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It’s a Friday morning and most students from the class, “The Worlds of Ntozake Shange,” are gathered excitedly around a conference table. Ntozake Shange is before them, her hand loosely wrapped around a Diet Pepsi bottle on the table, her soft gaze scanning the room. Kim Hall, the professor of the class, motions to the student on her right to begin the two hour group discussion by sharing her motivations for taking the class. The student says that her older sister passed an old copy of For Colored Girls to her midway through high school and it changed her life. She thanks Shange, who responds with a surprised but proud, “you’re welcome.”

The rest of the class introductions happen in a similar fashion: each young woman thanks Shange after a personal anecdote about her first encounter with Shange’s writing, and to each Shange responds with a hint of laughter, as if it seems odd to her to accept that her writing’s influence on the young women of the room is a personal achievement.

This exchange between the students of the Africana Studies class and the author herself epitomizes Shange’s legacy. Although there is reward in scholarly analysis of her writing, Shange’s poetry, essays, and novels were first powerful in the quiet rooms of their readers; Shange’s writing was, for many, the first safe space for black, female voices. It was the first writing that was inclusive of an experience a black, female reader might have had, seen, or felt around her. The diversity, the audacity, and the authenticity of Shange’s writing is it’s resounding impact. In addition to providing a space for voices formerly squeezed out of literature, Shange widened the form of poetry itself with her invention of the choreopoem--an expression that fuses words with dance. For her readers--and, I think, for Shange, too--Shange’s writing means expansion. It means pushing into a space formerly occupied by white men and words on a page the sensation of movement and the voices of powerful, black women.   

Another student at the table mentions that she dropped her English major because she felt she could only find black women’s literature in the Africana Studies department. To this, Shange (a Barnard graduate) groans and says slowly, “I’m sorry to hear that.” The classroom is quiet for a second and buzzes with a sense of anger. This brings to light another aspect of Shange’s legacy--that it points to an effort that is still active and necessary. Shange, who still goes home and is inspired to write, still writes to infuse literature with diverse voices, and her readers still go to her writing, it seems, to find those voices.

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Ntozake Shange: Playwright, Poet, Performer - Education Update

Ntozake Shange, Barnard graduate, Class of ‘70 garnered an Obie for her 1974 play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.” She has also won Tony, Grammy, Emmy nominations, a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. She was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, NJ.

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My Life Unvarnished

“My life unvarnished was born of a double ambition. Firstly, I’ve always asked myself why every attempt to speak of one’s self resulted in a batch of half-truths. It would appear that human beings are so desirous of portraying an existence different than reality that they embellish it despite themselves. My life unvarnished should be considered an attempt to speak the truth, to discard the temptations of myth and flattering idealizations. It is also an attempt to describe the birth of the vocation of a writer. Is writing in fact a job? Why invent lives, why invent characters who have no direct relationship to reality? This is perhaps the most universal of all my books. I use the word universal purposely although I know it highly displeases some. Above all, it is the story of a woman’s search for happiness and the ideal companion while she deals with the difficulties of life. She is confronted with that crucial choice, still valid today, of either becoming a mother or choosing to exist only for herself.” -- Maryse Conde

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Maryse Conde on honesty through writing and the reactions to/ misunderstanding of her works

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Jamaica Kincaid got her real start in writing when William Shawn, editor at The New Yorker, published the short stories that were later to be collected as At the Bottom of the River, much to the chagrin of his fiction department. Three of these short stories were composed in a single sentence. Though she has been the target of much doubt (How dare the New Yorker publish the writing of an uncredentialed Antillean émigré?) and derision (Ann Tyler once called her work “almost insultingly obscure;” Kincaid’s response: “and I think your books are almost insultingly clear”) Jamaica Kincaid will continue to be anthologized amongst great names, and will be taught in classrooms to our children and their children.

“Race.” I really can’t understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both “black” and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can’t take them seriously… The people who invented race, who grouped us together as “black,” were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong… They ought to be left with the tawdriness of it, the stupidity of it. It’s a way of organizing a wrong thing, it’s a way of making a wrong thing easy.

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“She never feels the necessity of claiming the existence of a black world or a female sensibility. She assumes them both. I think it's a distinct departure that she's making, and I think that more and more black American writers will assume their world the way that she does. So that we can get beyond the large theme of racism and get to the deeper themes of how black people love and cry and live and die. Which, after all, is what art is all about.”

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on Jamaica Kincaid

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Albert, a skilled interviewer and writer, was able to convey on paper the powerful recollections of these former slaves. The interviews in the book, recorded over 15 years after the end of slavery, documented vivid accounts of harsh treatment towards Louisiana slaves and the negative effects on the livelihood of former slaves after their emancipation. In the article, “A Beautiful Black Mind: Octavia V. Rogers Albert” Ajuan Mance stated that Albert’s  goal in creating this volume was to “correct and to create history”; and the emotional stories of the several former slaves portrayed in her book serve as a powerful challenge to the revisionist nostalgia of the period’s more dominant plantation tradition.

It was shortly after her death in 1890 that the New Orleans-based Methodist Episcopal Church newspaper, the “Southwestern Christian Advocate” serialized the work from January to December 1890. The House of Bondage then became one of the first collections of the stories and memories of former enslaved people.

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Actress Janet League and actress/playwright Ntozake Shange in the original stage version of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1977).

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Yes, child; for when I first got religion I did not want to hurt an ant. Every thing was love, joy, and peace with me. I sometimes think my people don’t pray like they used to in slavery. You know when any child of God get trouble that’s the time to try their faith. Since freedom it seems my people don’t trust in the Lord as they used to.

From The House of Bondage by 

Octavia V. Rogers Albert

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“Liberdade! Liberdade... ah! Eu a gozei na minha mocidade!” "Liberty! Liberty… ah! I enjoyed it in my youth!"

From Úrsula, translated.

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“The language in which I write is not French, nor is it Creole.  I say this often, it is a language that is mine. I write in Maryse Conde”

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“People often ask me for whom am I writing. The answer is I am writing for myself. I write about slavery, Africa, the condition of black people throughout the world because I want to order my thoughts, to understand the world, and to be at peace with myself. I write to try to find answers to the questions I ask myself. Writing for me is a type of therapy, a way to be safe and sound.”

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Ntozake Shange imagines her poetry to be an experience that is not restricted to the page--it lives in a dimension that is thick with words, movement, and sound. Throughout the last decade, the lively, physical world of Shange’s poetry has become strained by a neurological disorder called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, which has gradually taken control of her hands and feet. In the following article, a New York Times writer attends Shange’s 65th birthday party and describes the effects this disorder has had on her writing process.  

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“Agora Tulio daria todo o seu sangue para poupar ao mancebo uma dor sequer, o mais leve pesar; a sua gratidão não conhecia limites. A liberdade era tudo quando Tulio aspirava; tinha-a —era feliz!” "Now Tulio would give his blood to save the boy [who bought his freedom] from any pain, or even the slightest inconvenience; his gratitude knew no limits. Liberty was all Tulio aspired to; He now had it- he was happy!”

From Úrsula, translated.