Natural Occurrences
- Natural Occurrences
Once I pried open my doll’s head seeking a nest of silken hair inside. But there was none. No inner parts, no tongue. Just the stubble of glued blond tufts behind sky-colored, dumb, unrooted eyes. Odd to find it hollow, like a fallow garden or a river’s empty bed.
I thought I’d find some answer to the mystery of my own hair, not smooth or flowing like a doll’s, but kinked, knotted, painful to be combed. Tender-headed, my grandmother called me as she tugged the stubborn tangles and I cried until she warned my heart would burst.
She’d say I was full of woe, which, sounding religious, pleased and scared me— the way I’d felt beheading that doll. But it was a dead thing that, despite my tortures, couldn’t cry, or understand what I someday would: why I was angry and sad so often, and why the tears felt good.
Selected works by Sharan Strange:
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• First Sight
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• Hunger
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• Natural Occurrences
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• Froggy’s Class: South Carolina, 1969
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• Dorothy
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• Mule
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• February 19,1994
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• Ash
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• The Unintended Life
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• The Factory
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• The Stranger
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• The Body
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• An Interview with Sharan Strange
Sharan Strange, a member of the Dark Room Collective, teaches literature and social studies at Parkmont School, an independent non-traditional middle and high school in Washington, D.C. In 1995, she received the M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has been in residence at Yaddo, the Gell Writers’ Center, and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have appeared in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including Agni, Black Bread, Best American Poetry, 1994 (A. R. Ammons, ed.), The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry (Clarence Major, ed.), and Callaloo. Her poems have also been exhibited at the Whitney Museum (New York) and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston). She is a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina.
