Bucking Generational Scripts: Black Women on Life, Love, Sex, Relationships & Marriage Bucking Generational Scripts: Black

Women on Life, Love, Sex, Relationships & Marriage

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

When there is Woman, there is Magic

Ntozake Shange Over the past one hundred years, Black Women have written themselves into the forgotten pages of a maledominated society and literary world. They have written about how this power constricts their intersections of simultaneously being Black and Woman. Ntozake Shange writes from this perspective. Her literary work begets a consciousness of Black contemporary femininity in a society that crosses many genres: Playwriting, Novelist, Poet and Essayist. In the celebration of her name and all that Shange represents, Black Women in Philly have come together to create a Sisters circle/literary group entitled the Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought. Our cirle is a safe space where Black Women can be subversive and recover ourselves with words in the form of reading, writing and critical analyses through verbal dialogue. It is our hope that, Ntozake School of Literary Thought will be a place where Black Women can (re)affirm each other to heal many of the wounds that are inflicted by racism, sexism, classism, and homophobic views through our collective narratives. This is our seond year of the Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought and the second edition of our zine. In an writing exercise led by our Sista Diata, we decided to

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

write from the perspectives/voices of the elder women in our lives: our mothers, grannies, aunties, cousins, sisters, who influenced us, specifically with their views, opinions, and values pertaining to life, love, sex, and relationships/marriage. We wanted to know how these views/stories influenced Black Women today. What were the genders scripts that they consciously or unconsciously gave to us as a young girl? How have we followed these scripts? How have we moved away from these same scripts to carve out your own story around these same issues (life, love, sex, relationships/marriages)? Thanks to all the Sistas who contributed to the making of this zine, and Sis. Soraya Jean-Louise for allowing us to use her artwork for our beautiful cover and thanks to all the Sistas who bought magic to the Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought this summer
-Iresha Picot

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

This zine is dedicated to the Sistas of the Sistahood (Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, June Jordan, Lori Sharpe, and Audrey Edwards) who knew it was special to sit in a circle and create among other Black Women.

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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

Contributors Kimya Imani Jackson hails from Atlanta, Georgia. She is an artist and scientist hybrid. As a dancer, performance artist, new choreographer, experienced gerontologist, and a budding screendance (film/video for dance) practitioner she has been exposed to and explored all the ways the human body moves in various settings. Additionally, she evaluates medical professional and teaches silent meditation to beginners. Diata Jones a teacher, aspiring novelist, and long time poet. She is from Maryland, loves nature and traveling. One day soon, she will pack her things and live somewhere faraway and sunny. LadiSasha Jones describes her work as archival artistry centered within Black narratives, home stories, and community histories. While currently studying at NYU Tisch School of Art as a MA candidate in Art Politics, she hopes to develop her skills in film and photography to further merge her interests in visual art expression with her documentation practices. In her down time, Ladi'Sasha enjoys traveling, women writer's circles, French and Nigerian cinema, and cooking.

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

Soraya Jean-Louis McElroy is a Haitian born, New York and Brooklyn raised mixed media artist. Her love of black womyn, black families and the African Diaspora are important central themes in her creative process. Soraya's anti-oppressive framework and commitment to facilitating healing through art-tivism has been strengthened by her work as a health educator, doula, community organizer, mentor, youth counselor and African folklore story-teller. "I'm not a formally trained artist- my experiences, ideas, dreams for my people and Afro-Caribbean-ness have given me valuable skills to explore and express what's in my heart- that's the best training to me..just loving and embracing my whole black womyn self and presenting my truth/s to the world." Tunisia M. Owens works as an education specialist and youth advocate in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. She is committed to the cause of domestic human trafficking. Prior to her youth development work in California, Tunisia worked as a diplomat for the U.S. government and served in Africa and the Middle East. Tunisia currently resides in California where she is the proud mother of a two-year-old daughter.
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

Mama Soraya Jean-louis McElroy mama has no sword no gun no rope no whip to slice shoot tie beat these thuggish ghouls off her back they chew and gnaw and feed off her beauty those weapons only hurt a lil' no way mama got something more for her and us she got a black power smile full lips sun kissed skin breast that bloom milk to feed love of self
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Iresha Picot, M.Ed, is a proud southern Black feminist, currently residing in Philly and grassing her roots as a Prison Abolitionist, a practicing photographer, a newly trained Doula, and book lover. She loves to create and has mothered many projects such as Summer for the Sistas, Zami: Sistography Collective, the Assatas Daughters Project and Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought. Shanika Thomas is a 29 year-old school teacher from Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A in Childhood Education and is looking forward to doing her Master's in Women/Gender Studies with a concentration in Africana Studies. She is currently residing in Copperas Cove, Texas.

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herstory not written in books hands that lovingly caress away our pain Daughter Love Scripts LadiSasha Jones Mom Now you listen here little woman of the future I have a few things you should know as you get older you not a little girl nomore so I have to talk to you different about this stuff First, I want you to know that oral stuff is nasty some dont even do it to dey husbands better yet some lil boyfriend you hear me Masturbation is best cause its safe and I dont mind you doin it my house. So when you feeling them lil feelings you bout to start getting, just go in the bathroom and handle your business okay Marriage is okay too. just try to pickem right You dont wanna be draggin in any ole thing Especially somebody weak

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

Cause aint nothing worse than having to take care a weak man You listening my lil grown up Bama O sex. Sex is good Yeah its alright and it works sometimes, but a baby reelsem in best Marriage is okay if you get there, but dont be all looking for love. I learned there aint no good mens out there baby and love dont exist no where but in dem books on that there shelf All you can do is try to pick one thats right for you and your dealings Otherwise youll be left with his kids and the babies from the next all alone Grandma What? Sex. Thats for the hot ones not a Jones woman like you, no Just letem chase you and you take what you need but never open your legs for no lil snot nose you hear me Our women dont have to, nope. Unless you want to and then thats a whole nother thing It may be fun at the time but youll learn when youre left with a few brats And marriage, forget about it.
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

You from a long line of women who dont love. We tough men dont like that so you gotta pickem right Dont take his shit and learn to fight I tried to teach cha when you were young Maybe now youll listen Auntie 1 Honey, these four grown kids and diploma I got should teach you something about sex and men Marriage is okay I guess but I aint never been down that road Got close once but you cant trust no man girl Life aint about grand gestures If Ive learned anything it would be to never get too comfortable with love unless you wanna grow old with dissapointment Auntie 2 My pretty girl, just loveem and leaveem alone Be a fighter and a independent lover especially when youre young Just know that you may get soft with age and you may marry But try not to lose all your spark Them men like to take away your spark dont let them

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

I feel like I am forgetting to tell you something Tunisia M. Owens My great grandmother Stella and her sisters beat a stove into tiny pieces when they were my age. They took whatever tools were handy and beat that stove until there was nothing left. My great aunts husband had refused to buy a new stove claiming that the old one still worked; well, he was no match for this group of very determined sisters. They had a meeting and decided that the old stove had to go and they were going to give it a proper burial. This and other acts of conscious resistance by these warrior women were passed along through the oral history of my family. Long before it was en vogue to declare oneself a feminist, my foremothers began a quiet struggle against the power structures in place that impeded their growth and freedom as women.

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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

I inherited that spirit of resistance from my Granny, Stella, and so it was my destiny to be both an advocate and activist. It was never a question of choice with me if I would be a Black feminist, the only choice was whether I would declare it so. Before I could speak well enough to articulate my displeasure with the isms racism, sexism, ageism, heterosexism, classism, etc- I felt the weight of being a Black woman living in poverty. Granny - the latent feminist- frequently expressed her own wisdom about how women had to be creative in accessing power to achieve their goals. Always one to speak truth, she proclaimed upon being asked why she had married so late, I never wanted to get married, I only got married to get out of my fathers house and away from his unfair treatment of us girls. Through her acts of resistance, Granny showed me how to use the systems in place, however
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

imbalanced, to my own advantage. I would never measure up to proscribed social rules, but I was born with everything I needed to be successful in this world, in her eyes. Her life taught me to stand up, be strong, and advocate for myself. My other great grandmother, Ruth, was a wise and astute business woman. She was a Black share-cropper and migrant farm laborer with her husband and ten children. Big Mama- her name in the family- was not an educated woman in the formal sense, but she knew business and had a memory for numbers. She took advantage of the credit system at the farm store in order to feed her family before they received payment for the harvest. After a few seasons she recognized the cycle of poverty and financial abuse associated with credit. She told her family in no uncertain terms, Yall this season is gonna be hard, we gotta pay off this here man
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

and then we aint buying nothing else unless we can pay for it. With great determination Big Mama paid off that store credit and never took on any other debt for the rest of her life. These stories of her great business mind, her determination, and her perseverance also made it into the oral history of my family. She too was a latent feminist who actively resisted the roles relegated to an undereducated poor Black woman. Big Mama instructed her sons and daughters on matters of business, including using all their talents to earn multiple incomes. It was her living example that taught the family to hold multiple jobs and to have home-based businesses before the term side hustle was popular. She taught me to value all my talents and to make sure others valued my contributions also. The legacy Big Mama left was that my opinion and vision of

