In the novel Sassafrass, Cypress, & Indigo, Ntozake Shange describes Cypress’s dream, where she envisions a matriarchal society that defines childbirth as a punishment and men as nothing more than sperm banks. Shange depicts Cypress dreaming of this perverted society in order to show the very possibility of it. Cypress can conceive of this happening because it already has: “all of slavery gushing from her stomach” (187). This dream is something personal to Cypress, one that grew naturally from the scars the world has wrought upon her.
Cypress finds herself in a nuclear-ravaged England around 2014, in a society she does not recognize nor feel at home in. A woman, Gisa, initiates Cypress and leads her to a dark, huge stadium reminiscent of a womb, where women, mostly women of color, are forced into bearing children. Cypress flashes to the difficulties of pregnancy in reality – the “fertility pills, the test-tube babies” – and cannot comprehend why Gisa and this society would see motherhood as a punishment (186). In a world where they have demonized and criminalized motherhood, and taken away the true relationship between mother and daughter, giving birth is reduced to nothing but primal pain.
Gisa opens a curtain and Cypress sees her own mother, “her very own real mama,” in forced labor (187). In this moment, the perversion becomes unbearably painful because of its realness. “Oh god, not again,” Cypress whimpers (187). The sight pulls Cypress to the devastatingly physical realities of slavery, in which black mothers were seen as nothing more than machines and wombs. Where motherhood was perverted into an act of pain and punishment. Cypress in that moment cannot communicate to Gisa how this is a repetition of the past, when the people in power had “filled wombs over and over until they collapsed” and “bred spirits to be smashed” (187-88). Shange shows how this scenario is always a possibility – whether women or men are in power.
Shange depicts Cypress in this scene of immense and incomprehensible hurt in order to emphasize how this denigration of women of color did not stop with slavery. “Most of the ‘bearers’ were black and Latin” (187). Cypress is dreaming this world; she has created a personal world stemming from her own lived experiences. She furthermore has a visceral reaction to seeing boys, young men, and old men in cells, forced daily to make sperm donations to this society. She remembers “all the porno shows she had ever seen or heard of,” and likens the perversion before her eyes to those, to a society that defines bodies in nothing more than their materiality (188).
Then Cypress sees her father in one of those cages, a moment that again brings this sick perversion to a supremely personal place. Like a little girl, she screams “Daddy, Daddy,” as she watches his cage “crackle with electricity” because he refuses to donate his sperm (188). Cypress yells out in devastating pain and the guards turns on her, chase her, “prepared to capture and punish a felon” (188). In stripping motherhood from the title of Mother and creating a world where men are only seen as objects, these women have created a perversion of relationships that focuses only on the pain.
Discussion Question:
How does this dream contrast the final scene of the book, where Sassafrass gives birth surrounded by her mother and sisters? How does Shange paint two different depictions of motherhood with those two scenes?