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  • For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide For

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    Logan Gould
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    Ntozake Shange is an acclaimed African American poet and playwright known for her work "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf." The choreopoem debuted in 1976 and tells the stories of black women through a fusion of poetry, song, and movement. Shange draws from her own experiences and those of women she met to portray the lives and struggles of women of color. The work has themes of feminism, oppression, and empowerment. It helped establish Shange as an influential voice in black feminist literature.

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    For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide for

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    Ntozake Shange is an acclaimed African American poet and playwright known for her work "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf." The choreopoem debuted in 1976 and tells the stories of black women through a fusion of poetry, song, and movement. Shange draws from her own experiences and those of women she met to portray the lives and struggles of women of color. The work has themes of feminism, oppression, and empowerment. It helped establish Shange as an influential voice in black feminist literature.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    6K views5 pages

    For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide For

    Uploaded by

    Logan Gould
    Ntozake Shange is an acclaimed African American poet and playwright known for her work "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf." The choreopoem debuted in 1976 and tells the stories of black women through a fusion of poetry, song, and movement. Shange draws from her own experiences and those of women she met to portray the lives and struggles of women of color. The work has themes of feminism, oppression, and empowerment. It helped establish Shange as an influential voice in black feminist literature.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    SHANGE, Ntozake - For Colored Girls Who Have Considered

    Suicide, Macmillan Publishing Co.,Inc., New York, N.Y.,


    1977.
    Who is Ntozake Shange?

    Zaki Shange, as it is known in U.S.A., is a young author,


    one of the most admired poets known nowadays in U.S.A., and she
    had the honor of having three of her plays represented at the
    same time in New York. Her work is dedicated to the women of
    the "third world". She lives today in New York where she teaches
    literature in Columbia University.
    "For colored girls who have considered suicide when the
    rainbow is enuf", started her professional career in New York,
    in the "Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre" and it had such
    great success that from there it went to the "Booth Theatre" on
    Broadway where it opened in September of 1976, and is still pla/
    ing today to full houses.
    Shange knows Brazil and she thinks of coming here for the
    opening of her play.

    N. Shange's work:
    IF there is one artist whose work best symbolizes the arts
    explosion, it is Ntozake Shange. Her choreo-poem, " For Colored
    girls. . .", breaks the boundaries between poetry and theater,
    dance and realism, verbal meters and jazz rhythms, street talk
    and "high art". Nurtured by both the new voices of black poets
    and the shared vision of feminist groups, Shange has burst into
    the nation's consciousness without compromise, and with an art
    that speaks real life.
    Her work had origin in a group of poems represented not in
    a theatre but in a space in S. Francisco, in California, with
    the author and some poems, music and five women reciting and
    dancing on the spur of the moment. It was exactly at that time,
    in S. Francisco, 1974, that the group had other contacts with
    different women coming from various parts of the world to the

    61
    to the University. In the dancing classes, N. Shange exchanged
    some ideas with those women and started collecting their experien
    ces forming a whole that involves every woman in the world. This
    inspired Shange to study literary women's problems from Ancient
    times till the present. Parallel to literature, she dedicated
    her time to dance and corporal expression, as main parts of
    her poetry.
    From those informal and improvised choreopoems, appeared "For
    Girls". The poems were numbered, without titles, staged by girls
    of every race; each of those girls were named "Lady in blue", in
    brown, in green, etc., trying to give us a message of women from
    all colors, races, nameless, timeless, and placeless - a feminine
    experience throughout all times.
    Then came the last title "For colored girls who have consider
    ed suicide when the rainbow is enuf"; all the poems were entitled
    by the name "choreopoem" so describe the deep relation between
    poetry and dance. This choreopoem reflects, in words and move
    ment, the different moments of a woman's life - her successses,
    her fights, her errors, her passions, showing to us a perspective
    of the woman as a human being, discovering her identity is the
    world where she lives.
    A colored woman being, a marron one, forgotten in society,
    woman "of never having been a girl" sings her melody, a melody
    of self-assertion, her song brighter and happier than her and
    in a warm dance, the one in yellow, in purple in red, in green,
    in blue and in orange appear putting an end to their own vast
    worlds, "moved to the ends of their own rainbows" and being
    born again.
    Harsh music 'is heard and the thythm increases violently
    and accelerates more and more, till it stops.
    And silently the colored women become colored, delicate
    children, growing, growing slowly till they become girls, being
    accompanied by an appropriate musical rhythm.
    Suddenly they are women again and each one on the stage of
    life tells in a musical way of dancing her problems, her anguish
    and her hopes. There were the black folks and their music, there
    on the stage, crying for freedom in real a search for woman's

    62
    freedom. This identity also translates the woman's necessity
    of making the others know about her body. She has a body that
    wants to live and to be considered, not only an object used
    or rejected by men.

    "she waz hot


    a deliberate coquette
    who never did without
    what she wanted
    she wanted to
    be unforgettable
    she wanted to be a memory
    a wound. . . to every man
    arrogant enough to want her
    she was the wrath
    of women in windows
    fingerin shades lace curtains
    camoflagin despair
    stretch marks
    so she glittered honestly
    delighted she waz desired
    allowed those especially
    schemin/tactful suitors
    to experience her body 8 spirit
    tearin/ so easily blendin with theirs/. . .(I)

    She has a body that doesn't want any longer to continue


    being prostituted, a body that in the depth of the night, colored
    by the lights and the music wants to be loved and carelessly re
    membered. But she has a spirit too, thirsty for another athmos
    phere, a different one from that where she lives. harlem quarters:
    "want be good
    not good at all
    to meet a tall short black brown young man
    fulla his power
    in the dark
    in my universe of six blocks
    straight up brick walls
    women hangin outta windows
    like of silk stockings
    cats cryin / children gigglin/ a tavern wit red
    curtains
    bad smells/ kissin ladies smilin 8 dirt
    sidewalks spittin/ men cursing/ playin. (2)

    63
    "For colored girls. . ." is an inner complex frustrated
    love song, planted in a woman's heart, in a colored woman's
    heart, that is nothing more than a lamentation:
    "Ever since I realized there waz someone callt
    a colored girl an evil woman a bitch on a nag
    i been tryin not to be that d leave bitterness
    in somebody else' cup/ come to somebody to love me
    without deep & nasty smellin scald from lyi orbein
    left scream' in a street fulla lunaticsMhisperin
    slut bitch bitch niggah. . . (3)

    It is a desperate, deluded song of women who don't believe


    any more in men's love. I would say. It is a song of someone who
    suffered in the skin all rude men's treatment. . . and the play
    ends with a woman chorus, into a closed tight circle ( a femi
    nine circle):

    "i found god in myself


    & i loved her/ i loved her fiercely"
    Even god is her. . . isn't that also a proof of their les
    bian tendency, after being deluded by men's love?

    "I waz missin somethin" - lady in red


    "a layin on of hands" - lady in purple
    "not a man" - lady in blue
    But the end comes as lady in brown says:
    "&this is for colored girls who have considered suicide/ but
    are movin to their own rainbows". . .

    MARIA HELENA NORONHA

    64
    PART II - LITERARY CRITICISM
    LESLIE FIEDLER: HAMBURGER, LIT AND COCA-COLA
    (excerpts from a Lecture given by Leslie Fiedler at the
    Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in August of 1979).

    65

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