Looking Towards Phat Mama

The Beginnings of Ntozake Shange and her Literary Elsewheres.

By Nnema Épée-Bounya

Illustration by Iris Pope

On the fourth floor of Milstein Library, in box nine, folder three of the Ntozake Shange Papers sits a stapled, slightly stained, magazine. Tucked between the manilla folders of Barnard’s Archives, its cover is a loose sketch of a nude Black woman—her arms delicately wrapped around her body, her hip popped to the side, her featureless face turned toward the reader. To the right of the woman, the words Phat Mama stand out in a thick black font running vertical to the page. Flipping through the magazine, similar sketches of the nude, nameless woman appear again and again. On one page, she is sitting down, her legs bent and open, her hands behind her back. On another page, she confidently, almost daringly, has her arms behind her head with her legs crossed, displaying her chest. With each evolving pose, she takes up more space, making herself comfortable. 

Phat Mama was created by Ntozake Shange BC ’70, Thulani Davis BC ’70, and Eddie-Mary Daniel ‘74 as a self-described magazine of “poetry, drama, stories, art, music, and translations.” Students on Barnard’s campus in 1970 would have been able to purchase copies for one dollar. The first issue, “Her Black Mind,” was published in March of 1970, and is the only edition with a footprint online or in the Barnard Archives. Within these pages, the world of Phat Mama is populated with expressions of frustration, jubilation, love, rejection. The magazine’s dauntingly rich linguistic world includes a translation of “Night Over Senegal,” a poem by Senegal’s first president Léopold Sédhar Senghor, composition notes for music from Ghana’s Volta region, as well as countless blistering original poems, such as Davis’ untitled poem that begins: “elevators / make me / extremely / racist.” 

In the spring of 2013, The Scholar & Feminist Online published a special edition titled “The Worlds of Ntozake Shange” in which Professor Kim J. Hall and Professor Monica Miller noted in their introduction: “To read Shange, either to oneself or out loud, requires physical and cognitive adjustments. To experience Shange, you must cross over into her linguistic world and ruminate there.” The same can be said while reading through Phat Mama. As I took in Phat Mama for the first time, I found myself making the cognitive adjustments Miller and Hall advise. I read each piece multiple times, often outloud, absorbing their distinct rhythms and musicalities.

The breadth of the pieces published in Phat Mama is incredibly refreshing. While a poem by Léopold Sédhar Senghor and a student’s original musical composition may seemingly have little in common, what ties all of these works together is a confrontation with the complexity of Black identity. In Shange’s poem “the receiving line” which appears in “Her Black Mind,” her reckoning with her own identity is palpable: 

i’m ndekedehe abidurahman,

solani otieno, or chima, or

maybe paulette. 

if i stood there naked, no name,

uncostumed, unmasked, would you

see me?

if i, my meness was thrown to/at you

blatant and whole, could/would you

see me?

While Phat Mama is remembered in relation to Ntozake Shange and Thulani Davis, neither of those names appear anywhere within its pages. When I first read through the magazine, I found myself waiting for these names to appear, to show themselves. Instead, Shange and Davis appear under their birth names Paulette Williams and Barbara Davis, names that I was previously unfamiliar with before encountering Phat Mama. These are the names penned on the Table of Contents, the Contributors page, and attributed to the many poems and stories included in the edition. 

Shange, née Paulette Williams, changed her name a year after graduating from Barnard, which was also a year after the first edition of Phat Mama was published. In Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance, her book on Black dance, published posthumously, Shange explains that she wanted to get rid of her name which was born out slavery, as many Black Nationalists did at the time. Additionally, Paulette was a diminutive of her father Paul’s name; Shange, a feminist, wanted a name that reflected her independent, uniquely Black womanhood. Shange was named by her South African friend, who observed her for months before deciding on the name with which she would be written into history. Ntozake means “she who has her own things” in Xhosa, a Bantu language spoken in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana. Shange is a Zulu name, meaning “she who walks with lions.” Thulani means “be peaceful” or “be tranquil.” In the pages of Phat Mama, Ntozake Shange did not yet exist, but seedlings of this rebirth were present within her poetry, offering a glimpse into Shange’s world before she became the Shange that Barnard often celebrates and honors. 

… 

Phat Mama first came to my attention when I shopped a seminar on Ntozake Shange’s non-fiction work last year, taught by Professor Edwidge Danticat BC ’90. Danticat, an award-winning author, attributed the incredibly rich lineage of Black writers as part of her desire to study at Barnard. Specifically, she credits Shange’s being a Barnard alum as one of the reasons she wanted to attend. The literary magazine created by Shange was mentioned briefly during the first day of the class, and I wasn’t quite able to shake the idea of Phat Mama afterwards. I was enchanted by the presence of a Black literary magazine, started by one of the most notable Black playwrights here at Barnard.

I read a physical copy of “Her Black Mind” from Shange’s personal collection, donated to the Barnard archives in 2016. In a short piece on Barnard’s website about the donation , Shange credits Barnard for shaping her formation as a feminist and an artist: “I got all that I ever imagined from an all-women’s college, and I thought my archives belonged here.” For Professor Danticat, the presence of Shange’s archive on our campus is a “gift”, allowing us to grapple with the complexities of Black women’s relationships to the College. When asked about the experience of interacting with Shange’s archive for her class, Professor Danticat noted that “the class is a way of receiving that gift from her, of realizing you can have quarrels with Barnard, but this idea of belonging, this idea that Black women have made it a special place, seemed to have been important to her.” Shange’s archive ensures that this space she and others before her pioneered will continue for future generations of Black Barnard students. 

