Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

POEM: Bocas: A Daughter's Geography, Ntozake Shange, 1983
Editors, The Black Agenda Review
19 Mar 2025
🖨️ Print Article
Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange reminds us that whether we come from Haiti, Savannah, Luanda, or Palestine, we may not speak the same language, but “we fight the same old men.”

In Spanish, “Bocas,” means “mouths.” “Bocas” is also shorthand for a town and archipelago in Panama, Bocas del Toro (“Bull’s Mouths”), on the Caribbean edge of the Isthmus, where, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the US multinational corporation United Fruit Company acquired thousands of acres of indigenous land from Guaymi, Teribe and Bokota. They turned the land into lucrative banana plantations, importing thousands of West Indians as exploited and underpaid labor.

“Bocas” is also the title of a poem by writer Ntozoke Shange. Shange’s “Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography” is a poem about naming and space and resistance. In the poem, Shange connects supposedly distant and distinct places — “salvador & johannesburg” “santiago & brixton,” “capetown & palestine” — in a common cartography of solidarity and revolt. In so doing, in “Bocas,” Shange rebukes an imperialist capture of space and territory that would narcissistically rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” or brazenly seize the Panama Canal, handing it over to US corporate interests and reverting the Republic to a colony.

And in “Bocas,” Shange reminds us that, although we, in Chicago or San Juan or Luanda or Palestine  “cannot speak the same language… we fight the same old men.”

Ntozake Shange’s “Bocas: A Daughter’s Geography” is reprinted below.

Bocas: A Daughter's Geography

Ntozake Shange                                      

i have a daughter/ mozambique
i have a son/ angola
our twins
salvador & johannesburg/ cannot speak
the same language
but we fight the same old men/ in the new world

we are so hungry for the morning
we’re trying to feed our children the sun
but a long time ago/ we boarded ships/ locked in
depths of seas our spirits/ kisst the earth
on the atlantic side of nicaragua costa rica
our lips traced the edges of cuba puerto rico
charleston & savannah/ in haiti
we embraced &
made children of the new world
but old men spit on us/ shackled our limbs
but for a minute
our cries are the panama canal/ the yucatan
we poured thru more sea/ more ships/ to manila
ah ha we’re back again
everybody in manila awready speaks spanish

the old men sent for the archbishop of canterbury
“can whole continents be excommunicated?”
“what wd happen to the children?”
“wd their allegiance slip over the edge?”
“don’t worry bout lumumba/ don’t even think bout
ho chi minh/ the dead cant procreate”
so say the old men

but I have a daughter/ la habana
I have a son/ guyana
our twins
santiago & brixton/ cannot speak
the same language
yet we fight the same old men

the ones who think helicopters rhyme with hunger
who think patrol boats can confiscate a people
the ones whose dreams are full of none of our
children
they see mae west & harlow in whittled white cafes
near managua/ listening to primitive rhythms in
jungles near pétionville
with bejeweled benign natives
ice skating in abidjan
unaware of the rest of us in chicago
all the dark urchins
rounding out the globe/ primitively whispering
the earth is not flat old men

there is no edge
no end to the new world
cuz I have a daughter/ trinidad
I have a son/ san juan
our twins
capetown & palestine/ cannot speak the same
language/ but we fight the same old men
the same men who thought the earth waz flat
go on over the edge/ go on over the edge old men
you’ll see us in luanda, or the rest of us
in chicago
rounding out the morning/
we are feeding our children the sun

Ntozake Shange, “Bocas: A Daughter's Geography,” from A Daughter’s Geography (St. Martin’s Press, 1983).

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles? Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


More Stories


  • BAR Radio Logo
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Black Agenda Radio September 19, 2025
    20 Sep 2025
    In this week’s segment, we discuss a new book that analyzes the latest iteration of fascism currently emerging in the United States. But first, we are joined by a journalist and activist who has…
  • Rosa Clemente
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    The Black Puerto Rican Radical Tradition
    19 Sep 2025
    Our guest is Rosa Clemente, who is an activist, independent journalist, and currently a Doctoral student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst…
  • From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Fascism American Style
    19 Sep 2025
    A new anthology, From the Flag to the Cross: Fascism American Style, was recently published by OR Books. We're joined by co-editor Michael Steven Smith, a retired attorney, former board member of the…
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    White Power
    17 Sep 2025
    The power structure in the U.S. can be boiled down to a system of might, and white, making right. Donald Trump has exposed its rotten foundations and the two-faced collaborators who keep it running.
  • Editors, The Black Agenda Review
    ESSAY: U.S., The Caribbean, and the Future, Tim Hector, 1984
    17 Sep 2025
    “There has been divide and rule in the modern Caribbean with a vengeance, all in the interest of US hegemony over the economic, military and political destiny of the Caribbean as a whole.”
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us