Moderating the Gaze: Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass Cycle as a Loophole of Reprieve

ABSTRACT This article considers Ntozake Shange’s methodologies for amplifying Black women’s expressive sounds through an examination of what the author refers to as the Sassafrass cycle. The cycle consists of six iterations of fictional character Sassafrass’s story written between 1975 and 1982 that precede, coincide with, and then follows Shange’s encounters with the scopic regime, which Nicole Fleetwood defines as “the use of vision and visual technologies in a given historical and cultural context to maintain power relations.” Informed by ongoing discussions in Africana and literary studies focused on Black women’s expressive formations, this article is attentive to Shange’s movement from the stage to fiction and between diverse publication venues. This movement enables Shange to craft a textual loophole—a way to begin moving beyond the scopic regime and into new sonic and interpretive relation with audiences—and it allows her to experiment with reiteration, communicate with varied audiences, and craft individual and collective portraits of Black women based upon these situations. This article argues that through her experimentation with scale and ephemerality, the Sassafrass cycle enables Shange to both produce and amplify innovative Black feminist noise.