It is necessary to understand Shange’s desire to have her archive be a part of Barnard’s legacy while also noting her complicated relationship with the College during her time as a student. In the spring of 1970, Shange and Davis took part in the Barnard Strike Coalition, which joined the National Student Strike to oppose the Nixon administration’s expansion of U.S. military presence into Cambodia during the Vietnam War. According to Why We Strike, the Coalition’s publication, the Barnard Strike Coalition voted that Barnard go on strike on May 4, 1970, “not against the College, but against the policies of the Nixon administration and against business as usual at Barnard.” 

Why We Strike opens with a poem by Shange and Davis, titled “Guerrilla Love.” It feels indecent to extract only a few lines from this poem, but I will permit myself to provide you with its final lines:

blk blood is the revolution 

& i’m telling you /

this shit is on.

Phat Mama’s first edition was published just one month before Why We Strike, and does not include any explicit mention of Barnard. When reaching the “Contributors” page at the end of the magazine and reading the blurbs of each writer, it almost seems like a strange coincidence that all of the writers are students at Barnard. Neither the foreword nor the acknowledgements name the space that has brought all of these women together—a loaded, meaningful omission. Yet, as Professor Danticat noted, Phat Mama epitomizes the nuanced and at times tense relationship between Barnard and its large demographic of decorated Black alumni. 

To understand this history, I spoke with Nia Ashley BC ‘16, a filmmaker, writer, and producer who is working on a film investigating Black identity at Barnard. When discussing the absence of any allusion to Barnard in Phat Mama, Ashley noted that the College plays a nuanced role in Black students’ academic journey. She described how Shange, Davis, and other Black alums were shaped by places beyond Morningside Heights. Reflecting on how much Barnard deserves to be credited for the intellectual and creative development of their Black alumni, Ashley quipped, “Barnard can take credit for getting us all in one place.” She continued, emphasizing “Our cultural production tends to exist outside of the school. Parallel—maybe sometimes perpendicular—to the school. What does that say that the places of revolution, the places of cultural production, being yourself, and cultural identity [formation] happened in these elsewheres?” My conversation with Ashley pushed me to think about Barnard’s absence in Phat Mama more deeply, especially her question: “What does it mean that we are always stepping off campus, stepping outside of Barnard, creating next to, on top of, or underground?”

Phat Mama is a reckoning with visibility, written from this underground. Each one of its contributors contemplates their experience as not just Black women, but Black women artists. Phat Mama is an undeniable literary elsewhere. While Black students of Shange’s time often fed their intellectual and creative appetites by leaving campus and exploring other, Blacker parts of the city, they also found ways to carve out their own spaces on campus. By creating this literary world, the artists behind the magazine fabricated a space beyond Barnard while still within its four-acre boundaries. This desire for distance from their institution is more nuanced than simple resentment for the College; it is the demand for autonomy, for an identity that is not Bold and Beautiful, but rather honest, raw, Black. 

…

“What then did you expect when you unbound the gag that had muted those black mouths? That they would chant your praises? Did you think that when those heads that our fathers had forcibly bowed down to the ground were raised again, you would find adoration in their eyes?” These questions serve as the opening to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus,” his introduction to Senghor’s “Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française” (Anthology of new French-language Black and Malagasy poetry). In the foreword of Phat Mama’s first edition, psychoanalyst and author Dr. Hugh F Butts quotes Sartre’s rhetorical questions to note that many of the works within the magazine’s pages evoke the urgency and audacity of Black voices when they create their own spaces. The poems, translations, compositions, and plays that are woven into Phat Mama are raw expressions of the multiplicity of Black womanhood. In “Black Orpheus,” the philosopher also notes that white people reading Senghor’s anthology “will have the sensation of reading as though over another’s shoulder, words that were not intended for them. It is to black men that these black poets address themselves; it is for them that they speak of black men. Their poetry is neither satirical nor imprecatory. It is a taking conscience.” Phat Mama’s contributors do not address anyone that isn’t from the world they occupy, they do not explicate or perform for anyone but themselves. This “taking conscience,” as Sartre puts it, is what makes the magazine’s now fragile, aged pages still sing with life and urgency.

The final stanza of Shange’s “the receiving line” poem reads:

suffocating. stunt/stifled. i’ll die here. breathing and buried. but

i’m leaving/living. paulette’s leaving alive. i’ll see you, brother. 

i’ll see you, sister, when you get

there. when you get to where i’m going

… when you get to where i’m me. 

These lines make it clear that Shange was leaving/living to her underground, to her elsewhere. At the time of this poem’s publication, Shange’s time at Barnard was coming to an end. Through the poem’s confidence, determination, and unflappable poise, Shange closes the chapter of her life at the College. As I took in every syllable of this final stanza, I could see Shange as she approached her graduation: looking ahead, ready to shed her name and all the memories and identities that came with it. “the receiving line” is both a send-off for Paulette, and the beginnings of Shange. 

…

At the conclusion of our conversation, I asked Professor Danticat if she could describe what it was like being in Shange’s presence. She smiled before responding: “Oh, it was electric. It was electric. I was very young when I met her. It feels just like she's on the page.”

Phat Mama allowed space for Shange and the other Black woman artists to carve out an escape from Barnard, all while creating and distributing the magazine within its gates. The magazine feels outside of time, outside of the College, outside of any box one could file it into. While it now sits in the Barnard Archives, per Shange’s wishes, Phat Mama reads like an elsewhere beyond Barnard. As I navigate my time in the same classrooms Shange once sat in, I find myself continuing the search for this elsewhere, for the freedom that fills Phat Mama’s pages.