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    For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf
    For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf
    For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf
    Ebook112 pages1 hour

    For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf

    By Ntozake Shange

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Ntozake Shange’s classic, award-winning play encompassing the wide-ranging experiences of Black women, now with introductions by two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and Broadway director Camille A. Brown.

    From its inception in California in 1974 to its Broadway revival in 2022, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country for nearly fifty years. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be a woman of color in the 20th century.

    First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing…every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Now with new introductions by Jesmyn Ward and Broadway director Camille A. Brown, and one poem not included in the original, here is the complete text of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

    Editor's Note

    Profound & Provocative...

    Profound, provocative, & full of passion, Shange’s interlinked performance poems give voice to the previously voiceless.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateNov 2, 2010
    ISBN9781451624151
    For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf
    Author

    Ntozake Shange

    Ntozake Shange (1948–2018) was a renowned playwright, poet, theater director, and novelist. Her body of work includes Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Some Sing Some Cry with Ifa Bayeza, and the posthumous Dance We Do: A Poet Explores Black Dance and I Am an Old Woman. Among her numerous accolades are the Langston Hughes Medal for Literature, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s 2018 Shelley Memorial Award and three AUDELCO awards. Ms. Shange’s work has been nominated for a Grammy, a Tony, and an Emmy.

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    Reviews for For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      My rating here is mostly based on the subject matter. Through the poems in this collection, Shange shares the experiences that disproportionately affect women, and specifically women of color. There are big traumatic things like abuse, rape, and pregnancy, but there are also the everyday things like feeling that you're trapped in your current life with no way to make it better.

      As for technique, I found some poems confusing because of the author's use of unconventional spacing, punctuation, sentence fragments, and interjections. However, poetry can be difficult to review objectively because it reflects the feeling of a brief moment. Unless that moment, that feeling, and that wording resonates with you the reader, the whole poem falls flat. In addition to reading this book, I'd suggest watching a performance or listening to a reading of some of the selections. That is, after all, how it was originally released, so it may provide useful visuals and context.
    • 5/5
      “For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf” is a heart-wrenching choreopoem that shows the influence in sisterhood. Women of African decedents of all shades are united together to share their stories of laughs, adventures, and struggles. We tend to never expose our struggles. Maybe because we fear embarrassment. Maybe because we feel there would be a lack of compassion or support. After reading this book, my final take is that there is strength in being vulnerable. When we take the chance to be vulnerable and show our struggles, we discover that we are not alone.
    • 5/5
      One of the most moving poetic works I've ever read. So dark, yet so full of life. Even with minimal description, the narrators came to life in my mind, so much so that I imagined different voices for each. Truly a beautiful work.
    • 5/5
      ❤

    Book preview

    For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf - Ntozake Shange

    Beginning, Middles and New Beginnings—

    A Mandala for Colored Girls

    Musings and Meditations on the Occasion of

    the Second Publication

    By Ntozake Shange

    for colored girls began in the middle of itself. One early San Francisco evening when I could walk in circles through fog, I felt I was skipping through the mists, rinsing myself in damp clouds, licking the salty sweat at night. I started Cypress’ diary: I am outside St. Louis and this is for colored girls who have moved to the ends of their own rainbows. Later Cypress became the second daughter in Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo. My pieces seemed to fold in on each other and I fed them into each other. My girls in varied colors in all of my works, from Betsey Brown to Liliane, live in the journey of this work, were born in the journey of this work, for colored girls. From solo voice to theatre, from poetry to play, from random order to the rainbow, for colored girls has always encompassed them all.

    The poems finding their way through me to the audience, for that story, let me go back to the beginning, one of many. In 1975, Paula Moss, a dancer with an MFA from Irvine, and I drove across country from San Francisco with for colored girls in its nascent form to perform at the alternative Newport Jazz Festival at Studio Rivbea in Lower Manhattan. We had no idea of the momentous theatrical journey we were beginning.

    My sister Ifa Bayeza saw that performance and had a larger vision of for colored girls than I had ever imagined. A playwright, Ifa had been trying for years to convince me to allow others to speak my words, to let theatre artists do my work. As a committed solo spoken-word artist, I was suspect and resistant. I had never even considered having a director. I was a performance poet, not a theatre artist.

    Immediately after the Rivbea I began to book new performances in New York. I stapled offset printed posters to telephone poles throughout the city. I came with my own things, and my own ideas. I didn’t think I needed a director, but I consented to meeting a young recent graduate from the NYU theatre school, whom Ifa had pegged as compatible.

    When I first met Oz Scott, I was dubious. At the height of 6ʹ4ʺ and with his long patrician nose, Oz had the immediate appearance of a man looking down on the world. A Charles de Gaulle from Mount Vernon. He proved, however, to be disarmingly warm and self-effacing, and while quiet to the point of concern in casual conversation, he was so animated in his enthusiasm for my words and about his vision for them, that he won me over.

    What does a director do? I asked. I had scheduled a new performance at Old Reliable, a galley bar on Avenue D in the East Village. When I came to the first rehearsal I immediately saw Oz’s influence. He had assembled a group of actors, five young women. The five added to Paula and myself became seven, the rainbow. Oz had made such a natural leap, physicalizing the image, giving the rainbow a human form. I was suddenly surrounded by a circle of women, sacred in construction. My solo voice began its journey to many voices. We bonded immediately and worked with an effortless excitement. While that ensemble would change slightly in the months ahead, the core ensemble remained as it was that first day: myself and Paula Moss, Aku Kadogo, Laurie Carlos, and Trazana Beverley. Later Janet League and Rise Collins completed the set of seven. My sister Ifa sat in occasionally as a second pair of eyes and ears. Oz and I immediately began experimenting, collaborating with the ensemble, matching individual pieces to personalities.

    The poem now i love somebody more than went to the fiery Laurie Carlos with the husk of her voice and the sassy pop of her p’s in my poppa thought he was Puerto Rican. toussaint went to the doe-eyed Janet League, discovering her hero and that first touch of love. Both of these poems are journey poems. In each a young girl runs away with dreams of discovery. One yearns to travel down the Mississippi, the other up up up the stairs to a project party. The poems introduce the girls to other kinds of people of color, other worlds. To adventure, and kindness, and cruelty. Cruelty that we usually think we face alone, but we don’t. We discover that by sharing with each other we find strength to go on. The poems are the play’s first hint of the global misogyny that we women face.

    The ensemble was organic, fluid, and collaborative, all of us learning while doing. Through improvisation, we discovered and enhanced the beginning of the drama. We encountered the children’s games Miss Mary Mack, hopscotch, ring dances, common games which drew most girls of color into a public arena, exhibiting coordination, verbal pyrotechnics, and early sexuality. I watched grown women find the child in themselves, unabashedly shedding the structured worlds their parents had offered them for one of their own making, the secret life of girls.

    From this cloistered circle, all fall down. A girl, a colored girl, journeys again into the wider world, the arbitrary and foreign. "no more

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