Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Edwards, Erica R.

Titel

The Black Anterior

Ist Teil von

• American quarterly, 2023-06, Vol.75 (2), p.219-223

Ort / Verlag

College Park: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Near the beginning of Ntozake Shange's 1974 classic Black feminist choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, the lady in yellow remembers coming of age in a Buick on the night of her high school graduation. Colored "deep black," the Buick becomes a scene of too much pleasure: more people than seem possible crowd into the car—a young girl plus five pretty boys, all cousins—the young graduate sweats her hair out at the dance and, back in the car afterward, makes love for the first time. [...]more miracle than the layin' on of hands that ends the choreopoem is this: the Buick reaches its destination without event, and its Black inhabitants are even afforded the luxury of aging: "WE WAZ GROWN WE WAZ FINALLY GROWN," says the lady in yellow, and even if that bold assertion belies a youthful bravado, the past tense waz reminds us that the lady in yellow has indeed achieved the maturity of a grown-ass woman reflecting on the night she "gave it up in a buick." Considering the context of which Redmond speaks, let us note that especially since the postwar social movements that culminated in the global revolution and counterrevolution of the late 1960s, the apparatuses of surveillance and capture—tasers, guns, cages, security towers, checkpoints, and screens (I can't find a place to write this where I am not surrounded by a thousand tiny cameras)—have made Blackness the scene of the perpetual after: reaction after the news, funeral after the tragedy, analysis after the event, captivity after captivity. If the traffic stops Redmond writes of are not "events with a readily knowable beginning and end but processes inclusive of other sites beyond the street and evidence beyond the body," we must listen "elsewhere and otherwise" if we are to approach the knowledge of carceral terror and the enormity of life it is designed to snuff out.