is reached with the following rhetorical questions,

before i ride the subway/buy a paper/drink

coffee/i must know/

have you hurt a woman today

did you beat a woman today

throw a child across a room

are the lil girl’s panties

in yr pocket

i have to ask these obscene questions

I can feel the urgency and desperation in her voice through these “obscene” questions. Especially in the context of patriarchy and rape culture where women are many times dismissed for their fears and the violences occurring to them, these questions are unsettling because they are both outrageous and familiar at the same time. Women have constantly expressed concern over these violences but are dismissed daily by the law, the media, and their community. Shange effectively draws the truth and gravity out of these violences through embedding these outrageous yet familiar concerns in the statistics and narrations.

Reading this poem reminded me of a Crunk Feminist Collective piece I read last year, titled “How Chris Brown is Effing Up My Sex Life: A B-Side to Dating While Feminist.” The author describes her internal conflict of having sexual and intimate relations with men who do not have the same intentional gender politics as she does. Specifically, she cites an instance where she found out that her partner was a Chris Brown sympathizer and therefore she had to reevaluate her standards. She grapples with the question,

Can you be a good feminist if you have intimate engagements with partners who have diametrically opposed gender politics?

This author uses the same tactic of narrating her relationship and other instances in her life where she had to confront this conflict and then climaxing with a series of outrageous yet familiar questions:

In a culture where sisters are dying in alarming numbers from domestic violence, what responsibility do I have to them and to myself to choose intimate partners whose thinking and actions are sound on these matters?

To what extent is and should my sex life be political?

I mean should I withhold sex from dudes with sexist attitudes as an act of solidarity with my sisters?

How can I get next to you if I can’t get next to your politics?

How can I let you touch me if I wouldn’t touch your politics with a ten foot pole?

Can I feel safe in the softness of your touch if you don’t feel led to question a culture where other men routinely touch other women violently?

Can we really cuddle if you have the option to not care about women and violence?

Isn’t that choice, the choice to not care about how the world affects the woman you’re spending time with, a violent one?

How can I trust you to hold me when your beliefs hold me down?

Having read “The Art of Transformation: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist Art Movements” by Lisa Gail Collins and therefore understanding the crucial role Shange played and continues to play in bridging the Black Power and Women’s Liberation movement for black women makes this even more relevant. The Crunk Feminist Collective author pays homage to the black women before her who also bridged these movements:

It wouldn’t be the first time that Black women withheld sex from Black men in service of larger racial interests. After the Civil War, Black men (but not Black women) could vote for a few brief years. Back then, most Black folks voted Republican as they were the more liberal party at the time and the party of Abraham Lincoln. But there were times when some Black men determined to vote Democrat so they wouldn’t be the target of white racial backlash. In addition to accompanying their men to the polls to monitor their votes, Black women banded together and encouraged each other to withhold sex from any man who voted against the community’s interests. These sisters knew how personal the political was long before white women said it. They knew that when it comes to Black women’s quality of life, there is nothing more political or personal than the person we’re sleeping with.

nappy edges was published in 1978, this article in 2011. Black women are still grappling with these internal conflicts today but we must show love to Shange for being a visionary of her time to vocalize the intersectionalities and realities of black women.