It’s a Friday morning and most students from the class, “The Worlds of Ntozake Shange,” are gathered excitedly around a conference table. Ntozake Shange is before them, her hand loosely wrapped around a Diet Pepsi bottle on the table, her soft gaze scanning the room. Kim Hall, the professor of the class, motions to the student on her right to begin the two hour group discussion by sharing her motivations for taking the class. The student says that her older sister passed an old copy of For Colored Girls to her midway through high school and it changed her life. She thanks Shange, who responds with a surprised but proud, “you’re welcome.”
The rest of the class introductions happen in a similar fashion: each young woman thanks Shange after a personal anecdote about her first encounter with Shange’s writing, and to each Shange responds with a hint of laughter, as if it seems odd to her to accept that her writing’s influence on the young women of the room is a personal achievement.
This exchange between the students of the Africana Studies class and the author herself epitomizes Shange’s legacy. Although there is reward in scholarly analysis of her writing, Shange’s poetry, essays, and novels were first powerful in the quiet rooms of their readers; Shange’s writing was, for many, the first safe space for black, female voices. It was the first writing that was inclusive of an experience a black, female reader might have had, seen, or felt around her. The diversity, the audacity, and the authenticity of Shange’s writing is it’s resounding impact. In addition to providing a space for voices formerly squeezed out of literature, Shange widened the form of poetry itself with her invention of the choreopoem--an expression that fuses words with dance. For her readers--and, I think, for Shange, too--Shange’s writing means expansion. It means pushing into a space formerly occupied by white men and words on a page the sensation of movement and the voices of powerful, black women.
Another student at the table mentions that she dropped her English major because she felt she could only find black women’s literature in the Africana Studies department. To this, Shange (a Barnard graduate) groans and says slowly, “I’m sorry to hear that.” The classroom is quiet for a second and buzzes with a sense of anger. This brings to light another aspect of Shange’s legacy--that it points to an effort that is still active and necessary. Shange, who still goes home and is inspired to write, still writes to infuse literature with diverse voices, and her readers still go to her writing, it seems, to find those voices.
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