Playwright & Poet Extraordinaire: Ntozake Shange
It is hard to contain the work of Ntozake Shange (Oct 18, 1948 – Oct 27, 2018) on the page, and it is because her life, and radical art, refused any kind of containment. Although she is most known for her ‘choreopoem’, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf, her genre-bending, rule-breaking style extended to other endeavours in poems, essays, short stories, music, editing, education, directing and scholarship. She broke new frontiers in theatre and other art forms.
Born to an Air Force surgeon father and an educator/psychiatric social worker mother, Ntozake (born Paulette Linda Williams) was exposed to an artistic life from a young age, with guests like Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and W. E. B. Du Bois, frequenting their home. In 1956, Ntozake attended a non-segregated school and experienced a lot of racism, which her life’s work tackles. While earning her MA degree, she took on her African names which mean “she who comes with her own things” and she “who walks like a lion.” Ntozake was a self-described ‘Afrocentrist’ who believed in a Pan-Africanism that celebrates the cross-cultural riches of the diaspora.
Ntozake was praised, and criticized, for the nonconformity of her spellings and punctuations, the rebellion of her language. In a world full of violence and oppression, her language embodied the contradictions and multiplicity of an Afro-American life. It has been said often that Ntozake’s words begged to be read, to be performed, to be experienced. Her poetry broke conventions of written English; her choreopoems blended poetry, drama, prose, and autobiography. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf used female dancers to dramatize poems, showing how women who survived abuse and disillusions, identify futures within each other.
Ntozake’s work explored black food, how food was a connection beyond categories, what meals black Americans can use to celebrate themselves, and celebrate that rich diaspora. Her novel Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo (1982) contained recipes, and in her book, If I Can Cook You Know God Can (1999), she writes: “the restitution of okra’s reputation is one of my projects.” The latter is a collection of essays that travels from table to table, tables of African Americans, Nicaraguans, Londoners, Barbadians, Brazilians, and Africans. She writes on, “I refuse to allow our own people to reject an Africanism that is not inanimate or residual. Okra is one of our living ties to the motherland. In celebration I might make me a parade or an Okra Day/Are You Black or Not?”
Ntozake said she wrote for “young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive.” And although she went on to receive many honours and awards (from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, Tony and Obie awards), her exaltation of, representation of, and conversation with, black culture will be referenced and applauded for many generations to come.
CC Photo: "File:Ntozake Shange, Reid Lecture, Women Issues Luncheon, Women's Center, November 1978 Crisco edit.jpg" by Barnard College; digitally restored by Chris Woodrich is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
