{"id":165311,"date":"2023-09-06T11:04:51","date_gmt":"2023-09-06T15:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=165311"},"modified":"2023-09-06T14:34:11","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T18:34:11","slug":"dark-rooms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/09\/06\/dark-rooms\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Rooms"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Ntozake Shange at Barnard College in November 1978. From the Barnard College archives, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The following three short essays describe Ntozake Shange\u2019s experience with psychoanalysis. After the success of<\/em> for colored girls who have considered suicide \/ when the rainbow is enuf,<\/em> she struggled with bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and drug addiction. Her mental health challenges continued for decades, and she was remarkably open about them and diligent in seeking help through psychoanalysis and traditional talk therapy. Characteristically, Shange\u2019s complicated emotional landscape is rendered with tenderness and beauty, which is particularly important given our collective recognition of the importance of mental health care. In this, too, Shange was ahead of her time.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2014Imani Perry<\/span><\/p>\n

Editor’s note: Except where a change was necessary to avoid errors that altered meaning in the work, Shange\u2019s original handwritten notes and misspellings are how they appear in her archives. The editor aimed to maintain the integrity and urgency of Shange\u2019s writing style, and to publish her work as she left it.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Dark Room<\/strong><\/p>\n

When \u201cFor colored girls \u2026\u201d was at the height of its controversy\/popularity, I found myself wearing very dark glasses and large hats so that folks wouldn\u2019t recognize me. I couldn\u2019t ride elevators, up or down. If someone figured out who I was, I calmly stated that I was frequently mistaken for \u2018her\u2019. I\u2019d had other occasions in my life, when I was the only African-American in a class or banished to the countryside that my family loved so much, when I\u2019d been known to disassociate, to refer to myself in the third person. Then, I was \u2018Paulette\u2019. Now, Ntozake repeating the pattern of the girl I\u2019d gleefully left behind. This was very troubling. I\u2019d just become who I was and was in the frenzied act of \u2018disappearing\u2019 me. Now, I confess to discovering many, many roads to oblivion, but I rarely recounted these episodes with warmth or a sense of well-being. So, I did what I thought troubled writers did, I went to my producer, Joseph Papp, to seek counsel. To my alarm, Joe recommended against analysis or other therapies, \u201cbecause, then, my writers can\u2019t write anymore\u2019. Well, writing I was, living I was, living I was not, even though I wasn\u2019t always a strong supporter of my own perceptions. The ability to write in isolation for hours about anything and enjoy it is a gift, but it is not life. Even, I knew this. I could not hide in a dance studio, either. My presence was unavoidable , yet unbearable.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Off to find a shrink , I went. I was looking for a wizard, some magic, some chant, or breath that might make being me something to look forward to in the morning. I have the capacity to sleep for four days at a time, if I am so inclined. At one point I refused to get up and live my life among the living because my dreamlife was so much more interesting. Wizards I did not find. I did find that finding the right shrink\/ analyst is as important a decision as finding a soul-mate. Anyway, to make a long story less long, I\u2019ve been involved with overseven mental health care workers in the last twenty years. The overwhelming period of time spent with three: one psychiatrist, and two analysts. I lost one analyst to the Emergency Room which he saw as a challenge. Four years of quasi-sane mourning passed before I was able to seek out another with whom I have been working for nearly a decade.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0The Angriest Patient<\/strong><\/p>\n

With his help and astounding patience, I have lost my title as \u201cthe angriest patient ever encountered during all my years of practice\u201d to become the 1991\u201393 Heavyweight Poetry champion of \u2018The World\u201d, as you see, a much healthier management of violent proclivities. In all seriousness I\u2019ve learned to feel what I see. What I\u2019ve been blessed to conjure in words is no longer two steps removed; my body is not a hindrance to my spirit, but a manifestation of it. I am still crazy,but not so afraid with that part of me. I can even tell jokes to my \u2018crazy\u2019 person and realize that to be one of my saner moments.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve dressed up as a \u2018guinea girl\u201d, the ones who stole all the basketball players at my school just to prove that I could be one. That was a session to remember. I\u2019ve felt what I swear to be\u00a0electricity in my body. I\u2019ve known the ocean and intense heat. All this actually while on the couch. Talk about terrified. Try being the Atlantic Ocean all by yourself in an eight by twelve room with ancient fertility statues placed like buoys on what I guess I took\u00a0to be signs of land ahead. I don\u2019t know to this day. I\u2019ve talked in tongues. I\u2019ve only been able to do some sessions inSpanish, or a mixture of French and Portuguese. I don\u2019t know why. I know that is all that would come out. Sometimes, I sleep. Other times, Paulette speaks. Her voice is different from mine as Zaki. Sometimes, I want to knock her out, but since we can only use language as a tool or weapon or doll or whatever I need, I learned at least to talk to her, if I am not wildly gesticulating in some recollection of a dream; legs flying, arms of a flamenco dancer, long Balanchine neck I could never actualize outside my \u2018dark room\u2019 where things, me, memories float out of syllables and become benign or empowering, as they must because they are never without meaning.<\/p>\n

