SOURCE: "New World Consciousness in the Poetry of Ntozake Shange and June Jordan: Two African-American Women's Response to Expansionism in the Third World," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXXIX, No. 4, June 1996, pp. 417-31.

[In the following essay, Splawn examines the work of Ntozake Shange and June Jordan, in which she finds examples of "a New World aesthetic."]

     And who will join in this standing up
     and the ones who stood without sweet company
     will sing and sing
     back into the mountains and
     if necessary
     even under the sea
 
     we are the ones we have been waiting for.
 
                           —June Jordan, "Poem for South African Women"
 
     of course he's lumumba
     see only the eyes/bob marley wail
     in the night ralph featherstone
     burning temples as pages of books
     become ashen and smolder by his ankles
     walter rodney's blood fresh soakin
     the streets/leon damas spoke poems
     with his face/cesaire cursed our
     enemies/making welcome our true voice.
 
                    —Ntozake Shange, "irrepressibly bronze, beautiful & mine"

I

Poet June Jordan asks in the first line of the epigraph to this paper, "And who will join this standing up"—this standing up for every individual, regardless of race, nationality, gender, and sexuality? The words in the epigraph invoke a call to the many African-descended peoples throughout the world and to their allies, be they black (by race or by political-class identity) or white. Jordan, activist, author, scholar, and poet, seems to suggest that those who hear and will heed this call are those who aspire to a New World vision of strength in diversity, and love in our differences. This is the message that June Jordan delivers in exemplary poems from her oeuvre, such as "Poem about My Rights." In "Poem about My Rights," Jordan unfolds the pervasive nature of the oppression that diasporan women face in their day-to-day lives. Similarly, poet, activist, dramatist Ntozake Shange, in the preceding epigraph, links the oppression which African-descended people resist from one part of the globe to another. In this excerpt from "irrepressibly bronze, beautiful & mine," Shange shows how Patrice Lumumba's eyes, Bob Marley's wail, and Walter Rodney's blood blend, forming one unifying consciousness that I am calling the consciousness of the New World artist. Thus, New World consciousness is (1) grounded specifically in the experience of oppression diasporic women face; (2) linked to African-descended people throughout the globe; and (3) serves as a call to connect with allies who are oppressed elsewhere (i.e., in the Middle East, Central America, etc.)

This paper proposes to lay out the idea of a New World aesthetic as gleaned from the writings of June Jordan and Ntozake Shange, two African-American writers and activists, and will argue, in the words of Ntozake Shange in "Bocas: A Daughter's Geography," that though "our twins salvadore & johannesburg / do not speak the same language,… we fight the same old men / in the new world." These women writers see a very clear analog between their victimization as blacks and as women globally and the perpetuation of racist and expansionist regimes. June Jordan sees this connection clearly in the previously alluded to "Poem about My Rights" when she identifies two forms of terrorism in the brutal raping of women in the expansionist ideology of a country, in this case South Africa, which "penetrat[es] into Namibia [which then in turn] penetrat[es] into Angola."

In the New World aesthetic, women are engaged in the struggle to overcome oppression equally with men. Historical data is invoked in the poetry to reclaim the place of women in the liberation struggle. Section II of Shange's "irrepressibly bronze, beautiful & mine" reveals the solidarity in the struggle of George Jackson and Angela Davis, two African-American political activists whose stance on justice cost them time served in prison. Shange opens this section of the poem with the following portrayal of a typical day in the life of two leaders,

      he's of course george jackson
      doing push-ups and visiting with angela
      soledad soledad
      confined to his beauty alone
      fighting cement walls for air.

The final line, "fighting cement walls for air" is an allusion to "combat breathing," Fanon's term for the measured response of oppressed people to their oppression. Indeed, one might argue that it is exactly upon Fanon's conception of how oppressed people respond to their oppression that Jordan and Shange base the New World aesthetic.

II

But what is the New World aesthetic, the New World consciousness espoused in the writings of Ntozake Shange and June Jordan? The use of Fanon and Walt Whitman reflects the openness to which New World consciousness situates its literary and theoretical antecedents. June Jordan comes to a definition of New World consciousness by beginning with the vision of pluralism espoused in Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas and in his representative poems, and then tracing this radical vision of democracy in the writings of activist poets in the Americas and in the Caribbean. On Whitman's vision, she writes in the introduction to Passion, "New World does not mean New England. New World means non-European: it means big, it means heterogeneous, it means unknown, it means free, it means an end to feudalism, caste, privilege, and the violence of power. It means wild in the sense that a tree growing away from the earth enacts a wild event."

