“ People thought after Ralph Ellison that we all dropped dead and became illiterate. The Black art movement taught us differently.

“ if i had to struggle to identify with Anna Karenina & Blanche DuBois/ why cdnt white folks learn that skill

“ The show was literally for colored girls, which to me meant women-centered. Still nothing prepared me for the hateful response from African-American English-speaking males. for colored girls was meant for women of color. The poems were addressing situations that bridged our secret (unspoken) longing. for colored girls still is a womens trip, and the connection we can make through it, with each other and for each other, is to empower us all.

The reaction from black men to for colored girls was in a way very much like the white reaction to black power. The body traditionally used to power and authority interpreting, through their own fear, my work celebrating the self-determination and centrality of women as a hostile act. For men to walk out feeling that the work was about them spoke to their own patriarchal delusions more than to the actuality of the work itself. It was as if merely placing the story outside themselves was an attack. for colored girls was and is for colored girls.

“ Shange’s piece viscerally depicts the crooked room that black women confront. The production portrays the harshest and most bitter experiences of black women’s lives. Her characters suffer sexual and romantic betrayal, abuse, rape, illegal abortion, heartbreak, and rejection.

For colored girls has lasting significance for so many because it presents black women’s experiences with unflinching rawness that is not primarily concerned with translating these experiences for a broader audience. Its primary goal is to give voice to black women by acknowledging the challenges they face, not to invoke pity or even empathy either from black men or from white viewers. It speaks to and about black women, and it does so by using language, images, and experiences that resonate for black women. For many who love it, reading or seeing Shange’s for colored girls is like noticing not that one is alone in the crooked room but, rather, that there are others standing bent, stooped, or surprisingly straight. It is an experience of having someone make visible the slanted images that too frequently remain invisible.

“ Initially, I was demonically ticked at the notion that I, Ntozake Shange, a.k.a. Paulette Linda Williams, whose American birth certificate from an alleged Union state, New Jersey, read “colored” in 1948, was asked to write a piece about justice. This was truly laughable, since it is quite clear to me that “justice” as a fact, fantasy, or concept is so removed an actuality in my life, intellectual as well as visceral, that I thought maybe I should try my hand at a myth or my first science fiction.

“ i usedta live in the world
really be in the world
free & sweet talkin
good mornin & thank-you & nice day
uh huh
i cant now
i cant be nice to nobody
nice is such a rip-off
reglar beauty & a smile in the street
is just a set-up

“ in everything i have ever written & everything i hope to write/i have made use of what frantz fanon called ‘combat breath’. although fanon waz referring to francophone colonies, the schema he draws is sadly familiar:

There is no occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of final destruction. Under this condition, the individual’s breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is combat breathing

fanon goes on to say that ‘combat breathing’ is the living response/ the drive to reconcile the irreconcilable.

“ the most frequently overheard comment abt spell #7 when it first opened at the public theater/ waz that it waz too intense. the cast & i usedta laugh.

if this one hour n 45 waz too much/ how in the world did these same people imagine the rest of our lives were/ & wd they ever be able to imagine the rest of our lives were/ & wd they ever be able to handle that/ simply being alive & black & feeling in this strange deceitful country

“ the arbitrary nature of life as an african-american has been heralded, bemoaned, denied, wisht away, and yet we are still here. how could a people who have been accused of having no history, no culture, no art, no souls, no common sense or rational capacity survive so long?

“

I loved you on purpose /

I was open on purpose /

I still crave vulnerability & close talk…