Self-Love and Female Solidarity

In Zora Neale Hurston’s play Color Struck (1925) the female heroine Emmaline so

“despises her own skin that she can’t believe any one else could love it” (CS 102). Emma has internalized the racism that surrounds her to such a degree that she is not able to see her beauty and to accept herself as a black woman. It is this lack of self-love that finally even causes the death of her “mulatto” (CS 100) daughter. Although her daughter is sick and needs a doctor, Emma does not want to leave her alone with her love John, fearing that he will fall in love with her “very white” (CS 89) daughter. In the end Emma’s self-doubt makes her lose both her love and her daughter.

Aiming to encourage black women such as Emma to regain their self-love and to break with a false female self-understanding, black feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s challenged traditional representations and understandings of black women. For many

9. Engendering Time: Black Motherhood and MaleMaturity 168

black American female artists, theater was an important means of making women heard, breaking with given stereotypes and provoking a new understanding of black womanhood. Contemporary playwrights such as Ntozake Shange “behave[d] like explorers, sending back maps for their audience of apparent but uncharted territories”²⁹⁶ of womanhood and women’s place in society.

With the invention of the so-called choreopoem of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1976) Shange created a participatory, cathartic, and therapeutic theater for a traumatized black female identity that aims to influence the female target audience’s self-understanding by enacting and re-living a black female process of liberation, healing, and rebirth on stage. As the title already indicates, for colored girls is a performative ritual written for the female members of the audience, aiming to support their development from ‘girls’ into ‘ladies’ by showing them how to deal with the “metaphysical dilemma” of “bein a woman & bein colored” (FCG 45). The play is written by a woman for women about women that celebrate the particularity of the female body in order to re-define and to re-evaluate black womanhood as a source of strength and power. Functioning as a testimonial ritual, in which the archetypes presented on stage re-live different elements of a collective female memory,²⁹⁷ the choreopoem imitates a kind of mother-daughter-relationship in which the ‘mothers’ on stage aim to prepare their ‘daughters’ in the audience for unique female experiences, including the experience of motherhood.

The dramatic climax of the play is reached in the next to last poem entitled “a nite with beau willie brown” that focuses on crystal, a mother of two, who has to witness her two children kwame and naomi being killed by their own father beau willie.²⁹⁸ It is the longest poem in the play and it is the only one in which there are individual characters with names rather than anonymous archetypes of female experiences, indicating the importance of motherhood in the construction of black female identity. The poem is spoken by the lady in red who narrates that after the Vietnam War crystal’s lover beau

296 Helene Keyssar, Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1990): 2.

297 For a detailed analysis see chapter 7: “Dramaturgy of Time: Re-Lived Gender Memories in Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls.”

298 The lack of capitalization in the characters’ names is original and part of the new orthography that Shange introduces in her play. For a detailed discussion of language in for colored girls see chapter 8: “African-American Language Identity on Stage.”

willie brown “came home crazy as hell” (FCG 55), suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and being unable to reintegrate into society. Having become a drug and alcohol addict, beau willie started to abuse crystal and to beat her up. When she told him that she was pregnant with their second child, “beau most beat / her to death” and “she still gotta scar / under her right tit where he cut her up” (FCG 56). In order to protect her children, crystal “got a court order saying beau willie brown had no access / to his children / if he showed up his face he waz subject / to arrest” (FCG 56). beau willie however disregarded the verdict, broke into her apartment, and tried to force crystal to marry him by threatening to kill their children. He “kicked the screen outta the window / & held the kids offa the sill” (FCG 59) from the fifth story, urging crystal to tell everybody who was witnessing the scene that she would accept his proposal. In order to support this dramatic moment, there is a brief moment of silence in the performance indicated by a blank line in the dramatic text before the lady in red speaks the final lines, in which the perspective suddenly shifts to the “I” of the first person singular:

i stood by beau in the window / with naomi reaching for me /& kwame screamin mommy mommy from the fifth story / but i cd only whisper / & he dropped em

(FCG 60)

According to the lady in red, the reason why the catastrophe could happen was that she

“waz missin something” (FCG 60), namely “a layin on of hands” (FCG 62), the ritual with which the performance of for colored girls ends and that aims to release “the holiness of [herself]” (FCG 62). At the end of the play each of the seven female archetypes starts to repeat the lines “i found god in myself & i loved her” (FCG 63), culminating in a choral “song of joy” until “the ladies enter into a closed tight circle”

(FCG 64) that symbolizes female solidarity. This feeling of togetherness is supposed to initiate a process of healing for a damaged female self-understanding that made crystal,

“who had known so lil” (FCG 59), not stop beau willie from killing her self and her children. The ending enacts the strength that stems from female solidarity and a sense of togetherness and seems to suggest that, if crystal had found and loved “god in herself”

before, her children would be still alive.

