Tracing outside the lines

I read a review in the New York Times for Ntozake Shange's newest novel "Some Sing, Some Cry". If you haven't read Shange's work, you should. She's a celebrated playwright, whose scripts are also fascinating and intriguing novels. Her newest novel, which I'll report back once I read, is a story through 7 generations of Black women. The critic from the Times explains in her review that the voices of the women become merged together and this complied with what she calls "soap-opera drama" takes away from this critical exploratory of the Black woman's life through history... We'll see, if this is true.

I'm very excited to read this novel because it's a topic that I've always enjoyed to read and write about. I have read many novels that are written for/about/ and by Black women. In many novels the reader can feel a tension in the narrative through the character's need to define themselves as a woman and as a person of color. Often this is reflective of the author's struggle and balance to be viewed as a voice in the literary canon as well as maintain authenticity to the Black community.

Authors create characters that can exist in both worlds, but the identity of the Black character, becomes generalized in an innate bias lens the reader has with Black novels. Since the Black community is viewed as a whole, anytime you read a book or novel about them the identity markers disappear and the individual character is lost. It's interesting because when you read books like: "Eat, Pray, Love" or one of Emily Giffin's series,  as a reader you don't gather the characteristics of the heroine and make a general list that would explain the Caucasian race, so why do readers do this with Black novels?

One idea that I've considered is that the Black woman is diverse in personality, vitality and spirit, but  Black women hurt from the same pain. It's consequences and life situations that bores this burden of being so unique, yet so categorically similar. This ties back to Shange's novel that traces through generations one underlining pain that feels so different in each woman. This could cause a blur of identities. Some might say, "aren't all women like this? Don't we all have the same hurt?" I can definitively tell you, NO.

Black women deal with an internal struggle -- accepting the self with a stake in two worlds; essentially, she has to trace a picture of herself outside lines that are already drawn. The structure looks similar, but can exist on its own with just enough space to be different.