Joe, my \u2018Art-Daddy\u2019 as I called him was wrong about one thing, not many, but one. Psychoanalysis has made me a finer writer, a fuller person and a funnier one to be sure. I\u2019ve found characters I would literally shun to be beauteous. I\u2019ve been able to take on the persona of someone puzzling to me with no need, not a desperate one, to figure her out. I have\/ am plumbing the primordial depths of me, not without trepidation, but with a magic I thought I could pick up somewhere in the night. My analyst\u2019s Anthony Molino. He\u2019s a poet. He lives in Italy and like a guardian spirit, with me.<\/p>\n

10-9-97<\/p>\n

Houston, TX<\/p>\n

\u00a0The Couch<\/strong><\/p>\n

Though long before I\u2019d come to know myself as \u2018Ntozake\u2019 or, a writer, I had wanted to be a psychiatrist. This no doubt had\u00a0something to do with my parents\u2019 involvement with hospitals, sick people, poor black people, and me, following along to wards, living rooms, boarding houses, examination rooms, and dark rooms where X-rays were read or where violently mentally disturbed folks were sequestered. My father as a surgeon, excised with delicacy what was malignant, diseased, out of tune with the body, while my mother,\u00a0as I understood it, assisted individuals or families to get in tune with society as a whole, to make \u2018living\u2019 work for them as opposed to against them without necessarily challenging anything about the world as we know it. Both these approaches left me wanting. What if what was wrong couldn\u2019t be seen or couldn\u2019t be excised? What if life as some soul knew it wasn\u2019t worth living without some violent catharsis? I credited Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture and Dessalines, Tubman and Anthony with what ever legitimacy I had, and they were not the sort who \u2018fit\u2019 in. I\u2019d seen \u201cSnakepit\u201d, in all its simplified black and white depiction of living in our world with a pained contorted mind and spirit. I was caught somewhere in between the institution and slavery and the loose cells of The Bastille. Surely, there is some where more peaceful than The ER or the Settlement house. My ultimate answer was the analyst\u2019s couch, but before that I had tolearn to live with myself madly for a while longer.<\/p>\n

I saw things. I was not delusional or schizophrenic, I apparently could reach areas of my unconscious as a child that never left\u00a0me which turned out to be as much a burden as a blessing. I had visions. I wasn\u2019t playing. I was laying on the grass or upside a great tree, listening and seeing historical figures, artists, people I didn\u2019t know dancing with me, taking me to salons in Paris or roadhouse in Alabama. I was daydreaming, I imagine, but I never diminished\u00a0those episodes to anything less than my \u2018real life.\u2019 That\u2019s why journalists have such a hard time fact-checking stories on or about me. I will tell them an anecdote which is impossible to chart in any methodology. They ask me did something happen and I\u2019ll probably say \u2018yes\u2019 because I remember my dreams, both night and day, as authentically as I experience my daily life. Before I started menstruating, this issue of truth was very much alive. What I believed or felt I could not prove to anybody in a reasoned fashion. That\u2019s why I knew instinctively that I should not argue or debate because at, a certain point I, knew my \u2018truth\u2019 was simply mine and\u00a0not a collectively recognized reality. Yet it could not be a lie because I thought\/felt it. The only place I know where anybody else believes this is the psychoanalyst\u2019s office. There, it is enough to paraphrase Marie Cardenal to find \u2018the words to say it\u2019.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I dance. I can\u2019t always find the \u2018words\u2019 to say it. I\u2019ve come to believe there are words as we know themfor some things; that the body has a grammar for these constructs which are not beyond articulation, but of another terrain. I\u2019m becoming trans-lingual so that I may speak myself. Maybe I was a passionate gopi girl at Krishna\u2019s feet, I don\u2019t know, I do know that my\u00a0body extorts from me what hangs silent in the air. That\u2019s why psychopharmocology can only take me so far. I need my body to talk to me. My analyst watches all these gestures of mind and body, listens as closely to my muscle burns or prone attitude turns as my dreams.<\/p>\n

Most of my characters have visions and dreams with which some of you are acquainted. Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday visit Sassafrass.\u00a0Indigo speaks with the spirits of the moon and the Ancestors. Everybody, even, The Magician, in \u201cSpell#7\u201d opens their interior world to the whole of the audience, thought no one else\u00a0in the scene itself is aware of Allega brushing her hair or Maxine\u00a0collecting gold chains that bound her in resistations of The Middle Passage. Liliane, actually, has an analyst. No. He\u2019s not my analyst, he is Lili\u2019s. Sean, the debonair photographer in \u201cA Photograph: Lovers-in-Motion\u201d needed an analyst.I didn\u2019t give him one. I let him suffer. He didn\u2019t have visions, couldn\u2019t talk to spirits, shoot the breeze with his own myths, memory weighed too heavily. An example is simply that my father hadda monkey\/ he liked better than me\u201d, from the mouth of a grown man who is still that little\u00a0boy. Did that \u2018happen\u2019 to me? Not in the material world\/. But, living with my being i know now that if I \u2018know\u2019 about it, it happened\u00a0to me, belongs to me now. I was not here during The French Revolution, but I can describe Marat\u2019s bath and exude Charlotte Corday\u2019s 1 rage and naivete. Just as I named Crack Annie\u2019s daughter, Berneatha in honor of Hansberry\u2019s Beneatha. There is no doubt in my mind that Walter Lee woulda smoked everything in that house away and pledged the money to Beneatha\u2019s African boyfriend to\u00a0get himself in on some wild Dallas-Chicago-Lagos drug deal. Was I conscious of this? No. Can I discuss all this eccentric personal peculiarity now? Yes. Without heart palpitations? Yes. Without clammy palms? Yes. Without blinking an eye? No. All of this is very precious. I must keep my eye on my self\/s. I\u2019ve learned this on a yearly, hour byhour disciplined manner. It was not easy. I was not happy. I was not always careful. It costs a lot. What do I get in the end? Do I get better? How will I know when I get there? I could\u00a0get coy. Answer, Beckett knew what detained Godot, but we don\u2019t know that. I know I don\u2019t know that. Anyway, I have a hard time explicating \u201cle texte\u2019. The characters never die. The stories never end for me. That\u2019s why like Rapunzel I go unravel my loose ends with my psychoanalyst. Nothing is wrong. No one else knows. A pin\u00a0could drop, but usually what\u2019s falling away is not so piercing, not so singular, only the shreds of living I must make space for somewhere in myself\/s who is not only the writer and, therefore cannot continue to find herself whole solely on blank pages.<\/p>\n

One of Simon Bolivar\u2019s houses was hexagonal, seated on a cliff in such a way that from any point, he could feel\/ see land and peoples who would be free. When I lie nestled on the couch in the room of no color and all colors, I am in that house. I am on that cliff. I am one of those people.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 12.21.97.<\/p>\n

Houston, TX<\/p>\n

These essays will appear in <\/em>Sing a Black Girl’s Song: The Unpublished Work of Ntozake Shange, to be published next week. Courtesy of the Ntozake Shange Revocable Trust and reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Ntozake Shange (1948\u20132018) was an American playwright and poet, best known for her Obie Award-winning play, <\/em>for colored girls who have considered suicide \/ when the rainbow is enuf. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cFinding the right shrink\/ analyst is as important a decision as finding a soul-mate.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[67827,33616,17144],"class_list":["post-165311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-featured","tag-ntozake-shange","tag-psychoanalysis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDark Rooms by Ntozake Shange<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 6, 2023 \u2013 \u201cFinding the right shrink\/ analyst is as important a decision as finding a soul-mate.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2023\/09\/06\/dark-rooms\/\" \/>\n<meta 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