"I went to a concert where Ntozake Shange was reading. There, everything exploded for me. She was speaking a language that I knew-in the deepest parts of me-existed, and that I had ignored in my own feminist studies and even in my own writing. What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother-the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems-emotions which stem from the love of my mother. The reading was agitating. Made me uncomfortable. Threw me into a week-long terror of how deeply I was affected. I felt that I had to start all over again. That I turned only to the perceptions of white middle-class women to speak for me and all women. I am shocked by my own ignorance."
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Novelists from the United StatesEssayists from the United StatesPoets from the United StatesPlaywrights from the United StatesDancers from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
CherrĂe Moraga, "La Guera" in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ntozake_Shange
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Ntozake Shange
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