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For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide For
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide For
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
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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
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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.
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"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)
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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).
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