For the past few years, a photograph has circulated on social media of a Black women’s writing group from the 1970s called the Sisterhood. Pictured are the writers Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, Louise Meriwether, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Alice Walker, Audrey Edwards, June Jordan, and Toni Morrison—all the current patron saints of literary culture, before they were anointed, when they were working artists.
“They weren’t brands, and they weren’t celebrities.”
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Listen for the voices of your visions; they are nearby. Remember that you are a river; your banks are red honey where the moon wanders.
Ntozake Shange, from Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo
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Ntozake Shange, from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
[Text ID: “i found god in myself / & i loved her/ i loved her fiercely”]
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"i cdnt stand bein sorry & colored at the same time/ it's so redundant in the modern world."
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, Ntozake Shange
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Courtney Thorsson, The Sisterhood. How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture, Columbia University Press, New York, NY, 2023
Cover Art: June Jordan, on far right, with Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, Vertamae Grosvenor and others, The Sisterhood, 1977 [Inscription: Verso, front row left to right: Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, possibly Louise Meriwether; back row left to right: Vertamae Grosvenor, Alice Walker, possibly Louise Meriwether, Toni Morrison, June Jordan] [June Jordan Papers. Folder ‘Jordan with others, 1977-1999’, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA]
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a trinidadian woman
tells me a hot-blooded man
dances like slow winds
in haitian halls/
Ntozake Shange
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“& this is for colored girls who have considered suicide/ but are movin to their own rainbows”
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"Where there is a woman there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort of the spirits"
- Ntozake Shange, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo
Darkness Manifesting by The Phantom Painte
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Indigo seldom spoke. There was a moon in her mouth. Having a moon in her mouth kept her laughing.
from Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo by Ntozake Shange
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✨beyond the pines homestead✨
🏹🌲🏡
the American Indian way of community, harvest, & breaking bread 🍞
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Ntozake Shange, from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf
[Text ID: “you were always inconsistent / doin somethin & then bein sorry / beatin my heart to death”]
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for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Ntozake Shange
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if we’ve gotta live underground and everybody’s got cancer/ will poetry be enuf? // Eisa Davis to Ntozake Shange
dear ntozake,
I got sacks of mercury under the skin beneath my eyes
either cried too much or i’m abt to
the cool war’s burnin up my retina again
does poetry start where life ends?
i know i’m supposed to be cool:
i wear corrective lenses that feature
high definition tragedy.
baby in the dumpster ethnic cleansing
assassinations multinational mergers
i’m supposed to shake my head
write a poem
believe in ripples.
but i ain’t cool.
i emit inhuman noises
i imagine terrorist acts as i flick my imaginary ash
onto the imaginary tray
i imagine going insane with a purpose
and writing it down feels sorta unnecessary
does poetry end where life begins?
berkeley girl black girl red diaper baby
born of the blood of the struggle
but with reaganomics and prince pickin up steam in ‘81
nothing came between me and my calvins
10 yrs old unpressed hair playin beethoven
readin madeleine l’engle got scared in my pants when i heard
this girl testifying ‘TOUSSAINT’
in the black repertory group youth ensemble
i was just sittin in a rockin chair pretendin to be 82
and talkin like I knew all bout langston’s ‘rivers’
i wasn’t as good as her
and i definitely wadn’t cool
so i gave up drama
and decided to bake soufflés
zake
you wda beat me up in the playground
if we’da grown up together
and you did
eighth grade ‘he dropped em’
at the regional oratorical competition
i saw another fly honey rip it
this time it’s ‘a nite with beau willie brown’
i was bleedin on the ground
i became yours
no more soufflés
i jacked for colored girls right off my mama’s shelf
my mama fania who was sweatin with you
and raymond sawyer and ed mock
and halifu osumare
dancin on the grass back in the day
in you i found a groove
never knew i had one like that
did that monologue over and over
alone in my room
my bunk bed the proscenium arch
13 yrs old screamin and cryin abt my kids
gettin dropped out a window
didn't know a damn thing about rivers
but i knew abt my heart fallin five stories
you were never abbreviated or lower case to me
you just pimped that irony
that global badass mackadocious funkology
you not only had hígado
you had ben-wa balls in yr pussy
betsey brown on my godmother's couch
nappy edges in mendocino at the mouth of big river
spell #7 after the earthquake in silverlake
the love space demands had to be in brooklyn
yr poems are invitations to live in yr body
love letters yr admirers dream they coulda written themselves
no one cd find a category that was yr size
blackety black but never blacker than thou
you teased me into sassiness when i had none to speak of
made profane into sacred but never formed a church
sanctified women's lives
whether we were reading nietzsche or a box of kotex
we were magical and regular
you many-tongued st louis woman of barnard and barcelona
you left us the residue of yr lust
left us to wander life as freely as sassafrass cypress and indigo
and even the unedumacated could get yr virtuosity
cuz you always fried it up in grease
you built an aqueduct from lorraine hansberry's groundwater
and it bubbled straight to george c wolfe
you never read what the critics said
and you scrunched up the flesh between yr eyebrows
like everybody else in my family
but zake
is poetry enuf?
