Jay

“i’m a poet who writes in english come to share the worlds witchu”
― Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

“let her be born let her be born & handled warmly.”
― Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

“The poems introduce the girls to other kinds of people of color, other worlds. To adventure, and kindness, and cruelty. Cruelty that we usually think we face alone, but we don’t. We discover that by sharing with each other we find strength to go on. The poems are the play’s first hint of the global misogyny that we women face.”
― Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

“Knowing a woman's mind and spirit had been allowed me, with dance I discovered my body more intimately than I had imagined possible. With the acceptance of the ethnicity of my thighs and backside, came a clearer understanding of my voice as a woman and poet. The freedom to move in space, to demand of my own sweat perfection that could continually be approached, though never known, waz poem to me, my body and mind ellipsing, probably for the first time in my life. Dance as explicated by Raymond Sawyer and Ed Mock insisted that everything African, everything halfway colloquial, a grimace, a strut, an arched back over a yawn, waz mine. I moved what waz my unconscious knowledge of being a colored woman's body to my known everydayness.”
― Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf