Ntozake Shange’s Multilingual Poetics of Relation

In her 1994 novel Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter, Ntozake Shange has one of the characters describe his girlfriend—the eponymous Liliane—in a dialogic gesture that allows Shange to represent the two viewpoints on language that create the tension in her own work at large:

The girl truly believed certain thoughts, even certain gestures, were impossible in certain languages. She was driven, by some power I never understood, to learn every language, slave language, any black person in the Western Hemisphere ever spoke … I kept tellin’ her wasn’t no protection from folk hatin’ the way we looked in any slave owner’s language, but she had to believe there was a way to talk herself outta five hundred years of disdain, five hundred years of dying cause there is no word in any one of those damn languages where we are simply alive and not enveloped by scorn, contempt, or pity. There’s no word for us. I kept tellin’ her. No words, but what we say to each other that nobody can interpret.

(66)

On the one hand, there is a drive to learn all of the languages of the Western Hemisphere, because languages are not mutually translatable and if known could facilitate communication with other disempowered individuals, here defined as the third world people in the Americas. But on the other hand, there is a resignation to the racist prejudice lodged in any “slave owner’s language” and thus a need to overcome it through an opacity of language—through words “that nobody can interpret.” Even though I open with a fragment from a novel, because it perfectly encapsulates the paradox of multilingual poetics—its reaching out to communicate despite the opacity of its message—my focus in this essay is on the poetic and dramatic work A Daughter’s Geography. My aim is to show how the tension between these two attitudes to language brings Shange to practice multilingualism in her poetry and performance pieces in order to situate herself and her writing outside of the limited national community. While in Liliane Shange utilizes Spanglish and a sprinkling of French to comment on many of the linguistic issues that she engaged in her earlier works, A Daughter’s Geography employs multilingualism to a much larger extent, mixing Spanish, Portuguese, and French with the oral cadence of African American English.

First published by St. Martin’s Press in 1983 as a collection of poems, A Daughter’s Geography was reissued electronically in 2003 by Alexander Street Press as part of an online compilation, Black Drama: 1850 to Present. This new publication stresses the dramatic character of the collection and offers more connectivity among the separate poems by referring to them as scenes. Such dramatic designations suggest a greater whole in the form of a performance piece, or Shange’s signature “choreopoem,” a form described by Dianne McIntyre—the choreographer whom Shange worked with in staging these poems—as “an ancient African form” enriched with influences from European experimental theater and dance (qtd. in Lester 4).¹ Additionally, the poems that came to constitute A Daughter’s Geography, in a different order, were performed under the title Mouths at The Kitchen in New York, in 1981, and subsequently published in 1984 as From Okra to Greens and in 1985 as From Okra to Greens / A Different Kinda Love Story: A Play / With Music and Dance. This last version arranges the poems in a dialogue between a male and a female voice and casts five dancers, described as “The people of their worlds” (Okra 5). Although it omits many of the multilingual titles of A Daughter’s Geography, this version extends its transnational vision from the hemisphere to the world. It also adds stage directions and thus much more clearly, even beyond its title, connects the poetry with music and dance. The turn toward drama creates a new context for language, in which nonlinguistic codes, such as gesture, music, and visual symbols, can aid communication.

I read Shange’s search for a form of expression between the opacity of multilingual message and...