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

myself was all that mattered when it came to succeeding in life. At age 25 while living abroad, I developed friendships with women that I now call my sister-friends. They were 50 years young and had lived long enough to give me the wisdom that young people often miss because we are busy making mistakes. They loved and nurtured me in a way that gave me a new voice, new hope, and reminded me of the warrior women in my family who gave me courage to dream and excel. My sisterfriends helped me calm down the passionate anger that is so common among twenty-somethings and helped me recognize that hate is not pride. It was the women who helped me tease out a way to influence community without losing myself in the process. My sister-friends helped me see that I had to be the author of my life and live without regrets, even if I had to beat up a few stoves to get there.
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

Reflections of a Whistling Woman By Shanika Thomas A whistling woman and a crowning hen are neither fit for god or men. I love to whistle. Im not all that great at it, but I love to whistle, and it got me into trouble growing up because it was seen as improper for a lady to do. None of the adults ever could explain why. Theyd just say it wasnt natural. Whistling has become, for me, a symbol of declaring my liberation from the boundaries, stipulations, and limitations put on me because I am female. Although I was taught that I should not whistle, both in the literal and symbolic sense, that I should follow the rules that I should stay in my place, Ive learned that the saying, Well-behaved women rarely make history is profoundly true. While most of my elders saw whistling as a no-no, some of them were, in a symbolic sense,
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

whistlers themselves. My grandmother was one of them. Although her politics werent quite revolutionary, the things she taught me laid the foundation for thinking about myself in relation to feminism and my advocacy for feminism. Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Grandma taught me not to trust. She

taught me especially not to trust men. She admonished me to be prepared at all times to escape. All men were potential rapists in her eyes; including my daddy. I was scorned by her if I sat on a mans lap as a little girl. You can never be too safe. You should never get too close. Grandma died when I was twelve, but when we became teenagers, my sister and I could still hear grandmas teachings resounding through the echoes of time: Always carry a little extra money with
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you when youre out on a date. She told us that when we married, we should keep a separate cash of money from our husband. We should have our own bank account along with a joint account with our spouse. We should keep cash somewhere in the house that our husbands didnt know about in case we needed to leave, I imagine, sometime in the middle of the night. Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Several years later after reading Sisters of the Yam by bell hooks, I was challenged to make a commitment to truth telling. It is very difficult to make truth-telling a practice when you live in a world where the truth is seldom valued; where the person who tells the best lie or can come up with the best excuse is often celebrated.

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

I have also learned that in order to achieve fully realized lives in this world, we, as women, have to do more than teach our daughters to survive in this rape culture; we must challenge and transform it! Cleanliness is next to godliness. Grandma swore this was in the bible! She could not stand a dirty house. She was not a religious woman but she believed in a divine presence. She imagined that the presence of the divine would not dwell in the unclean. She could not stand clutter. I remember that whenever our room was messy, grandma would walk in and say, I cant even think in this room! She often said that our external environment was a reflection of our internal state. Ive learned to value space because of her. Not every corner of the house needs an object in it. Leave room to breathe. De-clutter!
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

If you block that window, she once said, how are you going to see out of it. Ive learned to make space for seeing through windows; for opening and closing doors Sometimes blood is NOT thicker than

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

her female friends auntie. She made time to call and to RECEIVE calls. But, dont get it twisted! She knew how to take the phone off the hook when it was family time or when she just needed time for herself! Tell them Im busy! I remember grandma saying this whenever she was making time for herself. She didnt care if what she was doing didnt seem important to those around her who were demanding her time. Grandma was going to MAKE time to do her crossword puzzles, to read her newspaper and to watch her soaps. I work hard, she would say, I deserve to have time to do what I want to do. This in no way meant that grandma didnt believe in hard work. I think that as women, we often have a difficult time seeing self-love and self-care as an important practice, a valuable work in and of itself. We live
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water. I appreciate grandmas willingness to challenge the old adage that blood is thicker than water. Grandma understood the need for a sense of community beyond the immediate family. She knew first hand that your loved ones can be guilty of stabbing you in the back, of hurting you in a way that no friend ever would. This didnt mean that she devalued family. She just understood that while family comes first, friends can often be like family. Grandma valued her friendships. She made time for friendship. She valued sisterhood. We grew up calling many of
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

