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For Colored Girls who have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow
is Enuf by Ntozake Shange
Table of Contents
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf Study Guide consists of approx. 53 pages of summaries and analysis on for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange. Browse the literature study guide below:
Introduction
Author Biography
Plot Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analysis
Poem One
Sequence One
Sequence Two
Sequence Three
Sequence Four
Sequence Five
Finale
Characters
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Critical Essay #1
Critical Essay #2
Critical Essay #3
Media Adaptations
Topics for Further Study
Compare & Contrast
What Do I Read Next?
Further Reading
Sources
Copyright Information
How to Cite for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf Study Guide
Introduction
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf is a choreopoem, a poem (really a series of 20 separate poems) choreographed to music. Although a printed text cannot convey the full impact of a performance of for colored girls..., Shange's stage directions provide a sense of the interrelationships among the performers and of their gestures and dance movements.
The play begins and ends with the lady in brown. The other six performers represent the colors of the rainbow: the ladies in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. The various repercussions of "bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma" are explored through the words, gestures, dance, and music of the seven ladies, who improvise as they shift in and out of different roles. In the 1970s, when Ntozake Shange herself performed in for colored girls..., she continually revised and refined the poems and the movements in her search to express a female black identity. Improvisation is central to her celebration of the uniqueness of the black female body and language, and it participates in the play's theme of movement as a means to combat the stasis of the subjugation. In studying this play in its textual, static format one should, therefore, keep in mind the improvisational character of actual performance and realize that stasis is the opposite of what Shange wanted for this play. In fact, in her preface she announces to readers that while they listen, she herself is already "on the other side of the rainbow" with "other work to do." She has moved on, as she expects her readers to do as well.
This complete Introduction contains 275 words. This study guide contains 15,941 words (approx. 53 pages at 300 words per page).
Author Biography
Born Paulette Williams on October 18,1948, Shange, at the age of twenty-three, adopted the Zulu name Ntozake (pronounced "en-toe-zak-ee" and meaning "she who comes with her own things") Shange (pronounced "shon-gay" and meaning "who walks like a lion") as a name more appropriate to her poetic talents. She felt that her Anglo-Saxon last name was associated with slavery and her given name was a feminized version of the male name Paul. Shange once stated in an interview that she changed her name to disassociate herself from the history of a culture that championed slavery.
Shange grew up in an affluent family and read voraciously in English, French, and Spanish (the latter with the aid of dictionaries). She also associated with jazz greats Josephine Baker, Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, Dizzie Gillespie, and Charlie Parker, who were friends of her parents. She led a privileged existence, but she felt overprotected and not an active part of the Civil Rights movement taking place around her, though racism affected her daily school life in St. Louis during the family's five-year stay in that city. She explained, in an interview with Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post, that "nobody was expecting me to do anything because I was colored and I was also female, which was not very easy to deal with." After graduating from Barnard with honors, she moved to Harlem and became closely acquainted with the plight of impoverished black women in the city. The anger she felt as a result of the victimization she witnessed and experienced was expressed in the poem "Beau Willie" (later to be adapted as "a nite with beau willie brown" in for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf), which she wrote while listening to the screams of a woman being beaten by her husband, who laughed as he hit her. Shange experienced more unhappiness while briefly married to a law student, and attempted suicide a number of times. Still undecided on a career, she earned her Master of Arts degree in American studies at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in 1973 and began teaching classes at various colleges in Northern California.
One night while driving home after teaching an evening class and feeling especially depressed, Shange saw a huge rainbow over the city of Oakland, California, and realized that women have a right to survive, because as she asserted in a 1976 New York Times interview, they "have as much right and as much purpose for being here as air and mountains do." In that same interview, Shange explained that she realized that the rainbow is "the possibility to start all over again with the power and beauty of ourselves," Her experience inspired the title of for colored girls ..., composed of twenty poems she wrote over a period of years and read in women's bars in San Francisco during the summer of 1974. She later took her choreographed poems to New York, After two years of off-Broadway performances and with the help of a New York director, Shange combined her poems and formed them into a production that ran for 747 performances on Broadway. Shange continues to write drama, fiction, and poetry, but for colored girls ... remains her biggest commercial and critical success. She has indicated that she would prefer to be known for more than this work. She would rather be known for her current non-commercial work, including her bilingual work with Latin American working people's theater, her association with the Feminist Art Institute, and her construction of installation art.
This complete Author Biography contains 592 words. This study guide contains 15,941 words (approx. 53 pages at 300 words per page).
Plot Summary
Dark phrases
The play opens with seven women dressed in the colors of the rainbow plus brown, running onto the stage from various directions and then freezing in place. The spotlight picks out the lady in brown, who comes to life and performs the poem "dark phrases," which speaks of the trials of a young black girl growing into womanhood in America. The other six women chime in after the lady in brown says "let her be born" as being from "outside Chicago," "outside Detroit," "outside Houston," and so on. The melancholy mood shifts to a playful rendition of "mama's little baby loves shortnin" and dance ("let your backbone slip") and a game of freeze tag, which is interrupted by the next poem.
Graduation nite
A theme of male assault combined with longing for male companionship is introduced, as the lady in yellow narrates, with some pride, how she lost her virginity in the back seat of a car. The other ladies variously express their agreement with or disgust over her joy in the discovery of sex.
