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

With its debut in San Francisco in December 1974 and the subsequent Broadway production debut in September 1976, for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf entered the public consciousness during the height of the Womanist movement, Black Feminist Movement, Second-Wave Feminism, the rise of Pan-African political awareness, and the Black Arts Movement, which is the aesthetic arm of the Black Power Movement. Shange’s entry into these conversations created a splash and contributed to her unique position both inside and outside of these movements.

During the 1970s, political consciousness grew at a rapid-fire pace almost globally. Around the world, colonized nations were throwing off their oppressors and making identities and rules for themselves, particularly African nations, most of which gained independence from European colonizers in waves between the 1950s and 1970s. At the same time, African Americans waged their own battles for Civil Rights. The Civil Rights Movement of previous decades primarily focused on creating more humane living conditions in the American South. By the 1970s, many African Americans in northern, urban cities were taking center stage with their calls for Black Power, at the core of which was more equitable and fair living conditions for Black people living in America’s urban centers. They called for freedom in the form of self-determination, cooperative economics, and global unity among Black people. The two were not separate movements at their cores; however, living conditions and attitudes in the South were slightly different expressions of racist and bigoted thinking than the ones people encountered in northern urban cities. Ultimately, many African Americans, no matter their regions, wanted to secure the right to vote, to walk down the street without harassment, to live in clean neighborhoods, and to be treated with human dignity and respect.

The Black Power Movement and its sister, the Black Arts Movement, called for self-determination and the rejection of white and European aesthetics. In his essay “The Black Arts Movement,” Larry Neal calls for Black artists to make art that speaks to and from their communities, work that celebrates Blackness, rather than trying to integrate Black art into the American canon. Published in 1968, the article set the tone for Black arts in the 1970s and beyond. Its influence lasted arguably into the 1990s, when a wave of Black sitcoms centering Black aesthetics in set design, humor, music, dialect, and fashion took over prime time television. Martin Lawrence’s eponymous sitcom is a prime example. In the 1970s, artists like Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Haki R. Madhubuti, Maya Angelou, and Sun Ra were among those who took up the call to create Black Art.

By the time Ntozake Shange enters, many of these conversations are in full swing. With for colored girls, she submits a work that answers the calls put forth by the Black Arts Movement, among others. Her allusions to artists of all kinds include musicians who create in the Black Arts tradition and artists who represent the larger African Diaspora, which signifies her Pan-African consciousness. She mentions Archie Shepp, who combined European musical instruments (already Africanized in the hands of Black jazz players) with West African drums. Shange also invokes Celia Cruz and Willie Colón, both Afro-Latino musicians doing the same as Shepp. Shange also mentions Amiri Baraka with a tone of great respect. Ironically, Baraka rejects Shange’s entry into the Black Arts Movement; he critiqued her heavily, saying that she and others from the West Coast were too “Hollywood” to be taken seriously by the movement. Because he mostly disparaged women in this critique, others suggest that Baraka likely rejected Shange because of her third influence: Womanism (a political and cultural movement for the loving treatment of women that centers the experiences of Black women), a term coined by Alice Walker.

American women in the 1970s also made calls for equality and improved living conditions. Women’s liberation, especially sexual liberation (largely symbolized by the power to have autonomy over and safety within their bodies), was another powerful force in the national conversation. The United States Supreme Court declared that a woman has the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion in 1973. It was as contentious then as it is now. Still, many Black women did not think Feminism always included them or accounted for the nuances of what many called their double oppression (now called intersectionality). Alice Walker coined the term Womanism to create a space for Black women to have those conversations among themselves while also supporting equitable treatment for women and Black people via their participation in the Feminist, Civil Rights, and Black Power Movements. In any case, Black men, like Baraka, often took offense to the ways Black women artists portrayed Black men in their art, stating that their portrayals of sex-based violence against women were unrealistic. They characterized women like Shange, Walker, Michele Wallace, Audre Lorde, and others as divisive, anti-Black, both for speaking their truth and for aligning with the Feminist movement.

Black women also criticized the misogyny and sexism prevalent in the people’s liberation movements of the 1970s and previous decades. The gatekeepers, often men, decided which truth was an appropriate truth and often harshly critiqued the work of women artists and activists, including Shange, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou, among others.

Shange’s work speaks from and to the Black community. With for colored girls, she has created a work that rejects white aesthetics, its rules, and its structures. From the way she doesn’t name her characters, to her choice to use African American Vernacular English, to her musical selection, to her rejection of the rules of grammar, Shange has created a work that builds on and celebrates its own aesthetic. Her choices to combine poetry and dance, to reject narrative structure and character development, and to include Diasporic and popular music all represent not only experimentation with form but also a rejection of what any critical body says a Black American woman’s story should be. By creating her own rules and telling her own stories, Shange embodies the self-determination that was at the root of the many political and cultural shifts of the 1970s.