In that same introduction, Jordan further argues:

In the poetry of the New World, you meet with reverence for human life, an intellectual trust in sensuality as a means of knowledge and of unity, an easily deciphered system of reverence, aspiration to a believable, collective voice and, consequently, emphatic preference for broadly accessible language and/or "spoken" use of language, structure of forward energies that interconnects apparently discrete or even confidential balancing of perception with vision: a balancing of sensory report with moral exhortation."

Indeed, one might argue that while we are acutely aware of the many variations of our "Africanisms," a New World consciousness problematizes the imposed division between blacks in the New World and blacks in other parts of the globe. In fact, it problematizes all kinds of divisions, be they gender, racial, or sexual. An example of the New World writers' response to this can be seen in Shange's "New World Coro":

     the earth hums some song of her own
     cuz
     we have a daughter/mozambique
     we have a son/angola
     our twins
     salvadore & johannesburg/cannot speak
     the same language
     but we fight the same old men/in the new world
     we are so hungry for the morning
     we are trying to feed our children the sun
     but a long time ago/we boarded ships/locked in
     depths of seas our spirits/kisst the earth
     on the atlantic side of nicaragua costa rica
     our lips traced the edges of cuba puerto rico
     charleston & savannah/in haiti
     we embraced &
     made children of the new world
     but old men spit on us/shackled our limbs
     old men spit on us/shackled our limbs
     for but a minute …
     you'll see us in luanda or the rest of us in chicago.
 
                              (A Daughter's Geography)

The line "see us in luanda or the rest of us in chicago" signals the interconnectedness of African-descended people to suggest that African-descended people are really the same people who are merely separated by geographical location. Despite overwhelming historical odds against survival of the Middle Passage, Africans en route to the New World did survive and, generations later, women and men descendants of those African survivors seek to "feed [their] children the sun," a line reminiscent of Zora Neale Hurston's memory of her mother's prodding of herself and of her siblings to "jump at de sun," or reach for the heights of success, in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. Also the repetition of the syntactical unit "but old men spit on us/shackled our limbs" twice powerfully underscores the theme of racially based oppression by powerful, though cowardly, elites who spat on the enshackled women and men in the New World who could not, by virtue of their being enshackled, retaliate. It should be noted as well that this refrain is repeated in the longer poem, "Bocas: A Daughter's Geography." In that poem Shange pointedly states,

     there is no edge
     no end to the new world
     cuz i have a daughter/trinidad
     i have a son/san juan
     our twins
     capetown & palestine/cannot speak the same
     language/but we fight the same old men
     the same old men who thought that the earth waz flat
     go on over the edge/go on over the edge old men.
 
                            (A Daughter's Geography)

The first two lines in the above quote underscore Shange's view and, I might add, the view of other contemporary activists such as Audre Lorde and Jean Binta Breeze—that people of color comprise four-fifths of the globe; thereby, leaving terms like "minority" open to interrogation. And though there is "no edge to the new world," the speaker in this section invites the old men, who elsewhere in the poem "spat on us," and who deign themselves the discoverers of the New World, to "go on over the edge." This alludes to the prevailing view about the shape of the earth during the time of the most notable of those "old men," Christopher Columbus, that the earth was flat and that therefore one could fall off the edge if one attempted to sail around it. It is worth noting that as with the line "but old men spit on us/shackled our limbs," this line is also repeated, underscoring Shange's emphasis on reclaiming African-descended peoples' right to determine their own destiny.

III

For Shange and Jordan, however, our consciousness is not simply confined to our individual struggles in particular countries in the New World; they are also entwined with our collective struggles as "global Africans," Vibert Cambridge's term for African and African-descended peoples throughout the world, as well as with those of the people of Central America and the Middle East. Solidarity lies with other oppressed groups who are struggling. As Audre Lorde puts it, "Yet there is a vital part that we play as Black people in the liberation of consciousness of every freedom-seeking people upon this globe, no matter what they say they think about us as Black Americans."

Based on a line from Bob Marley's "Heathen," Shange's "Rise Up Fallen Fighters" addresses this theme pointedly:

     david's warriors
     rise up rise up fallen fighters
     show me the promised land
     show me round the universe
     our fathers' land
     rise up
     announce the comin of the kingdom's rightful heirs
     i climbin to the moon on the rasta-thruway
     our father lands
     risin up
     the land even sing & jump
     the sky want to jam all thru the day
     the stars forget they weakness
     & dance
 
     rise up fallen fighters
     unfetter the stars
     dance with the universe
     & make it ours
 
     rise up fallen fighters
     unfetter the stars
     dance with the universe
     & make it ours
 
     oh, make it/make it ours
     oh, make it/make it ours.
 
