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    A Study Guide for Ntozake Shange's "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf"
    A Study Guide for Ntozake Shange's "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf"
    A Study Guide for Ntozake Shange's "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf"
    Ebook38 pages35 minutes

    A Study Guide for Ntozake Shange's "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Ntozake Shange's "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 27, 2016
    ISBN9781535823494
    A Study Guide for Ntozake Shange's "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Ntozake Shange's "for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf" - Gale

      3

      For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf

      Ntozake Shange

      1975

      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.

      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

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