“The Slaves Who Were Ourselves”: The Politics of Identification in Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo
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This essay examines Ntozake Shange’s critique of identity politics in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. The multiple foci of the novel allow Shange to examine the pitfalls of identity politics and suggest an alternative politics of identification. The stories of the elder sisters, Sassafrass and Cypress, dovetail into each other. Sassafrass struggles against the misogyny within the Black Arts Movement, while Cypress gains insight into the inhumanity at the heart of gender separatism. Indigo, the youngest, stays in the South and trains as a healer and a midwife. Indigo shows a great capacity for identification from an early age. Her violin playing serves as an intersubjective medium, allowing her to identify with and heal her listeners. This psychic process enables Indigo to forge new alliances across culturally constructed lines of identity while widening the imagination of social justice. Shange ends her novel by celebrating the everyday as the site where identities are constantly made and remade in search of a broader community.
Abstract
This essay examines Ntozake Shange’s critique of identity politics in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. The multiple foci of the novel allow Shange to examine the pitfalls of identity politics and suggest an alternative politics of identification. The stories of the elder sisters, Sassafrass and Cypress, dovetail into each other. Sassafrass struggles against the misogyny within the Black Arts Movement, while Cypress gains insight into the inhumanity at the heart of gender separatism. Indigo, the youngest, stays in the South and trains as a healer and a midwife. Indigo shows a great capacity for identification from an early age. Her violin playing serves as an intersubjective medium, allowing her to identify with and heal her listeners. This psychic process enables Indigo to forge new alliances across culturally constructed lines of identity while widening the imagination of social justice. Shange ends her novel by celebrating the everyday as the site where identities are constantly made and remade in search of a broader community.
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