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The Worlds of Ntozake ShangeAND DIGITAL STORYTELLING

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a practice in being present: a reflection on the Healing Justice Shange Event

by Johnson 1 Comment

Something I’ve been in deep rumination about this year is the amount of time I spend outside of the present in my daily life. A Pisces child, I’ve always been prone to dissociation from my reality into lands of my own creation. However, as college became a more tangible part of my life, I find myself so often preoccupied with anxiety-ridden thoughts of the future that I often fail to be properly present in spaces. This lack of consistent presence only hinders me from properly acknowledging and addressing issues that arise in my life in real time, and I am left often in rumination of particular life events weeks and sometimes even months later. This delay in my experiencing of self, has filled me with much consternation of recent especially as I get older and further develop and explore parts of myself. 

This semester, however, I’ve begun to realize the acute importance and power in presence and have taken measures to intentionally include practices that allow me to feel completely within a space. What made the “Emergency Care of Wounds That Cannot Be Seen: Healing Justice & Ntozake Shange” event such a transformative and healing moment for me was  how present everyone was, and was allowed to be. Although it was about reflecting, honoring, and thanking Ms. Shange for what she has contributed to our individual and collective lives, I find that it was as much about us as it was about her. The configuration of the room being a collection of chairs placed in a circle surrounding Shange’s altar, emphasized that it was just as much about seeing and appreciating her as much as it seeing each other, experiencing these moments as a collective. Within their expressions of gratitude to Shange, Cara Page, Ebony Noelle Golden, and Tiffany Lenoi Jones brought so much life into the space, while also challenging us to interrogate our positionalities and the ways in which it influences the amounts of space we feel entitled to take up. They stood to remind us that the words and impacts of Shange belong just as much to us as it does to them, and we shouldn’t fear the things that may arise in our spirits when in Western academic spaces. Although I find it a difficult and jarring feat to express myself and feelings whenever I feel them arise within the confines of this institution, I do value the reminder that I am allowed to take up as much space as possible.

A particular statement that I took away from this event that I feel is applicable not only to this course but the larger trajectory of my life’s work, was Ebony’s statement in regard to Shange, “I am a daughter of her imagination.” In a world where Black Women were habitually misunderstood, compartmentalized, oversimplified, and violated, Shange saw our inherent value and created worlds where we are central, multidimensional, human, and HEARD. It is in that acknowledgment and insistence on making sure through writing that we know that we are heard and not alone that her indelible impact lies. 

Since coming to college, I’ve stopped writing poetry as much as I used to. What used to be an outlet for me to interrogate my feelings in real time, and allow myself moments of presence, had almost completely disappeared. However, last night I felt not only mobilized but that it was some sort of duty of mine to chronicle my thoughts and experiences in writing, if not for the healing of others, for the healing of myself. As Suzan Lori-Parks stated in her play, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, “You should write it down because if you don’t write it down then they will come along and tell the future that we did not exist” (243). We exist, and we are inherently valuable and have a duty to remind and heal ourselves if not through writing through collective gathering, and it was this event that drove this point in for me.

 

Thank you Professor Hall and Professor Miller. Thank you Vani Natarajan. Thank you Cara Page, Ebony Noelle Golden, and Tiffany Lenoi Jones. Thank you members of the Shange Worlds Healing Committee. And most of all Thank you Ms. Shange for all of your efforts in making sure we are seen, heard, and can heal.

 

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.

expressions of mind/body in response to external voices

by Sophia 1 Comment

“who is setting these priorities?” and “advice” revealed a facet of Shange to me that was almost more (or at least differently) vulnerable than her work I had previously read.

One of the most defining features of her writing to me has always been the confidence with which she makes art, defines herself as an artist, and transitions between mediums so fluidly that the lines between them are called into question. This, just as much as her characteristic syntax, has always been, as she named it in “takin a solo/ a poetic possibility/ a poetic imperative”, “the particular flow of [her] certain somebody.”

The syntax of “who is setting these priorities?” and “advice” immediately inform you that they will be something different than her usual descending stanzas. They look like prose and read more like a rant, inner monologue, or even a conversation, and deal with an anxiety about writing, performing, and simply living that the powerful self or extension-of-self that speaks in most of her work never questions.

The primary question of “who is setting these priorities?” is “What in the hell am I supposed to do with my body every day?”
The primary question of “advice” is “What in the hell am I supposed to do with my mind?”
They are both in response to external noise; in the former: media-noises and existential smallness, in the latter: the “them” of every artist –who make you feel like an alien and are always asking when you’re going to get a real job.

These poems investigate and meld the mind-body question that Shange is always responding to. “who is setting these priorities?” speaks of physical inhibition instead of physical freedom, which is another departure from what I perceive to be her typical approach. The poem is an anxious accumulation of maladies: “today the cosmos satellite fell down over uranium city”, “4 or 3 million american women who take the pill & smoke are 10 times more likely to have heart attacks than women who don’t take the pill or smoke”, “the wilmington 10 are still in jail. there’s only one woman’s survival house in brooklyn.” Instead of describing her physical self as a way to free her from these stresses, she implies that they build up in her –knots that can only loosen with itches:

“i like to fuck. i’m too nervous not to smoke. no one likes to eat pussy if you wear a diaphragm…i need a cigarette cuz this is just too much for me. plus there are women who actually find sex boring/ me/ i’m gonna have a heart attack.”

“advice” takes the opposite to the same problem; it speaks of body inhibiting mind rather than mind halting body. It opens and closes with the mention of the bodies of those who are giving her advice:

“people keep tellin me to put my feet on the ground i get mad and scream/ there is no ground”
“i am gonna write poems til i die & when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind & knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground”

In this case, her physical limitations are not the center of the conversation so much as the others’ are, who are have such tunnel-vision that they can’t acknowledge the preciousness of her lifeblood, and “[can’t] read or understand english anymore” to the point where it makes her feel like “the last survivor of a crew from mars”.

The response to the vulnerability in the two poems synthesizes why Shange must do her work. When everyone is telling her she can’t be a poet, her black body writes for her: “cartwheel and somersault down pages outta my mouth come visions distilled like bootleg whiskey” When there are too many problems, too much noise, and too many voices, she opens another show after the one that just closed, keeps fucking and taking the pill, and catching the 8:00am train.