An Interview with Ntozake Shange
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- An Interview with Ntozake Shange
The interview was conducted on March 25, 2014, by phone between Charlottesville, VA, and Cheverly, MD.
What do you see as the lasting legacy of Baraka?
The lasting legacy of Baraka. Cullud brilliance! Let’s see… one of the most important, I think, is his… his fifty-year dialogue with African American history. Even in the poetry there are references to historical characters and historical dates that are significant to us as a people. Once he mentions these dates and these people, it’s up to us to go research and find out who they are. I know I’ve found out a lot about Black people just by looking up references in his poetry like Black Dada Nihilimus.1 Oh yes. And his persistent engagement in vernacular art, his bringing doo wop and jazz and billboard posters and Negrophilia artifacts into his work allows us to have a relationship to our outside world that we are confronted with all the time and have no frame of reference for. He gives us a frame of reference for that which we call modern culture, modern vernacular world.
And the other part of his legacy is his… his absolute mastery of lyricism. There is such lyricism in Amiri Baraka’s work that it makes one swoon. Even when he’s talking about the ugliness of the ugly, or he’s talking about vampires and Superman around them.2 There is lyricism in the work that is unavoidable and absolutely possessive. To approach that would be a gift any poet to come should cherish.
You said, it makes one “full”?
Swoon.
That’s so beautifully expressed. Is there a specific work or passage that you especially value or that comes to mind immediately when you think of Amiri Baraka?
Well, ahhh… “Beautiful Black Women”… [She cites some passages from the following 1969 poem:]
Beautiful black women, fail, they act. Stop them, raining.They are so beautiful, we want them with us. Stop them, raining.Beautiful, stop raining, they fail. We fail them and their lips [End Page 486] stick out perpetually, at our weakness. Raining. Stop them. Blackqueens. Ruby Dee weeps at the window, raining, being lost in herlife, being what we all will be, sentimental bitter frustrateddeprived of her fullest light. Beautiful black women, it isstill raining in this terrible land. We need you. We flex ourmuscles, turn to stare at our tormentor, we need you. Raining.We need you, reigning, Black queen.
That’s beautiful. When he does this with the Spirit House Movers singing doo wop… it is like an Ave Maria. It is just holy.3
Ok, I’ll have to look it up. It’s about looking… the experience of seeing?
The experience of seeing is really black women in the world as a historical and metaphorical reality.
It’s not a passage that I’ve seen cited frequently and it’s probably one that we need to begin to cite.
I hope you will, yes.
Is there… I know there is… but I will ask the question. Is there a dialogue between your own celebrated work and that of Baraka’s?
I would hope so. I hope so because Amiri Baraka is essential to understanding me. I hope. That’s one of my hopes. I’ve built my work on my understanding of his work. And one of the requirements, one of the things I’m adamant about is representing history through my work, so that I make references to seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century realities in works that are about twenty-first-century characters. And even in Sassafrass [her 1982 first novel Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo] there are those slaves who are ourselves, who accompany Indigo on her adolescent journey. And Sassafrass and Cypress are visited by blues characters in full regalia, characters who become reality for them, even though they are visions. They are as real to them as their mother is to them through her letters. So I try to use the techniques that...
