leadership. One that thrives as a beautiful entanglement of sorts shared between artistic colleagues and is
crafted of resilient tools critical to articulating creative integrity and expressions of personal character and
systems of beliefs. “Later on I sought out language that somehow echoed inarticulate impulses I lived with,”
Shange contends, “in the same way I watched Carmen de Lavallade’s body make sense of an irrational
vicious place I was supposed to pledge allegiance to everyday.” 6
In truth, Shange’s most compelling personal, creative and political characterizations of how to manage and
be outraged by the demands of a “vicious place” in context with an artist’s embodiment of fluidity, freedom
and resistance, enables each of us, to mine those similar risks on a daily basis. She taught us that to impart
empathy one must also know the precariousness of emancipation.
Thank you Ntozake Shange for your ability, perhaps your explicit intention, to provide Black women artists,
if not all attentive, creative seekers across the rainbows, the gift of recovering our most authentic selves.
Ashe.
1 Shange,
Ntozake.
- Lost in Language and Sound - or how I found my way to the arts. St. Martins Press: New York, 2011.
- For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, 1975.
2 Sprague, Joey. Feminist Methodologies for Critical Researchers: Bridging differences. Walnut Creek, CA;
Lanham, MD: Rowaman & Littlefield, AltaMira, 2005 (45).
3 Shange, Ibid. (Lost…)
4 “What-is-black-girl-magic-video_n_5694dad4e4b086bc1cd517f4.
5 Shange,, Ibid (Lost…11-12).
6 “Ibid 4.
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