Ntozake Shange (1948- ) – her name sounds like “Ento Zocky Shongay” – is a great American writer who found herself growing up as a black woman. She is famous for writing the Broadway play “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf” (1975). Her writing is angry but beautiful, full of pain but full of joy too.
She writes the books she wished she could have read growing up as a black girl in America.
Her father was a doctor. They were rich. He taught her to be proud of being black. As a girl she met Josephine Baker, Dizzy Gillepsie, Chuck Berry, W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson and other famous black Americans. She learned to play the violin and to dance. She went to poetry readings. She loved to read. She read Melville, Langston Hughes, Dostoevsky and others. She read books in French and Spanish too.
In many ways she lived in a perfect world, but none of it prepared her for what would come next.
In those days in America – in the 1950s – white children went to white schools and black children went to black schools. Then the highest court in the land said that this broke the law: they had to go to the same schools.
Shange lived across the street from the all-black school where she went. They told her she now had to go to a white school.
She had to take three buses to go across town to get there. But that was the easy part. When she got there she found out that the white children hated her because she was black. She had no way to make sense of it. She wrote about it in “Betsey Brown” (1985), a book that took her ten years to write.
She did well at school and then went to Barnard College in New York and got married. But then her husband left her. She tried to kill herself four times. She stuck her head in an oven; she drank poison; she cut her wrist; she drove her car into the ocean. But none of it worked. So she wrote about it. She had to write about it – it was the only way she could live.
She wrote about it in 20 poems. That became the play, “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf”. It started out in the jazz lofts of Soho in New York. In time it made it to Broadway and then across the country.
The other day I read a poem of hers, “you are sucha fool”. It has been 15 years since I last read it, but it all came back to me and I loved it all over again. Few poets are that good.
In 1971 she got rid of her slave name, Paulette Williams, and named herself Ntozake Shange. It is a Zulu name, Xhosan in fact. Her last name means she walks like a lion.
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Ntozake Shange is a gifted writer. I enjoyed the book For Colored Girls Who Committed Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf. That book was so controversial because she had portrayed some of the Black male characters negatively. But it had struck a response in some Black women, though.
Stephanie B.
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I know she can be hard on men, but I still love her. It is clear she likes men and does not paint them all with the same brush. That is part of why I posted “you are sucha fool” – to show that.
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I think I must read her book, there are two bloggers that I am aware of who have named their blogs after her book.
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@Stepahnie B- The Colored Purple was also controversal because of the way that black men were portrayed. I find it intersting that blk men were/are up in arms about their portrayl in African-American lit when what is said about blk women in rap music is 10x worse.
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Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo is quite good too.
The Color Purple has one horrible black man (Alphonso) and one who kinda comes around. I’m not a fan of black women being portrayed as weak (Celie) or sex-crazed (Shug), but those are realities just as there are physically and sexually abusive black men. These are not at all unique to African-American or black women. It happens today in pretty much every community and I’m quite sure it happened far more often back then when it was far more difficult to leave such a situation.
I haven’t read For Colored Girls… so I can’t comment. I would be surprised after reading her other works to find that black men in general are demonized.
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Wow what a beauty – the whole deal, bodymindsoul and poeticvision. An enduring voice of the black and human struggle to just BE.
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The 40th anniversary of For Colored Girls. I wish the young folks could watch the original play on DVD and compare it to the Tyler Perry one. The Tyler Perry film was not as horrible as i expected but it is not the same, seeing how the original was a choreo/poem and i wondered how this would transfer to film.
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Thinking of pulling out Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo. I listened to a sample on Audible and liked the lyrical and magical prose. May she RIP. We lost her this year in October right after her birthday.
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I didn’t know about those multiple suicide attempts. So out of all her sadness she wrote powerful and beautiful words.
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I thought that zulu and xhosa – being rival groups, at war for at least the past 200 years – would be totally different people. But no…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language
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She passed last year.
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