in a world, post-womens liberation, thats led us to believe that a strong woman is one that can both work tirelessly outside of the home (after all, the womens liberation movement did fight for that right, right?) and take on the second shift without complaining. This woman is to be every woman! But this woman is everything to everyone but herself. Both my grandmother and my mother worked late night shifts at the hospital, so grandma expected that everyone would do their part to keep things running smoothly at home. She despised laziness but never equated making time to rest to being lazy. Grandma understood the importance of sitting still. One ritual she practiced that I will never forget was unplugging the phone, turning off the television and all the lights in the house whenever there was a storm. Be still when god is working, she would say. We
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

would sit silently in the dark, listening to the thunder, the wind rustling the leaves, and wait for the storm to pass. Ive learned to see the storms of life as a time for reflection; Ive learned to be contemplative Be nobodys fool Everything grandma said seemed to play back to this: Be nobodys fool. Grandma despised foolishness and folly. She was trying to teach us to be critical thinkers. She was trying to teach us to be independent. You are all youve got, she would say. Dont let nobody take advantage of you. Dont depend on no man! Grandmas warnings were constant; relentless. I think that all of us have had women in our lives who taught us to value independence. Theyre lessons taught us to understand that the world is not safe for girls and women, and that we
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

must secure ourselves in light of this fact. They labored over this fact. I believe they wanted us to be prepared to stand on our own. Their labor was not in vain. But now, we also understand that our labor as feminists is not just in the vineyard of empowering ourselves and other women. We seek to do the work of building camaraderie with the men in our lives as well, to bring about a partnership model, to undo dominator culture, which is sustained, not only through sexism, but through racism and white supremacist capitalism. We have a more complete picture of the work that we must do, but we stand on the shoulders of the women who came before us. We will continue our workand well whistle while were doing it.

Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

Complicated By Iresha

Granny: Little girls dont talk loud nor do they sit around a lot of boys. They dont sweat their pressed hair out or make lots of unwanted noise. They will go to school. Climb the ivory tower and when they come down, they will get married, have babies, and make Granny prouder. Iresha: I was invisible so long, that my voice is now louder, and men arent thrown to me Granny, especially as I climb this ivory tower. And see I do not just write on my myself. One tattoo speaks of home, Africa. The other speaks of Blackness, Power. And my hair never grew with all those relaxers or hot combs. Now see how it swings because it has been release to a freedome.

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Dining Room Talks With Grandma Liz Kimya Imani Jackson Often my Grandma Liz and I would sit in her buttery yellow wall papered dining room around her small white table that slightly leaned to side and talk about thoughts, experiences, and dreams. One particular day after getting her Judge Mathis fix, she turns to me as says, Your aunt has been bent out of shape because a man that she met a month ago is not calling her four or five times a day. A man doesnt have time to do all that talking because he has to go to work, hang out with friends, he has to eat, and go to the bathroom. A man with all that time doesnt have a life. Most importantly, you should be too busy having your own life to have all that time on your hands. If you dont have a full life then you are doomed..because all relationships come to an end either you break up or the person dies. When youre grandfather died, a man
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

that I was with for forty plus years, it broke my heart.but I have a full life with my own interests and activities it helped me move through the grief. So when you decide that you are ready to get with somebody make sure he has a life and make sure you do. I nodded and silently said, Amen Grandma. Amen. Eubie by Diata Life for me has been hard But smile! Youll never know Work, work, Aim to please, Keep a smile on. I had to deal with abuse and venereal disease. But you will never know Smile child; Life is too short.

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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

I lived 71 years, And was near death too many times. Near death at his hands, Near death from stress and trauma: Lungs collapsing from heartbreak and strife, Infidelity and domestic violence Almost seemed normal You cant leave though Shh I will never tell you How I suffered. You gotta smile. Dont talk about what ails you. Work and take no breaks. Cause life is too short I know it is. --------------------------------------Grams, Why didnt you tell me? All of the things that ailed you? So they wouldnt ail me? Why couldnt we talk about it? Did religion or shame keep you far? You did nothing wrong.
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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

It wasnt your fault. Why did you stay though? Why did you let him abuse you And mom? Why didnt you fight back? Or did you? I wish you could have told me what ailed you, So it wouldnt ail me too. I will tell the others.

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Ntozake Shange School of Literary Thought

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