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Beyonce broke the Internet on Sunday with a super futuristic, multimedia, high energy performance of “Run the World (Girls)” at the 2011 Billboard Awards. She also may have shut up all the haters, myself included.
I heard the song when it first dropped and not only did I tune it out as analgesic, monotonous refuse my iPod would chew up and spit out in disgust, but the lyrics themselves hit my radar as pretty damn problematic. Or at least the ones that aren’t the hook…which is most of the song…
This post continues a week-long meditation on Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreo-poem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Tyler Perry’s 2010 feature film of the same name. For the full series follow the tag sing a black girl song. NOTE: The tag for posts specific to this Nunez Daughter series has changed. Since the movie’s release, the global conversation has deepened by tens and hundreds, all using the for colored girls tag. But the ND series is still tagged for colored girls: click either and join the conversation….
Prologue:
worlds like words for a woman who is a poet and
a mother are confusing/overlapping contradictory
fatigue & exciting. between diapers, the park, the
telephone conversations with e.t. and the dollhouse
which had to be a plantation house where little black babies
rest and play between my poems. my incomplete thoughts.
thoughts i never find the ends of: lose threads on dresses, in
my soul there lies a quiet that sleeps out in the night
after the last bottle and the last dried dish. somewhere
between the unfinished books i am dying to read.
among the letters to friends i cant finish. there
is a quiet that booms and presses me out of my bed. out of my tiredness
and sense of complete isolation from all the rest of
you. they are here in this book. i see no evil. i am
fighting demons in the dark and the energies of a free spirit
who must know
this world will do its best to take from her all she is unless she is
willing to struggle as she struggles with me for the right to see.
This post continues a week-long meditation on Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreo-poem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Tyler Perry’s 2010 feature film of the same name. For the full series follow the tag sing a black girl song. NOTE: The tag for posts specific to this Nunez Daughter series has changed. Since the movie’s release, the global conversation has deepened by tens and hundreds, all using the for colored girls tag. But the ND series is still tagged for colored girls: click either and join the conversation….
i keep wanting to get to the angry post. life gets in the way. but maybe something, someone is telling me to stay focused….
***
but the something is not Shange. because that’s another thing. for once–thank god–we are dealing with a living legend:
i wonder if she ever wishes we would all just get past for colored girls. wonders if we will ever look at the rest of her catalogue–her poems, her essays, her novels, her other plays, her word paintings–or if we will continue to circle, magnify, even deify this one work.
There is a specific purpose I have for doing this, when I did it, with whom I did it. Because at this stage in my career I need to open my audience not to shut it down.
ordinary
brown braided woman
with big legs & full lips
reglar
seriously intendin to finish her
night’s work
This post continues a week-long meditation on Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreo-poem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Tyler Perry’s 2010 feature film of the same name. For the full series follow the tag sing a black girl song. NOTE: The tag for posts specific to this Nunez Daughter series has changed. Since the movie’s release, the global conversation has deepened by tens and hundreds, all using the for colored girls tag. But the ND series is still tagged for colored girls: click either and join the conversation….
A choreopoem, the Secret Sister Society Network reminded me. Not just a poem, but a choreopoem.
Ah. Yes.
But what does that mean?
***
And this is how it begins.
In the university library. Searching for Shange. A walk down her aisle and titles pop out at me:
ntozake shange. the love space demands
ntozake shange. see no evil
ntozake shange. a daughter’s geography
ntozake shange. ridin’ the moon in texas
ntozake shange. sassafrass, cypress & indigo
I find a book on Black Arts Movement woman poets. And my heart stops. Beside it is:
lisa sánchez gonzález. boricua literature: a literary history of the Puerto Rican diaspora
I am following Library of Congress subject headings:
lester a. neal. ntozake shange: a critical study of the plays
This is what happens when you look.
Arms full of books. I want to eat them all. Especially the ones written by Shange. But I leave three or four. Don’t want to deprive others of the pleasure of her company. After all, I’m not alone.
***
i begin with Cheryl Clarke & i remember what captivated me about the choreopoem’s title in the first place:
Colored girl :: Third World woman :: colonized machete sugar cane tobacco growing mountain woman :: indigenous blooded slave born woman :: black & Puerto rican woman :: all around brown bodied hot sex positive feminist woman
i’m a poet who writes in english
come to share the words with you
the movie/play didn’t mention black girls who spoke Spanglish when English is enuf.
This post continues a week-long meditation on Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreo-poem, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Tyler Perry’s 2010 feature film of the same name. For the full series follow the tag sing a black girl song. NOTE: The tag for posts specific to this Nunez Daughter series has changed. Since the movie’s release, the global conversation has deepened by tens and hundreds, all using the for colored girls tag. But the ND series is still tagged for colored girls: click either and join the conversation….
There are texts you encounter because you happened to pay attention in class that day. Others fall in your lap courtesy of good friends and stupid enemies. The few great ones are placed in your hands by God herself.
I can’t hear anythin but maddening screams & the soft strains of death & you promised me you promised me… somebody/ anybody sing a black girl’s song bring her out to know herself to know you
When I first met for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, I was a thirsty undergraduate, searching for something that would help me make sense to myself. I use the full title above because part of me hovered on the silver edge of suicide/insanity/lost wonder. We forget–for black girls, the very air we breathe is toxic. The violence of our silence, our erasure, is a cancer that eats our bodies whole from the inside out. Acting out, bitter back talk, a roll of the eye perfectly timed to make you feel 2 feet tall–lazy weapons we wield against a miasma of racialized tropes already configuring what can be seen, who we might be. We commit suicide everyday without knowing it then keep moving, walking dead, zombies & shadows.
We see our days stretch forward, a half-life with no point and no end. By twelve years old we are already tired of the same old shit.
I was young-tired by the time I stumbled across Shange. A choreopoem? I asked my self. Are you serious?
I devoured the text.
For an apprentice wordsmith preoccupied with the kinetics of language, with the chemical reactions a misplaced “wench,” “black bitch,” or “quadroon” cause, Shange’s text is pure alchemy.
for colored girls took the written word with all of its racist and sexist significations, made it speak. It took the spoken word with all of its unseen and multi-tonal meanings and music and wrestled it through the chests and out of the mouths of seven black women–an act of death and resurrection.
sing a black girl’s song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you
When you leave the text, you know yourself. The world no longer excludes you, because you are the center of it and the view from your front yard reveals the human as a guise, a farce you’ve simultaneously exploded and reshaped in your own image, giving birth to a new form.
Could this, I wondered, be translated onto the big screen? Could black womanhood giving birth to herself be confined to a narrative structure, be tied to the visual impact of real black female bodies, retain its poetry, confront stereotypes and assumptions (and fear and pain and coping-silence and coping-anger and shame), dialogue with tropes and trauma and conflict while still handling the griot call?
Yes. It can. It was. Full bodied women appeared on the screen and for two hours I fell back in love with myself and with movies and with black women who fight to be whole beings never mind the work we do in our own minds to diminish them, to bring them low.
But let’s not forget–
it is the poem that made the movie.
& it is Shange who saves Tyler Perry from himself.
It has
been years
since the colored girl in me
(sitting idly at the base of my spine)
sat up and took notice
inhaled sweat, spit, shit smells from the floor
the walls
but this time
without choking
metabolizing just enuf
to slam eyes wide open
and
dared notice the way
fleshy pockets of
distrust
& self-destruct
gathered at the corners of her eyes,
swelled beneath fingertips
worn clean by
day to day
metaphysical struggle
with unseen foe
empathized with the
heat in her chest
and in wiping her own brow gently
let bloom another world
behind her ribcage
let herself be marked–
full
wet
(unfinished)
& whole.
