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Ntozake Shange & Michaela angela Davis on Feminism, Tyler Perry & More. 2010

Noted urban culture critic Michaela angela Davis and legendary poet and author Ntozake Shange recently sat down for a discussion of Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuff, it’s adaptation into the film For Colored Girls, black feminism and plenty more recently at The Brooklyn Museum in New York.  It’s humorous, frank, refreshing and real. See what I mean and peep the conversation plus an inspiring audience q&a over at my other home, ParlourMagazine.com

Michaela angela Davis: Many people think you are the priestess of feminism…that you gave us the manifesto. And it’s interesting; I used to call For Colored Girls, our manifesto for a very long time.  Do you consider yourself a feminist? Also do you think what feminists are today is radically different than in the 70s. Do you think there needs to be a redefinition or a new pr campaign for feminism?

Ntozake Shange: Am I feminist? Yes I am. Do I think there needs to be a new pr campaign for feminism?  I think the Black people need one. White people just take the word feminism and walk away with it. We call ourselves womanist or all kinds of other weaker sounding words and let them take the big word that has to do with power and walk away with it and tell us it doesn’t have anything to do with us. Or we tell ourselves that. They never told me that, so I never became not a feminist.

 So since nobody told me personally that it had nothing to do with me, I assumed that because I was a woman and I was seeking a better life for women and children, that I was therefore a feminist. I wanted human rights for women and children, so I am a feminist.  I want political power for women and children and I am a feminist. I want to bring out from hiding working with roots and folk medicine. I want to bring midwives back into our lives. There are all kinds of things that I want to do as a feminist that I can do as a womanist.  But why get all these different words going? Why not just have one word that covers all we want to do for ourselves? It’s very difficult how we can separate over something when we’re all working towards the same thing. Or are we? Sometimes I don’t’ know what we want to happen. If we tell the white women they own feminism , then they can have the political power to do this that and the other, then what are we supposed to use to take our own freedom with? I don’t understand. 

When I was a little girl, I was influenced by two very important biographies as a child: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Toussaint L’ Overture and Susan B. Anthony.  It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered Susan B. Anthony abhorred black people.  And so did Europeans and she wanted to do everything she could to get them away from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The same was true of Jane Hull. That was obvious, racism. We don’t have so much obvious racism right now (but from stories people tell me it’s coming around quite quickly). We need to be able to look at our own heroes and heroines who we do have for examples of how to help women and girl children and little boys be safe in the country where they live.  And that’s what I try to do with my work and that’s what I try to support when I do charity work. And that’s what I try to do when I speak out with people like you.