                             (A Daughter's Geography)

"[O]ur father lands / risin up" and references to the "fallen fighters" connote the collective struggle of African-descended people and their ancestors for freedom. These fallen fighters—like Petion, L'Ouverture, and Dessalines in Haiti, to whom Shange addresses her plea for their spiritual return during the Duvalier regime in "A Dark Night in Haiti: Palais National"—comprise the dead African and African-descended warriors, both male and female, who had been so successful in the past in breaking the tyranny of their enslavers. The line may also be a reference to more recent warriors who, while still alive, have experienced set-backs (hence, the reference to "fallen") in the struggle for freedom. Since the speaker asks the "fallen fighters" to "rise up" and "unfetter the stars," a role that only mythic figures who have been immortalized as constellations, etc., can do, the poem fuses Todorov's fantastic with magical realism and traditional African religion.

June Jordan speaks of another kind of resistance in "A Song for Soweto,", by opening the poem with the issue of language imposed on the colonized. Her use of phrases like "devil language" and "falls slashing" denotes a cultural moment when one's language and one's oppression are interconnected. For as the speaker states,

     Where she would praise
       father
     They would teach her to pray
       somebody please
       do not take him
       away
     Where she would kiss with her mouth
       my homeland
     They would teach her to swallow
       this dust.

This interconnection does exist, "[b]ut words live in the spirit of her face and that / sound will no longer yield to imperial erase." Thus,

      Where they would draw
        blood
      She will drink
        water
      Where they would deepen
        the grave
      She will conjure up
        grass
      Where they would take
        father and family away
      She will stand
        under the sun/she will stay
      Where they would teach her to swallow
 
        this dust
      She will kiss with her mouth
        my homeland
      and stay
      with the song of Soweto
      stay
      with the song of Soweto.

The Soweto girl embodies the New World consciousness in her resistance to colonization. Though she has been made to face insurmountable odds, she takes for herself the beauty of "[her] homeland."

Expanding on themes raised in "A Song for Soweto," Jordan makes a powerful statement about the oppression of women and of Third World countries by the superpower countries in "Poem about My Rights":

     which is exactly like South Africa
        penetrating into Namibia penetrating into
        Angola and does that mean/mean how do you
     know if
        Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look
     like the
        proof of the monster jackboot ejaculation on
     blackland
        
and if
        After Namibia and if after Angola and if after
     Zimbabwe
        and if after all my kinsmen and women resist
     even to
        self-immolation of the villages and if after that
     we lose nevertheless what will the big boys say
     will they
        claim my consent.
 
                                              (Passion)

The implications of Pretoria's "monster jackboot ejaculation on Blackland" are particularly rich if one considers the rise of certain countries to superpower status due to military, rather than economic, power. Further, "if Pretoria ejaculates what will the evidence look like?" is a reference to the difficulty of providing legally sanctioned "proof" in the judicial system, not only of rape but also of other forms of oppression, such as racism. The more trenchant aspect of Jordan's question, however, points to the New World consciousness concerns. That is, what do the manifestations of Pretoria's "jackboot ejaculations" mean for African-descended people? Such evidence could take on a range of effects, including material, psychosocial, and spiritual manifestations of oppression. Later in the poem, Jordan makes reference to a kind of "penetration with or without the evidence of slime" (Passion), another example of the pervasive nature of victims having to provide the burden of proof in order to exact justice.

IV

     see what the man have done
           done
     see how the red blood run
           run.
 
              —June Jordan, "Atlantic Coast Reggae"

Thus begin the opening lines to Jordan's "Atlantic Coast Reggae," lyrics from a reggae the poet describes in an essay in On Call: Political Essays, in which she describes a little girl's matter-of-fact reflecting in a street song that she sings about the people of Nicaragua's attitudes about expansionism from the West in her country. The refrain to the song is sung by a five-year-old girl who, like most people living on the Atlantic side of Nicaragua, is black and English-speaking. The refrain—the New World consciousness refrain, that sees the systemic paradigms of power and, while never accepting its invasive effects, situates the responsibility for the effects of war and destruction where they belong (i.e., with the colonial powers)—reminds us how banal the realities of occupation are for African and African-descending people. It is, in the words of Ntozake Shange, "like drinking morning coffee." My point of emphasis here is that the speaker is a young girl who, like her male peers, is actively engaged in the struggle for liberation. As I have indicated in the first section of the paper, women are engaged in the New World struggle on a par with men. Women give their lives for the Revolution. Jordan makes explicit in "Fourth Poem from Nicaragua Libre: Report from the Frontier" the high price that women pay for their involvement in the struggle for liberation:

      gone gone gone ghost
         gone
         both the house of the hard dirt floor and the church
         next door
         torn apart more raggedy than skeletons
         when the bombs hit
      leaving a patch of her scalp
      like a bird's nest
      in the dark yard still lit by flowers.

The "piece of scalp with hair attached" provides shocking evidence of the price exacted from one woman for her fight for freedom. Left "like a bird's nest" scattered in the debris of the bombed community, the visible remains of what once was a vibrant human being testify to Nicaraguan women's engagement in the struggle for liberation.

In a more personal vein than the previous poem, the woman speaker in the following poem makes clear her distaste of gender abuse:

     I AM NOT STILL As i stand here like a phony catatonic:
         aggressively resisting. I am not, it is not important
        am i an impermeable membrane. This resistance
        provokes the madness of enumeration
        I am insensible to a,b,c,d,e,f,g,—
        And the gamble of elimination:
        A∗, B∗, C∗—
        The energy this resistance requires is itself an
        alteration of temperature, at least.
        So I surrender. I surrender and I multiply:
        Polybot:
     Sponge.
 
                         (Naming Our Destiny)

This passage invokes Stuart Hall's reminder that the body is the only cultural capital that we have. The speaker expresses her defiance via negation. Even in her impassive stance, she resists total denial of self. Her "surrender" is a negotiated one, whether her oppressors realize it or not; for as Audre Lorde tells us, one's oppressors must overcome their victims, but resistors need only survive. Thus, her position in the poem is one that she mediates for herself: echoing Langston Hughes's resisting speaker in "I, Too," she elects to "surrender" and "multiply:" [p]olybot:" "[s]ponge."

Jordan presents a further example of women's commitment to the battle for liberation in her poem "To Free Nelson Mandela":

   They have murdered Victoria Mxenge
   they have murdered her
   victorious now
   that the earth recoils from that crime
   of her murder now
   that the very dirt shudders from the falling blood
   the thud of bodies fallen
   into the sickening
   into the thickening
   crimes of apartheid
 
   Every night
   Every night Winnie Mandela
   Every night the waters of the world
   twin to the sofly burning
   light of the moon.
                            (Naming Our Destiny)

Jordan's use of assonance in the near-refrain, "into the sickening / into the thickening / crimes of apartheid" approximates the blues pattern. Images of "dirt shuddering," "falling blood," "thud[s] of bodies," however, add a morbid twist to the blues motif. Nonetheless, the speaker suggests that despite the perverse conditions, women, like Victoria Mxenge and Winnie Mandela, inspire hope through their resistance. It should be noted that though feminist issues are expressed in Shange's and Jordan's writing, they are inextricably linked to issues encompassed in the New World aesthetic.

V

     I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
     My name is my own my own my own
     and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this
     But I can tell you that from now on my resistance
     my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
     may very well cost you your life.
                     —June Jordan, Conclusion to "Poem about My Rights"

In conclusion I would like to underscore Jordan's and Shange's too often overlooked message. For these African-American women writers, the era of the Euro-American liberal, whether in academia or in various other professions, has passed. We are in an age of radical artists, thinkers, and leaders who do not seek to join the established bureaucracy. Furthermore, these writers resist essentialist postures that seek to offer definitive expressions of their expressions of their experiences as women in the African diaspora; they write, as Issac Julien puts it, "from the African diaspora," as opposed to "of the African diaspora." These women would give their lives for the establishment of a New World. In such a world men and women share equally in the full benefits of freedom. Difference is not only tolerated but celebrated. Jordan's and Shange's vision of a New World is not a philosophical retreat of perpetual ecstasy nor complacency, but rather a world of striving. Echoing Frederick Douglass' maxim that there is "no progress without a struggle," Jordan's and Shange's vision of the New World epitomizes that foreshadowed by Fanon in A Dying Colonialism, in which men and women engage in "combat breathing," a measured response to oppression. But with regard to colonizers, Jordan and Shange make clear that although they and other African-descended and indigenous people "[did not] set things up like this," they will not be silenced. Indeed, one might argue that these writers feel a need to retaliate against their oppressors. As Shange goads the "old men" in "Bocas: A Daughter's Geography" to "go on over the edge," these writers write about retribution even as they speak of empowerment and equality.