Mood Indigo

NTOZAKE SHANGE, "i. Mood Indigo "

it hasnt always been this way
ellington was not a street
robeson no mere memory
du bois walked up my father’s stairs
hummed some tune over me
sleeping in the company of men
who changed the world

it wasnt always like this
why ray barretto used to be a side-man
& dizzy’s hair was not always grey
i remember i was there
i listened in the company of men
politics as necessary as collards
music even in our dreams

our house was filled with all kinda folks
our windows were not cement or steel
our doors opened like our daddy’s arms
held us safe & loved
children growing in the company of men
old southern men & young slick ones
sonny til was not a boy
the clovers no rag-tag orphans
our crooners/ we belonged to a whole world
nkrumah was no foreigner
virgil aikens was not the only fighter

it hasnt always been this way
ellington was not a street

Shot in 1967 and released in March 1968, by the young, engaged filmmaker Charles Belmont, Mood Indigo is a political interpretation of Boris Vian’s novel of 1947. The poetic world of Vian, mixing surrealism with jazz and symbolist literature, intersects in the film with references to 19th-century realist painting by Courbet and Millet. These appear as pictures on the walls, transformed into tableaux vivants, or as a personification of Courbet wandering in the landscape. Such paradoxical mobilization of realist painting, which professed to exclude the imagination, needs be considered as constituting a case of the reception of realism in the context of 1968. Over and beyond witnessing how “bourgeois” investments in the cultural heritage could be targeted on the part of militants of the extreme left, Mood Indigo contributes to the subversion of the traditional opposition between the real and the imaginary underlying the mythic graffiti “Be realistic, demand the impossible” that flourished on the walls of Paris that Spring.