The Unboxing of a Black Girl
Angela Shanté
Page Street YA, 2024, 160 pages
$18.99

Reviewed by Beth Brown Preston

Angela Shanté’s new poetry collection is subtitled “A Love Letter to Black Girls.” In these powerful poems, she confronts “Black Girls vs. The World.” She writes: “I want to live in a world where Black girls get to be free” (9). In the poet’s introduction, she confesses that “Poetry and experimental storytelling have always anchored me when the rainbow truly wasn’t enough,” paraphrasing the title of by Ntozake Shange’s 1975 play, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. Shanté claims that she wrote the book that she always wanted to read—a book to be read out loud—full of choreopoems vivid in their articulation and poetic outcry.

The poet evokes an American history that has always exploited and abused Black people. The salve poured into the wounds suffered by Black women is found in their respect for inheritance, tradition, and legacy. She credits her own admiration for the elders who molded and shaped her during her childhood years as key to her survival. Her relationship with her mother and with her older sister, who assumed the maternal role when their mother was missing, became vital to the “unboxing” of Angela Shanté.

The poet writes of the “boxes,” or labels, used to define and classify Black people, especially ingrained into the psychology of young Black girls. In her poem “Floss (Verb),” she introduces the verb “to floss,” which means “to flaunt” in her own language. Through this word, she describes the economic boundaries that existed between herself, her sister, and the other children in the neighborhood whom she was told to call “the poor”:

“Having luxuries placed you in a tier above. I knew that if I had something I could flaunt over another person, the world would treat me a little nicer. Hold me a little gentler. So, allowance was a big get. It meant my big sister and I were a pair of the very few girls in our hood who had money to spend. Having extra was a big floss” (18).

The poet reveals that “some boxes are chosen for us” with the defined, restrictive, and established roles Black girls are forced to play by their family members who instill in them certain codes of behavior and language. Other “boxes” become part of the wider, even more insidious influence of false socialization caused by racial differences, economic stratification, and prejudice.

As I reviewed this poetry collection, I was drawn to the philosophy of James Baldwin in Begin Again—Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.’s series of timely essays on the life and works of the novelist and social critic. I began to consider the process of “unboxing” the self that Shanté describes in her poems. There are obvious similarities between this process of “unboxing” and the personal transformation Baldwin experienced through his work. Professor Glaude writes:

“Imagine as a child grappling with the hurtful words that say you’re ugly, he (Baldwin) intimates to Fern Marja Eckman, his first biographer. ‘You take your estimate of yourself from what the world says about you. I was always told that I was ugly. My father told me that. And everybody else. But mostly my father. So I believed it. Naturally. Until today I believed it’” (35).

The mission of Shanté’s work is to lay claim to and reinforce the beauty found in the Black family, in the Black body and mind, and within the landscapes of the neighborhoods in which we dwell. She writes in the poem, “The South Bronx”: “between the grime and litter / over burned buildings / and through smoke-filled highways / i can make out beauty” (79). This exemplifies the recurring theme of her poems, that there is inherent beauty in the lives of Black people that cannot be stifled, maligned, nor ignored. She convinces readers that we all need to step out of our boxes.

Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program at Goddard College, she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bread Loaf Scholar. She has published three poetry collections as well as two chapbooks of poetry. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Atlanta Review, Callaloo, Calyx, Chiron Review, Seneca Review, Tuskegee Review, World Literature Today, and many other literary and scholarly journals.