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September, 1977 - New National BLACK MONITOR
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Ten years ago, in the hot summer of
1967, an eighteen year old college student
from Mercer County, New Jersey, attended
a conference of black people in Newark.
She later reflected:
“The Black Power Conference in Newark
was deeply significant for me. 1 felt as if we
were bringing in a new day. There was a
kind of rapturous joy in seeking all kinds of
black people representing a wealth of
intelligence and strength. I was incredibly
mesmerized by the thought that
people, at long last, could make it. That
experience gave me the impetus to realize
that I could do it... myself.”
For Ms. Ntozake Shange, who has
created the sensational Broadway play,
“for colored girls who have considered
suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.”—and
the book by the same title—, the meeting
following the devastating disturbances in
Newark was a life’s turning point. It was a
tremendous, almost explosive spark which
impelled her on her way, so she noted ten
years later. It has led to the discovery or
unfolding for her—and for the many
thousands who have made the effort or the
pilgrimage to hear and read her words—of
what has become a black girl’s song of
freedom and release. It is what Shange calls
“a righteous gospel.”
A Black Girl’s Song
Ntozake Shange (pronounced “En-tow
zok-aye” and “Shawn-gay”) is one of the
brightest stars now rising in the literary and
theatrical world. Her play, running steadily
since September 1967, and now, at the
Booth Theatre in New York City, is in her
own account, “enveloping almost 6,000
people a week in the words of a young black
girl’s growing up.” Her new book is des
tined to reach and enrapture millions more
with Ntozake’s “good news” or “gospel of
liberation” for our all too uptight world.”
The secret of Shange’s success is not so
much in the trained showmanship of her
theatrical work, although that work is an
artistic triumph. It rests in a message, in “a
righteous gospel” of liberation.. .not only
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for women but also for our age. Hence the
publication of the play in book form is a
significant opportunity for America’s read
ing public to share in a thoughtful search
ing for the many messages of freedom and
fulfillment with which her words abound.
Unfulfilled Promises
Ms. Shange speaks, in her play (which she
calls her “choreopoem”) of the absence of
reciprocity or of mutual sharing. She grew
up in what might be called an idealized kind
of middle-class-oriented home with profes
sionals as parents. Nonetheless, even as a
young girl, Shange felt the alienation of
race which she sensed to be characteristic of
a largely fragmented and somehow inco
herent world. She recognized, perhaps fore
most, an absence of ecstatic joy which to
her is tne measure of one’s capacity both
for self-acceptance and fulfillment.
All these awarenesses came through the
experiences of Shange’s youth, as a part of
her triumphs and errors, especially in her
trying to be first a black girl and later a
black woman. She speaks of this in her new
book as “our struggle to become all that is
forbidden by our environment, all that is
forfeited by our gender, all that we have
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forgotten.” To grow up into womanhood,
particularly black womanhood, was for
Shange—as perhaps for countless others—
a journey into emptiness, a lifelong
promise unfulfilled.
No Less Than God
The forgotten aspects of life, for Shange,
represent the essential drive for being.
It is felt most acutely and incessantly in
our youth. What mankind has forgotten
is the very nature of our being. We come to
know what we are largely through an
awareness of our history. Then finally, we
discover in ourselves.. .no less than God.
Shange’s choreopoem or book is thus
infinitely more than a play. Three aspects
of the book and play stand out as central.
—lt is a life’s statement as to what
Shange herself is all about.
—lt is also a representation of the univer
sal reaching out for life which is most
intense and perhaps most optimistic in our
youth but which persists, most often pain
fully, throughout our lifetime.
—Again, “for colored girls...” is a
resounding condemnation of our age for
not having looked for the best in the human
race’s past and for not having found the
greatest gift of the present, the God in our
selves. . .who brings each day the rainbow.
This latter gift is at the heart of Ms.
Shange’s “righteous gospel.”
“Sechita”
The most obvious reason why people
enter so quickly into the spirit of Ms.
Shange’s book and play is that they affirm
not only where we are but also where we
might most deeply hope to be. In this sense,
Shange’s words are sensitive to the present
pain in life but most especially to the possi
bilities and the yearning on the part of
every life for the realization of what we
have been created for.
The character, Sechita, a favorite with
Ms. Shange, symbolizes and expresses these
feelings about our life most clearly. Sechita
is a dance hall girl who is seen by different
eyes as a god, as a slut, and then as
innocent and knowing.
Sechita, in all of these tragically universal
and varied roles, sums up what Shange
herself has discovered in her lengthy search
for what womanhood is all about. She
writes: “Unearthing the mislaid, forgotton
&/or misunderstood women writers, paint
ers, mothers, cowgirls, & union leaders of
our pasts, proved to be both a supportive
experience & 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
Hurston to Kathe Hollwitz, Anna Mae
Wong to Calamity Jane.”
Ms. Shange adds: “Studying the myth
ology of women from antiquity to the
present day, led directly to the piece,
Sechita.” This work helped Shange de
velop her fresh sense of the world, her new
and liberated sense of herself and also her
penetrating insight into what she calls
“women’s language.” Women, for Shange,
speak in a kind of tribal symbolism; for
women have been made into what is most
often a cruel world apart.
(Continued on page 8.)