A Colored Female Group Protagonist

for colored girls is written in the form of the so-called choreopoem, a theatrical invention by Shange, which combines poetry, prose, song, dance, and music on stage. It deviates from traditional theatrical forms in that there is no division into acts and no clearly defined setting. It mainly consists of a sequence of different poems which are accompanied by effects of lighting and music. In the preface Shange describes the beginnings of the play in 1974, when “[w]ith as much space as a small studio on the Lower East Side, the five of us, five women, proceeded to dance, make poems, make music, make a woman’s theater for about twenty patrons” (FCG ix). According to Shange, they used for colored girls to express themselves and their femininity, “clarifying [their]

lives – & the lives of our mothers, daughters, & grandmothers” (FCG x).

This focus on women and a distinct female perspective is already evident in the title, which explicitly names the target audience. It is not addressed to the “white, middle-class, heterosexual, and male”¹⁹⁸ spectator which, according to Jill Dolan, has long dominated American theater, but it is rather written for an audience consisting of “colored girls.”

Although the play is not children’s theater in the traditional sense, it is nevertheless addressed to a young age group. Why Shange favors the word “girls” to other nouns such as ‘women’ or ‘females’ will become clearer in the course of the analysis. For the moment let us focus on the adjective “colored,” which specifies what kind of girls are addressed in the title. Shange indeed plays with the different meanings of “colored” in her choreopoem, presenting a multifaceted black female identity on stage.

First of all, the term “colored” refers to the physical appearance of the girls, describing the color of their skin. The term was widely used as a conventional description of black people of African ancestry well into the first half of the 20^th century.¹⁹⁹ Although it persists in certain contexts, for example in the acronym NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the term is usually regarded old-fashioned and politically incorrect today. Even though the term was no longer seen as a conventional description of African Americans when the choreopoem was produced,

198 Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988): 1.

199 cf. The American Heritage Book of English Usage (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

7. Dramaturgy of Time: Re-Lived Gender Memories inNtozake Shange’s for colored girls 118

Shange nevertheless constantly associates ‘colored’ with ‘black’ and ‘African-American’

in her play, so that one may rephrase the title as having been written ‘for African-American girls.’ Throughout the dramatic text phrases and terms such as “blk [sic] man”

(FCG 26), “black brown young man” (FCG 37), “negro” (FCG 26), “niggah [sic]” (FCG 38), and “niggers” (FCG 7) are repeatedly used. It is the “lady in brown” who both opens and closes the play, framing the action as the first and the last voice heard on stage.

According to one of the female voices the choreopoem is “a black girl’s song” (FCG 4), which deals with the “metaphysical dilemma” of “bein [sic] a woman & bein [sic]

colored” (FCG 45) at the same time. The references to African-American history and music in the dramatic text further support this specific reading of the adjective “colored”

as African-American.²⁰⁰ By introducing the pejorative phrase “colored girls” in a play which celebrates black womanhood and femininity, Shange attempts to initiate a re-evaluation of black female identity. She thereby stresses black women’s diversity and the manifoldness of black female identity as the second meaning of the adjective “colored”

reveals.

In everyday language “colored” is used to describe something which has a particular color or a combination of colors rather than being just one color. This denotation of the word also applies to for colored girls, in that it refers to the complexity of female identity which is personified in the seven female voices on stage. The seven female speakers do not wear costumes and do not have individual names as signifiers of character, but only specifications according to the colors of the rainbow: lady in brown, lady in yellow, lady in purple, lady in red, lady in green, lady in blue, and lady in orange.²⁰¹ The color brown is of course not directly part of the spectrum of rainbow colors. However, mixing paint of all these colors would create the color brown. Thus, it fits the general presentation of the ladies as personifying different facets of a single female consciousness and identity.

200 For a detailed discussion on the intertextual and intermedial references as elements of a distinct African-American cultural identity see chapter 10: “Theater of the Present: Writing to the Moment and to the Audience.”

201 There is indeed one exception: The next to last poem entitled “a nite with beau willie brown”

(FCG 55-60) introduces crystal, a mother of two and the girlfriend of Vietnam War veteran beau willie. She and the other family members are the only characters identified with individual names.

For a detailed discussion of the specific meaning of this poem see chapter 9 on “Engendering Time: Black Motherhood and Male Maturity.”

Throughout the performance the characters remain shadowy, unspecified, and almost interchangeable voices. Their appearance on stage seems to be quite arbitrary in that there is no clear scheme that determines the succession of the speakers. The symbolic connotations often associated with colors also resist any clear thematic ordering of the different poems and their speakers. In contrast to fictional characters, they lack any individual qualities and features which would make them distinct from each other.

According to Shange, this indeterminacy of the seven voices serves the general concept of the choreopoem as representing a collective female identity while mirroring different facets of a single consciousness:

The rainbow is a fabulous symbol for me. If you see only one color, it’s not beautiful. If you see them all, it is. A colored girl, by my definition, is a girl of many colors. But she can only see her overall beauty if she can see all the colors of herself. To do that, she has to look deep inside her. And when she looks inside herself, she will find ... love and beauty.²⁰²

The adjective “colored” is here used in the sense of ‘colorful,’ stressing heterogeneity and the diversity of black female identity. As the ladies themselves say, they have “come to share [their] worlds witchu [sic]” (FCG 16). The plural form of “world” emphasizes that there is not one single world that is shown but rather a multitude of experiences, situations, events, thoughts, and emotions. The female voices indeed serve as anonymous blueprints for different types of formative female experiences such as a first sexual encounter on graduation night, unrequited love, sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, abortion, and motherhood. One after another each woman makes herself heard in order to

“sing a black girl’s song / bring her out / to know herself” (FCG 4). As Shange points out:

If my characters don’t do anything else, they talk to each other. And they talk to each other about their lives and what they want to do. No matter how crazy their talk is sometimes, what matters is that they’re talking, that they’re postulating their realities and their visions of the world.²⁰³

Although the poems are presented as individual speech acts about highly emotional issues, the ladies all remain surprisingly flat and anonymous, making the audience’s

202 Neal A. Lester and Ntozake Shange, Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays (New York: Garland Pub., 1995): 26.

203 Neal A. Lester, "Interview with Ntozake Shange," Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights, eds. Philip C. Kolin and Colby H. Kullman (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1996): 220.

7. Dramaturgy of Time: Re-Lived Gender Memories inNtozake Shange’s for colored girls 120

identification with any individual character impossible. The figures are indivisible “due to the fact that they all had one voice, which [Shange] proceeded to divide.”²⁰⁴ The seven female voices on stage are no characters in a traditional sense, but rather female archetypes used to illuminate the collective experience of black womanhood. Each of the archetypes represents a particular female experience in a choral form. As Paul Carter Harrison points out, in for colored girls we discover “choric testimonies constructed in the form of poetic blues arias that awaken our consciousness to the female agency of spiritual kinship.”²⁰⁵

This choral form is also evident in the choreography on stage. There is a constant crossover between the movements of the individual actors and the movements of the group as a whole. On the one hand, there are moments of sudden standstills in which time is stopped for a while, as the following example shows: “The four ladies on stage freeze, count 4, then the ladies in blue, purple, yellow, and orange move to their places for the next poem” (FCG 39; emphasis added). On the other hand, there are also sudden and apparently fearful reactions which accelerate the action, and thus the tempo, on stage:

“There is a sudden light change, all of the ladies react as if they had been struck in the face. The lady in green and the lady in yellow run out up left, the lady in orange runs out the left volm, the lady in brown runs out up right” (FCG 16; emphasis added).Whereas the action of running is here accompanied by visual effects of lighting, the movements on stage are often also accompanied by music, adding audible effects to the visible ones:

As the lady in brown tags each of the other ladies they freeze. When each one has been tagged the lady in brown freezes. Immediately “Dancing in the Streets” by Martha and the Vandellas is heard. All of the ladies start to dance. The lady in green, the lady in blue, and the lady in yellow do the pony, the big boss line, the swim, and the nose dive. The other ladies dance in place.

(FCG 6-7)

One after another the female figures thaw and come to life. The music finally unites the individual archetypes, encouraging them to dance together as a group on stage. The way

204 Lester, "Interview with Ntozake Shange": 225.

205 Paul C. Harrison, "Form and Transformation: Immanence of the Soul in the Performance Modes of Black Church and Black Music," Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, eds. Paul C. Harrison, Victor L. Walker and Gus Edwards (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002): 325.

the action is staged supports the notion of a shared black female identity, while the music and songs in for colored girls are used as a liberating “survival tool,”²⁰⁶ accelerating the process of liberation and healing on stage. The choreography and the visual effects visualize the close relation and the constant crossover between the individual archetypes and a shared black female identity. The focus is not set on the individual archetypes but rather on the way they are part of a larger female entity. Instead of introducing individual characters with names and certain specifications, Shange presents an anonymous black female group protagonist consisting of different facets and colors. The audience’s attention is thus not primarily directed towards the speakers of the poems but rather to the poems themselves.