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"let her be born & handled warmly": Reflections on My Pregnancy Journey Preparing to Mother a Black Daughter

2019; Project MUSE; Volume: 62; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/caj.2019.0014

2766-0265

Shermaine Jones,

Theatre and Performance Studies

86 CLA JOURNAL “let her be born & handled warmly”: Reflections on My Pregnancy Journey Preparing to Mother a Black Daughter Shermaine Jones Can I live? Where can I live? How can I live? Can I live and not, just, barely, almost, survive? What is living when that living requires that black girls and women be small, be half-living, be subordinated, be open to condemnation, abuse, and censure? What about the worlds they are making? Can you see them? Do you apprehend them and the beautiful lives that they make in the midst of deprivation and terror? Can you hear them—their sorrow and joy, their pain and refusal, and their insistent desires and political demands? What are the conditions, the grammars and the tenses, in which those expressed demands and desires might be heard and met not with force, but with care? —Christina Sharpe let her be born let her be born & handled warmly —Ntozake Shange When I learned of Ntozake Shange’s passing on October 27,2018,I had not yet known I was with child. As my friends and fellow scholars discussed her legacy, I thought of how deeply she has influenced not only my development as a black woman, but also my approach to friendships, self-care, pedagogy—my understanding of love. I was first introduced to Shange’s work when a neighbor, who had always taken interest in my social development and exposure to the arts, secured tickets for me and my best friend to attend an Off-Broadway production of for colored girls at the American Place Theatre in the summer of 2000. It was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. As a sixteen-year-old black girl from the Bronx, I watched, mesmerized, as seven magnificent black women adorned in vibrant colors translated the nuances and grammar of black girlhood as well as the complexities, pleasures, and pain of black womanhood. Teaching CLA JOURNAL 87 “Reflections on My Pregnancy Journey to Mother a Black Daughter” me that “bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma” (Shange 59). Shange gave voice to my own experiences of alienation and trauma as well as sense of invisibility. Most importantly, she affirmed the beauty and divinity of black womanhood and the need for self-care as well as communal validation: “i found god in myself & i loved her/ I loved her fiercely” (87). Shange’s work remained a prominent presence in my life.As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, I directed and performed in a rendition of for colored girls as a director of the Black Underground Theatre Association (BUTA). In my interpretation, we performed vignettes from the choreopoem in the sacred space of the black beauty parlor. We integrated West Indian accents and inflections, among other black vernaculars, to communicate the diasporic resonance of Shange’s work, as Tracy Chapman’s “Baby Can I Hold You” provided a soundtrack to our frustrations. As a graduate student teaching a course on “Black Love,” I turned to Shange’s “comin’ to terms” as I encouraged students to navigate black male and female romantic relationships through issues of consent, space, domestic violence and what I proposed as “liberatory masturbation” in a pivotal scene in the story. I asked my students to consider the significance of a black woman creating and owning her pleasure and reclaiming her body from labor and expectations of selfabnegation . In my current position as an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, I continue to engage Shange as a theorist of black womanhood. Most recently, I employed Shange’s insights to argue for an engaged and ethical reading practice that “handles warmly” the pain of black women, specifically grieving black mothers, by attending to the emotional interiority of black womanhood. It is a practice that calls us to listen to and value black women’s lived and felt experiences for the sake of black women. The spirit of Shange’s work, her radical commitment to centering and celebrating black womanhood, has always guided me. When I reflected on her passing, I recalled her insistence on a need for a “layin of hands/ the holiness of myself released” (86). I mediated on...