Now i love somebody more than
Their discussion slides into this next poem, narrated by the lady in blue, who says she has Puerto Rican blood. Speaking some Spanish she describes her love of music and dancing and of the men who make music. The rest of the ladies softly join in saying "team masque" ("Hove you more than").
No assistance
The lady in red interrupts to tell that in spite of rebuffed love she continues to "debase herself for the love of another." But she ends in strength when she says "this note is attached to a plant/i've been waterin' since the day i met you/you may water it/ yr damn self." The lady in orange responds with a throwback to her desire for love and joy {"i wanna sing make you dance"). The rest of the ladies join in with "we gotta dance to keep from cryin," "we gotta dance to keep from dyin."
I'ma poet who
The dancmg culminates in an declaration of pride in expression summed up by (he lines, "hold yr head like it was a ruby sapphire/i'm a poet who writes in english/come to share worlds with you,"
Latent rapists
A sudden change of light causes the ladies to "react as if they had been struck in the face," and they collaborate on a poem describing the shock of date rape for those who expected violence to come from a stranger, "a man wit obvious problems," and not a friend. ' The nature of rape has changed" and now a woman may find violence instead of the companionship she seeks.
Abortion cycle #1
Again the lighting announces a slap to the face, as the lady in blue describes her experience with an abortion as "steel rods" inside, and no one comes to comfort her because in her shame, she had told no one. She exits.
Sechita
The lady in purple narrates the uneasy queenage of a beautiful biracial stage star, Sechita, who nightly dances the role of an Egyptian goddess of love in a tawdry Creole carnival while men try to throw gold coins between her legs. As the lady in purple narrates, the lady in green dances the life of Sechita. At the end both exit and the lady in brown appears.
Toussaint
The lady in brown now relates how at age eight, while reading in the adult library, she discovered Toussaint L'Ouverture, the admired hero of the Haitian French Revolution of the late 18th century. Toussaint becomes her ideal imaginary black male companion until she meets Toussaint Jones, who also claims to "take no stuff from no white folks," and who has the advantage of being in the here and now. She accepts him as a replacement for Toussaint L'Ouverture
One
The lady in red narrates her story of a sequined butterfly and rose-adorned prostitute who plays her role perfectly, a hot, "deliberate coquette." She uses mens' desires to get what she wants, and she hopes to wound them in return, on behalf of other women "camoflagin despair &/stretchmarks." Before dawn, she bathes and throws the man out, writes the episode into her diary, and then cries herself to sleep.
I used to live in the world
The lady in blue next describes the telescoping of her world down to a stifling six blocks in Harlem, where, if she is "nice" or a "reglar beauty," she runs the risk of being molested by a black man in the dark. The four ladies freeze and then move into place for the next poem.
pyramid
The lady in purple describes a three-way female friendship that is "like a pyramid" with "one laugh" and "one music." They all fall in love with one man, who chooses one of them. The others fend off his attempts to betray her with them, honoring their friendship over their need for a man. Finally, the chosen one finds the rose she'd given to him on her friend's desk. The two discover him with yet another woman, and so the three ladies join together for support and love. Sharp music interrupts them and the ladies dance away "as if catching a disease from the lady next to her," and then they freeze.
no more loves poems #1, #2, #3, and #4
The four poems which follow are spoken by the ladies in orange, purple, blue, and yellow, respeclively. #1 laments the plight of the "colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag" who ends up "in the bottom of [some man's] shoe." #2 asks to be accepted just as she is, "no longer symmetrical & impervious to pain," #3 asks why black women ("we") don't go ahead and "be white then/& make everythin dry & abstract wit no rhythm" but she realizes that she can't think her way out of wanting love even if she cannot find someone worthy to love. #4 announces that "bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical/dilemma." All seven ladies join in a chorus of "my love is too delicate [alternately: beautiful; sanctified; etc.] to have thrown back in my face." This leads to a celebratory dance and chant.
somebody almost walked offwid alia my stuff
The lady in green testifies that someone has robbed her of her memories and her things that make her who she is everything except her poems and dance.
Sorry
The ladies chime in, scorning the variations on "i'm sorry" that men have told them.
a nite with beau wittie brown
The refrain "there was no air" punctuates this wrenching poem in which beau willie brown tries to force crystal to say she'll marry him by holding their two children out of the fifth-floor window; when she can only whisper her affirmative answer, he drops the children.
a laying on of hands
All of the ladies join in declaiming the power of "a laying on of hands," not a man or even a mother's hug, to heal them through their own holiness. The lady in red announces that she found god in herself and "loved her fiercely." The play ends with the lady in brown, who repeats the opening lines with the verb in present tense: "& this is for colored girls who have considered/suicide/but are movin to the ends of their own/rainbows."
This complete Plot Summary contains 1,226 words. This study guide contains 15,941 words (approx. 53 pages at 300 words per page).
Poem One Summary
Seven African-American ladies, each in a dress of a different color, run onstage, take up a position of distress and freeze. The lady in brown speaks of the voices of African-American women as being ghostly, unheard amidst screams, whispers and promises. In intense poetic imagery, she calls to the other ladies to find their voices, speak and sing.