9. Engendering Time: Black Motherhood and MaleMaturity 170

This focus on a woman’s self-worth and self-love in the representation of motherhood is also evident in Judith Alexa Jackson’s play WOMBmanWARs (1992) in which the mother character Sapphire has to learn to love her self before she can love her daughter Danisha. Influenced by the feeling of having to react to “the twenty-one or so odd hours of primetime woman-bashing”²⁹⁹ of the Anita Hill-Thomas Clarence court hearings from 1991, Jackson combines a medial re-enactment of the hearings with the presentation of the fictional family life of Sapphire, her husband Danny, and their daughter Danisha. For Jackson, the Hill-Thomas hearings “demonstrated the gender socialization that all of our spirits suffer from.”³⁰⁰ Based on the premise “that we all have some woman in us and we all have some man in us,” Jackson read the event as a form of

“self-bashing” that revealed the cultural and social (self-)understanding of black women in which “sexism and racism [had] become interchangeable.”³⁰¹ Alluding to the title of her play, Jackson explained:

I wanted to demonstrate that there are wars that go on within women. Our wars start in our wombs. All women have wombs, even as fetuses. We are inside the womb with our own womb. WOMBmanWARs are wars that women have with themselves in just trying to be whole in this world.³⁰²

By pointing to the importance of the womb as the basis of female identity construction, Jackson presents motherhood as an integral element of the definition of womanhood and female self-understanding. Accordingly, it is her social role as a mother to a girl child that challenges and gradually changes the character Sapphire’s self-understanding in Jackson’s play. Like her husband Danny, Sapphire would have preferred a boy child, as she admits to “one female audience member as if they were old friends” (WMW 171):

You see the kids around? Well, when you’ve got girls… you have to worry.

So much going on nowadays.

People snatching kids off the street. Bodies mangled in ditches. … Girl …

299 Judith Alexa Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)," Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by African-American Women, ed. Sydné Mahone (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994): 147. For an interesting reading of Jackson’s play as a “signifyin(g) performance” see Beatrix Taumann, "Strange Orphans": Contemporary African American Women Playwrights (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999): 260-270.

300 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 147.

301 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 147.

302 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 147. Italics original.

can’t get a minute’s peace… You must count your blessings every day that you’ve got a boy child. It’s a man’s world.

(WMW 171)

According to Sapphire, girl children need extraordinary protection in “a man’s world,” so that she is convinced that “[w]omen don’t want girl children no more than men do”

(WMW 171, 172). She adds: “I know it sounds like I don’t love Danisha. Probably sounds like I don’t love myself, I do love Danisha… I do love my child” (WMW 172).

However, even if Sapphire loves Danisha, she is caught in a false understanding of womanhood that leaves “half of [her daughter] in dreamtime” so that she “can’t see [her]

whole” (WMW 170) as the Anima/Animus character, the “fetus/spirit child” (WMW 151) that Danisha developed from, points out.

Sapphire is only made aware of her daughter’s beauty and strength when Danisha is found fighting with her playmate Jerome, who wanted “to look up [her] dress” (WMW 180) against her will. While Sapphire’s husband condemns Danisha’s reaction because

“[he] hate[s] to see little girls fight” (WMW 181), Sapphire realizes that her daughter

“was defending herself” (WMW 180) against sexual harassment, just like Anita Hill with whom Sapphire had sympathized before. In the next and last scene in which Sapphire appears on stage she enters her daughter’s room, sits on the edge of her bed, and talks “to [her] as much as [her]self” (WMW 181) about how her perception of her daughter has changed. Watching the 1982 drama Sophie’s Choice in which the protagonist has to choose whether her daughter or her son should live and be spared from death in Auschwitz, Sapphire finally realizes that her thinking about womanhood was caught in “a man’s world” and she tells her daughter:

I saw Sophie standing there, holding both of her children close… trying to choose who would be cremated. How could she choose? How could any mother choose? I saw her mind working. He might be a warrior. He might change the world. It was a man’s world to change. I knew her choice before she ever opened her mouth. I would have made the same choice. Death for the girl.

And that’s when it hit me Danisha. I have never chosen you. I have never chosen life for you.

(WMW 181-182)

9. Engendering Time: Black Motherhood and MaleMaturity 172

In contrast to the previous scene in which Sapphire addresses a female audience member when talking about her preference of a boy child, she now addresses Danisha directly, which indicates the new attention that she pays to her girl child and to her own womanhood. She explains that when Danisha was born, she “actually cried” because she did not want to have the responsibility to raise a girl:

My heart knew it would be my job to break you. To break your spirit before you were grown and some stranger came along and did it. I had to do what my mother did to me and her mother to her. To protect you from your dreams.

But no more, my darling, precious daughter. I don’t know how. I don’t even know why. I only know today is the last day. The last day I stand back and watch your spirit cry.

(WMW 182)

At the end of the play Sapphire finally realizes that it is her duty to strengthen her daughter’s spirit and self-confidence in order to prepare her for life. Referring to this scene in her play, playwright Jackson once pointed out that “[i]t’s very important to teach children, and not just teach them how to read, write and do arithmetic, but how to believe in themselves.”³⁰³ She explained that she and all black women must continue what their mothers’ generation of “subliminal feminists”³⁰⁴ had started when they “stopped breaking the spirit” of their daughters and, thus, paved the way for a subsequent generation of

“overt feminists”³⁰⁵ such as Jackson, who aims to foster a new and positive self-understanding of black women with her art. Sapphire’s promise “I choose you. I choose you” (WMW 182) at the end of WOMBmanWARs is not only the promise to choose her daughter, but it is also the promise to choose her self. She finally realizes the importance of what the Anima/Animus explained earlier: “Centuries went by as the world awaited the coming of a female savior. And let me tell you now. No one’s coming. Save your Self”

(WMW 159). With Sapphire, Jackson portrays the development of a black woman who finds what she calls “the light,” i.e. “the knowledge of your self,”³⁰⁶ and who becomes aware of her responsibility to teach her daughter how to find this light, too.

303 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 149.

304 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 148.

305 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 149.

306 Jackson, "WOMBmanWARs (1992)": 149.

Interestingly enough, Sapphire’s husband Danny does not undergo a similar development in the course of the play. His absence on stage in the last scene of the play indicates that he has not gained a similar knowledge or a similar level of maturity. This difference between the male and the female characters on stage is indeed introduced in several other plays considered here.