On Ntozake Shange: 'She Did Not Sound Like Anybody Else, Ever'

Literary Hub posts remarks from Michael Denneny, Ntozake Shange's longtime editor, on the occasion of her Langston Hughes Medal. Awarded to Shange this year, the medal celebrates influential and engaging African-American writers. On their decades-long collaboration, Denneny writes: "For me personally, this forty-year collaboration has been both sustaining and immensely rewarding." From the beginning:

I started working with Zaki in 1975 when I published For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf at Macmillan. I had not seen the play but only read a copy of the script, and what astonished me from the very beginning was Zaki’s remarkable ability to make language come alive on the page. This voice was very concrete, very particular, very much her own, and totally unmistakable. She did not sound like anybody else, ever.

She had escaped what she called “the straightjacket that the English language slips over the minds of all Americans.” As she said in “my pen is a machete”:

in order to think n communicate the thoughts n feelings I want to think and communicate / I haveta fix my tool to my needs; I have to take it apart to the bone / so that the malignancies / fall away/ leaving usspace to literally create

She had worked hard at this, at breaking down the language she was given and remaking it into her own tool, language fit to express her reality as a colored girl. And, having retrofitted her language, the word music that burst forth was a literary performance close to jazz.

I remember one time, a time when Zaki was strapped for cash, which often happens with poets, and I heard one morning in the office about a literary contest for publishers The New Yorker was running, sponsored by Bulgari, the New York jeweler. They presented a list of topics and invited writers to compose a thousand word essay; the winner to be published in The New Yorker and receive a $10,000 award. I immediately picked the topic “silk,” called Zaki and said,”Write me a thousand word riff on silk.” “On what?” she said. “On silk, anything that comes to mind, a prose poem on silk,” and I explained the contest to her, and the cash reward. “I mean, what have we got to lose ” I said “Just try it for a couple of hours this evening.” And late that night I got a call and she read me the piece, which won the prize and which is a stunning performance—part prose poem, part historical essay, part autobiography, part song: a beautiful and totally unique verbal performance that defies the usual literary categories. An original act of language.

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