i beg the question cuz you grew me up
you and adrienne kennedy and anna deavere smith
and all my mothers
you blew out the candles on my 26th
so when there's mercury under the skin beneath my eyes
and the world ain't so cool
do you write a poem
or a will?
like leroi jones said if bessie smith had killed some white people
she wouldn't have needed that music
so do we all write like amiri baraka does
or do we all get our nat turner on?
i beg the question cuz i wanna get my life right
do some real work
and i really don't want to kill any white folk
i mean can we talk abt this
maybe it's just my red diaper that's itchin
but i still got that will to uplift the race
sans bootstraps or talented tenths or paper bag tests
this time we uplift the human race
and i know the rainbow might be
but is poetry enuf?
it's a naive question but i'm old enuf to ask them once in a while
if we do finally unload the canon
clean it out
stock up on some more colorful balls
ain't we only gettin the ones that are available at a store near you?
doesn't the market end up setting the new standards anyway?
is poetry enuf if it ain't sellin?
if ain't nobody readin it?
can poetry keep a man who can't read
from droppin his kids out a window?
and how can i call a ceasefire to this cool war
in stanzas of eights
when we've declared poetry a no fly zone?
we have learned to protect it and its potential politics
like a mother
shoot down anyone who might overdetermine a poem's meaning
(while we poets divebomb everyone else's politics with impunity
like we're the United States or something)
if poetry is just poetry
we save it from the conservatives
but doesn't that mean it's of no use to the progressives?
is poetry enuf?
cuz that's all i'm doin.
makin up stories on stage on the page
keepin the beat
and that's all my friends are doin
and that's what a lot of folks my age are doin
but if we've gone and burnt up everything in the sky
if there's nothin else to eat but landfill stroganoff
if we've gotta live underground and everybody's got cancer
will poetry be enuf?
my aunt angela says i can do my thang
and keep swinging left hooks to oppression
if i stay up stay into it stay involved
just one form of praxis will do.
it's just my guilt that thinks i need twenty-two
what's enuf?
shouldn't i (or somebody) be our secular bodhisattva
become a real power player but skip the talk show
can't we stabilize, rekindle collectives
and cooperatives and collaborations
therapeutic communities that double
as creative juggernauts
a publishing house a theatre where the plays
cost less than the movies
get the neighborhood coven back together
take dance breaks in the cubicles
sing until the flourescent lights burst into snow
i ask you because you changed me zake
you changed thousands of women
and i know poetry can't be enuf if you drunk
i ain't tryin ta walk off wid alla yr stuff
and i got nuttin but love for ya
so that's why i gotta know
i'm sittin on my bed encircled by every book
you've ever published
they're open like fans
marking pages with the flint of genius
all i want is for this circle to grow
so tell me:
is this where poetry and life are twins?
i felt so crumpled up when i started writing you
poetry seemed so useless and dingy
next to all the bright red bad news
but now that the poem is over i feel wide open
like an infant of the spring just tell me how
to feed this light
to my responsibilities
and poetry just might be enuf
love
eisa
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Ntozake Shange, October 18, 1948 / 2023
Image: Ntozake Shange, New York City, 1976 [«Time». Photo: © AP/Shutterstock]
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