Ntozake Shange, 1985

#BlackWriters Who Helped Shape My Storytelling

February 8, 2016

Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf

Ntozake Shange first performed for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf in 1974, the year I was born. I think that itself is amazing. This beautiful, Black woman, and 4 other women artists, performed the “choreopoem” outside of a Berkley bar. Two years later she had it up on Broadway, the 2nd Black woman to have a play on Broadway, following Lorraine Hansberry. I don’t remember how I came across the book, but the title grabbed me. I was eleven, slaying dragons that year, and I had discovered Black Girl Poetry. The title got me. I was a colored girl who had considered suicide, and was amazed that another colored girl had felt the same way I had at one point. And, she had the audacity to write and publish poems about it. “latent rapists” opened my awareness of writing as a means to heal, and as a means to connect with others who may have had similar life experiences. #BlackHistoryMonth #BlackWriters #BlackAuthors #Writer #Writing