REVIEW:

IS ENUF ENOUGH?

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

by Ntozake Shange

I really hope no white' person ever has cause to write about me because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and they'll probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that all the while I was quite happy.

--Nikki Giovanni

The above lines are taken from Nikki-Roasa, a poem written in the late 60's, a time when the Black political population insisted on the right to articulate and to interpret its own experience. As a minority group comes to recognize its oppression, it needs to separate from the general culture in order to discover its uniqueness, strengths, and limitations. White feminists learned to accept the need for Black separatism, especially as practiced by Black women whose concerns centered on the struggle for civil rights, the degradation of the Black male, and the fragility of the Black family. For years it seemed enough to acknowledge that the attitudes, values and overall lives of Black women were very different from those of White women. One simply guessed at whether these differences originated in race per se or in socio-economic background. More than a decade has passed. Today, Black people, particularly women, seem more willing to share their experience with White women. For Colored Girls is a cultural sign of pride, confidence and revelation of what it has felt like to be misunderstood, esranged from other Black sisters, and ready to search for new sources of emotional support among them. Because I see these changes in perspective, I feel fairly comfortable responding to this play, without -fear of playing the oppressor.

We have access to so few dramatic examples of "Black experience" that the ones we do see, i.e., Roots, become laden with significance and therefore distorted. Specific themes tend to become generalized as characteristic of an entire subculture. Complex characters may diminish into commercialized culture heroes and paperthin stereotypes. Labels such as the one I've used -the "Black experience" -become thoughtless terms terms which in reality represent a vast range of perspectives and a rich variety of peoples. One can avoid these reductions by looking closely at an artwork and seeing how it differs from others.

For Colored Girls was presented for the first time in December of 1974 at the Bacchanal, a women's bar just outside Berkeley, California. During the summer prior to the opening, Ntozake Shange began a series of seven poems, following the example of Judy Grahn's The Common Woman: "They were numbered pieces; the women were to be nameless and assume hegemony as dictated by the fullness of their lives" (excerpted from the Macmillan edition of For Colored Girls). The poet identified two sources of inspiration for her choreo. poem. The first arose from an intensely feminist atmosphere, including a strong commitment to a theatre group, involvement with Third World women writers, and contact with poetry readings by the Shameless Hussy Press and the Oakland Women's Press Collective. The second emerged from the more "stable" (as Ntozake calls it) influence of academic studies, especially Women's Studies at Sonoma State College, where she studied subjects directly related to her sense of self:

... Unearthing the mislaid, forgotten, and/or

page 14/January, 1978/What She Wants

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misunderstood women writers, painters, mothers, cowgirls, and union leaders of our pasts proved 'to be both a supportive experience and a challenge not to let them down, not to do less than --at all costs not be less woman than--our mothers, from Isis to Marie Laurencin, Zora Neale Hurtson to Kathe Kollwitz, Anna May Wong to Calamity Jane.

Ntozake was born as Paulette Williams to wealthy parents in Trenton, N.J. At the age of 8 she integrated an all-White school. She married at 19, divorced later on, and made several suicide attempts in successive years. Ntozake Shange chose her name for its African origins, meaning "She who comes with her own thing" and "She who walks like a lion." She graduated with honors from Barnard College in 1970 and received a Master's degree in American Studies at USC.

Triumphant

Ntozake Shange photograph by Ebony Magazine, August, 1977

After its opening, For Colored Girls continued to play in bars, coffee houses, and dance studios until 1976, when director Oz Scott and producer Woodie King brought it to the "legitimate" theatre on both coasts. Ntozake Shange is presently working on a play called A Photograph: A Still Life With Shadows /A Photograph: A Study of Cruelty, and a novel and screen play named Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo. She left the Broadway production of For Colored Girls because "perhaps it . . . is either too big for my off-off Broadway taste, or too little for my exaggerated sense of freedom, held over from seven years of improvised poetry readings" (synopsis compiled from the Macmillan edition of For Colored Girls and from the August 1977 edition of Ebony).

For Colored Girls is unusual because its fluid form allows a series of images, rhythms and voices to organize themselves into a whole picture of Black female survival. This organic shape has a beginning and an end, but between them lay multiple details of real life. The absence of traditional plot makes the play into a documentary drama, in which different kinds of women learn to survive and to keep a firm grip on their self-respect. If there is any plot at all, it is in the progressive realization of the value of process, whereby each portrait adds one more element necessary for the development of personal strength and the recognition of sisterhood as a wellspring of support. The innocent "lady in yellow" on graduation night is glad to remember that "Martin slipped his leg round my thigh;" that

means "WE WAZ GROWN/WE WAS FINALLY GROWN." She liked sex "in the backseat of that ol buick, WOW, by daybreak, I just can't stop grinnin." The "lady in blue" plays at being Puerto Rican in order to appear different from other Blacks.

The combination of sex and love grows tedious for the angry "lady in red," who experiments "to see how selfish i cd be, if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover, if i waz capable to debasin myself for the love of another, if i cd stand not being wanted, when i wanted to be wanted, & i cannot." And then we hear the brave voice of the "lady in orange,' originally played by Ntozake Shange in the Broadway performance in September 1976: "hold yr headlike it was ruby sapphire, i'm a poet, who writes in English, come to share the worlds witchu."

The lady in brown" lives in the delightful world of an imaginative, 8-year-old who discovers in the Adult Reading Room of the public library the Black historical figure, Toussaint, who "didn't low no white man to tell him nothing." In her magical discussions with him Toussaint gives her a sense of purpose and integrity, devising "strategies how to remove white girls from my hopscotch games" and taking her on a secretive journey to Haiti. But the little girl meets a Toussaint Jones, a tough young boy who also takes "no stuff from no white folks, ya dont see none round heah do ya." And Toussant Jones wins, because he's "wid me speakin english and eatin apples yeah."

We are lured by the lovely, icy world of sechita, who wears silk roses behind her ears and orange butterflies "tween slight bosoms." We watch her draw a "bath of dark musk oil egyptian crystals and florida water to remove his smell" and to shed her mask, becoming a "regular colored girl fulla the same malice livid indifference as a sistah worn from supportin a wd be hornplayer or waitin by the window." We wince as sechita records her current exploit in her diary and then cries herself to sleep.

Some Black women still speak of the shortage of proud Black males. Keen competition for men separates Black women from each other but in a very compelling way unites them in intimacy and understanding. The poet conveys this bond in a complex scene of despair and comfort, as three women who have the same lover learn that one of them has been rejected by him:

she held her head on her lap

the lap of her sisters soakin up tears

each understanding how much love stood between them

how much love between them love between them love like sisters.

The "lady in orange" intervenes to announce that her poem is a requiem for that part of herself which had tried to love her man sincerely in spite of all the odds against her to become a "colored girl an evil woman a bitch or a nag." All of her sorrow and bitterness seems self-indulgent but necessary.

Then one dancer sets in motion a serious move. ment, passing it on to the next dancer, to the next, to all the "colored" ladies: "My love is too delicate to have thrown back in my face." The description of each kind of love changes with each dancer -to "beautiful," "sanctified," "magic," "saturday nite," "complicated," and "music" as they chant each other's word and climax with the word "complicated" in a peak of life and togetherness. We can feel the turning point.

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The "lady in green" confidently explains that "somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff". She wants to make sure that the audience understands that "this is a woman's trip and i need my stuff," such things as her voice, her rhythms, her arm "wit the hot iron scar", and her "leg wit the