Re-Lived Memories on Stage

Shange indeed exerts considerable effort to turn the poems into intense and impressive speech acts on stage. In the majority of the poems the female voices narrate individual memories from the past that are re-lived in the moment of utterance. The poems usually start in the past tense form, but extend into the present in the course of the speech act, pointing out a temporal progression and development.

A striking example in this context is the poem entitled “abortion cycle #1” in which the lady in blue describes the abortion of her unwanted child:

tubes tables white washed windows grime from age wiped over once legs spread

anxious

eyes crawling up on me eyes rollin in my thighs

metal horses gnawin my womb dead mice fall from my mouth i really didnt mean to

i really didnt think i cd just one day off...

get offa me all this blood

bones shattered like soft ice-cream cones i cdnt have people

lookin at me pregnant

206 Lester and Shange, Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays: 42.

7. Dramaturgy of Time: Re-Lived Gender Memories inNtozake Shange’s for colored girls 122

[...]

this hurts this hurts me

& nobody came cuz nobody knew

once i waz pregnant & shamed of myself.

(FCG 22-23; emphasis added)

In general, the verb tenses are used to signal the “grammaticalization of location in time,”²⁰⁷ marking the temporal position of a situation or discourse in relation to a specific temporal reference point, in this case the now of the female speaker. In “abortion cycle

#1” there are several moments in which the lady in blue changes the temporality of the verbs, alternating between the present and past tenses. Her use of the past tense form in “i really didnt mean to / i really didnt think i cd” indicates that she is remembering a past experience and narrating this on stage. The use of the temporal adverbial “once” makes this reference to a recalled past very explicit.

This basic past tense reference frame in the poem is directly contrasted with different present tense forms, for example in the following lines: “eyes crawling up on me / eyes rollin in my thighs / metal horses gnawin my womb / dead mice fall from my mouth.” The lady in blue here employs a ‘dramatic present,’ which enhances the dramatic effect of the lady’s memory by making the audiences feel as if they were present at the time of the experience. The intensity of the lady in blue’s memory is further emphasized by the progressive aspect of the verbs “crawling,” “rollin,” and “gnawin.” The continuous form is usually used to express an incomplete, ongoing process, making the description in the poem even more dramatic and pressing. Although the verb forms may also be grammatically interpreted as gerunds, their identification as present progressive forms is supported by the lady in blues’ use of the present tense in the following lines: Her memory becomes so vivid that she even re-feels her pain when she says “this hurts / this hurts me.” She also addresses anonymous people present during the abortion who she asks to “get offa me all this blood.” These people are invisible for the audience, but not for the lady in blue who is completely caught up in her memory of an unspecified

207 Suzanne Fleischmann, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990): 15.

moment in the past.²⁰⁸ While narrating her traumatic experience, the lady in blue becomes so involved with her memory that she simultaneously re-lives it; her memory ‘comes alive’ in the moment of performance. The past and the present, or more precisely the

“story-now” and the “speaker-now,” radically coincide, uniting two formerly separated temporal dimensions in the performative now which may also be termed the ‘audience-now.’²⁰⁹ The spectators are thus turned into witnesses of the re-enactment and re-living of a traumatic past on stage in the performative now.

Another striking example of tense switching in for colored girls is the poem entitled

“no assistance” (FCG 13-14) in which the lady in red talks about a love affair that started in the past but is now, at the moment of the speaker’s performance, ended:

without any assistance or guidance from you

i have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a day [...]

i want you to know this waz an experiment to see how selfish i cd be

if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover

if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another if i cd stand not being wanted

when i wanted to be wanted

& i cannot so

with no further assistance & no guidance from you i am endin this affair

(FCG 13-14; emphasis added)

Like the lady in blue, the lady in red also uses both progressive and simple present tenses.

The progressive form in the final sentence of the poem – “i am endin this affair” – however also implies a future dimension by pointing at the ongoing processual quality of

208 The imperative form may also be addressed to the audience as will be seen in section 7.4.

However, this reference seems to be unlikely here. The emotional intensity of the lady in blue’s memory of the traumatic experience makes its interpretation as a reference to anonymous people from the past more likely.

209 This terminology is taken from Fleischmann, Tense and Narrativity: From Medieval

Performance to Modern Fiction: 125. Fleischmann writes: “Narratives are intrinsically structured with two time frames: the time of telling the story and the time during which the events of the story are assumed to have taken place. I refer to these respectively as speaker-now and story-now”

(125; emphasis original). The term ‘audience-now’ is not included in her analysis as she does not focus on dramatic texts. For the present analysis the extension of her terminology, however, proves to be quite useful.

7. Dramaturgy of Time: Re-Lived Gender Memories inNtozake Shange’s for colored girls 124

the lady’s decision to stop the love affair and to become a self-loving and independent woman. She has not yet completed her journey, but she is at the now of the performance right in the middle of it. Neither the lady in red nor the audience knows how or when this process of transformation and development will be completed.

This implicit progression from an unspecified moment in the past to the performative now and finally to a future perspective indeed determines the overall structure of for colored girls.