BOOK REVIEW: NTOZAKE SHANGE'S SASSAFRASS, CYPRESS & INDIGO

The temptation to confuse, or at least identify certain artists with their creations is hard to resist. It's that way with poet and playwright Ntozake Shange. If the women in her poems, plays, stories, and, most recently, her novel, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, (St. Martin's Press, 1982; $10.95), are not parts of Shange herself, they sure pull their clothes from the same closet, cook from the same pots and hum the same tunes, the blues and the Art Ensemble of Chicago blowing much of the air around them.

Author of three plays* and an ad- aptation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children, Shange is best known for her choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, a celebration and tribute to being black and woman in Am- erica. for colored girls was first per- formed in 1974 at the now defunct Bac- chanal, a women's bar in Berkeley. Shange has always given the Bay Area women's community credit for much of the support and encouragement she received in those early days of her career. when she returns here, it is something of a homecoming.

And

So

Sashaying into town with Shange this last time, the end of September, were Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, three more coloured girls, this time, sisters hailing from Charleston, South Carolina. As in her poetry, Shange's first novel evokes smells, textures, sounds and pic- tures of blackness, of woman, of magic. And like magic, all is not predictable and the world may appear not as it seems. This is not a novel in the conventional sense. Shange maintains the book's strongest narrative line, and creates the most vivid characters, in the first section, the story of Indigo, youngest of the three sisters. Indigo is yet a child, though in the course of her stor- y she becomes a woman. Indigo hears her dolls speak. Indigo sees the world as it might have been. Indigo walks through that world with all the sureness and de- light of one who refuses to be less than herself.

"She made herself, her world, from all that she came from. She looked a- round her at the wharf. If

there was nobody there but white folks, she made them In the grocer-

black folks.

トト

une white IOLKS were

buying up all the fresh

collards and okra, she made

4

1983 Helen Keller