Ntozake Shange

Playwright

• Born: October 18, 1948
• Birthplace: Trenton, New Jersey
• Died: October 27, 2018
• Place of death: Bowie, Maryland

Poet, novelist, and playwright

Shange is best known for her poetic and literary commitment to African American themes, and her works are considered an essential part of modern African American literature. Her first successful work, for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf(1975), pioneered the “choreopoem,” a form of stage drama that combines poetry, dance, and music. It was her first step toward a prolific and innovative literary career.

Areas of achievement: Literature; Poetry; Theater

Early Life

Ntozake Shange was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, into an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Paul T. Williams, was a medical doctor, and her mother, Eloise, was a psychiatric nurse and educator. The Williamses were at the center of the black cultural and intellectual community, providing Shange and her siblings exposure to such important cultural figures as Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Shange’s affinity for poetry developed early, and it was evident that she possessed a keen intellect and the gift of creativity.

In 1956, the family relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, where Shange attended an integrated school for gifted and talented children. She struggled to adjust and began to write in order to assuage her feelings of alienation and anger. After high school, she returned to the East Coast in 1966 to attend Barnard College in New York. Her college years were volatile because of the climate of protest that permeated universities at that time. She felt that her major, American studies, was not relevant to or inclusive of African American women. She also married and divorced during her early college years. These personal and academic frustrations created such conflict that Shange attempted suicide several times. However, she ultimately graduated with honors and was accepted into the University of Southern California’s master’s degree program in American studies.

Shange’s academic career and life in California were transformative. She was able to delve into the African American canon of literature and the emerging field of women’s studies. She changed her name to “Ntozake Shange,” which in Zulu translates to “she who comes with her own things [and] walks like a lion.” After graduate school, her creativity flourished as she became a teacher, continued to write, and began to study and perform African-derived dance. She performed with Halifu Osumare’s dance company and, with Paula Moss, began experimenting in the mixed performance of poetry, music, and dance. They developed the choreopoem, Shange’s signature art form.

Life’s Work

Shange moved back to New York in 1975 and began to perform for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf in nontraditional performance spaces. Producer Woodie King was impressed with her work and brought it to the New Federal Theater, an Off-Broadway venue. The choreopoem next was performed under the direction of Joseph Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival, then on Broadway in 1976. It won critical acclaim and received an Obie Award, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Tony nomination. However, Shange’s play also sparked controversy and debate because of its unconventional format as well as its feminist perspective.

Shange continued to explore the intersection of race, gender, and class in poetry, choreopoems, plays, and novels. She published a volume of poetry, Nappy Edges, in 1978. Her trilogy of choreopoems Three Pieces (A Photograph: Lovers in Motion, Boogie Woogie Landscapes, and Spell #7: Geechee Jibara Quik Magic Trance Manual for Technologically Stressed Third World People) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry in 1979.

Shange married musician David Murray in 1977 and gave birth to their daughter, Savannah Thulani Eloise, in 1981. Shange and Murray later divorced. In 1981, Shange won an Obie for her adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. She also won a Guggenheim Fellowship and obtained distinguished professorships at Rice University and the University of Houston. She managed a rigorous academic career with writing for several years. Her play Three Views of Mt. Fuji was first produced in 1987.

Shange published her first novel, Sassafrass, Cypress, and Indigo, in 1982. Other well-known novels among her many publications are Betsey Brown (1985) and Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (1994). Her poetry volume A Daughter’s Geography (1983) addresses the shared struggles of minority women worldwide. She revisited the challenge of love and relationships in The Love Space Demands: A Continuing Saga (1992). Shange even wrote a literary cookbook titled If I Can Cook, You Know God Can (1998). Later works focused on literature for children and young adults. These works, Whitewash (1997), Muhammad Ali: The Man Who Could Float Like a Butterfly and Sting Like a Bee (2002), Daddy Says (2003), Ellington Was Not a Street (2004), and Coretta Scott (2009) offer younger generations glimpses into African American life and culture. She published the novel Some Sing, Some Cry (2010) with her sister, Ifa Bayeza. She also produced and directed theatrical plays, documentaries, and television specials. Despite having suffered strokes and being diagnosed in 2011 with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, which had made it difficult for her to read and type, she had continued to work and publish.

Shange published her last work, a collection of new and selected poems titled Wild Beauty, in 2017. She died in Bowie Maryland, on October 27, 2018, at the age of seventy.

Significance

The production of Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf offered a shocking, intimate, and frank depiction of African American women’s struggle, survival, and solidarity. Shange’s innovation of the choreopoem, in which music and dance transmit what language cannot, provides an effective artistic convention with which to lay bare the souls of black women. Its break with decorum, tradition, and literary convention was an indication that there was no proper way to explore the nexus of race, gender, and class in America. This work resonates with audiences and is frequently produced on college campuses and in independent theaters.

Bibliography

Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America. Greenwood Press, 1988. A good study of Shange, along with Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry. Focuses on for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf and the 1979 trilogy Three Pieces.

Collins-Hughes, Laura. "Ntozake Shange, Who Wrote For Colored Girls, Is Dead at 70." The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/obituaries/ntozake-shange-is-dead-at-70.html. Accessed 5 Dec. 2018.

Effiong, Philip Uko. In Search of a Model for African American Drama: A Study of Selected Plays by Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, and Ntozake Shange. UP of America, 2000. Analyzes the historical and sociopolitical considerations that determine the choices made by each dramatist.

Elam, Harry J., and David Krasner, editors. African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader. Oxford UP, 2001. Shange and her choreopoems are examined in this survey of the portrayals of race issues in theater from the nineteenth century on.

Ford, Karen Jackson. Gender and the Poetics of Excess: Moments of Brocade. UP of Mississippi, 1997. Uses the poetry of Shange to explore the literary conventions of women writers.

King, Anne Mills, et al. “Ntozake Shange.” Critical Survey of Drama. Edited by Carl Rollyson, 2nd rev. ed., Salem Press, 2003. A thorough overview of Shange’s life and career through 2002, emphasizing her plays. A good starting point.

Lester, Neal A. Ntozake Shange: A Critical Study of the Plays. Garland, 1995. Lester examines critically Shange’s contributions to the American stage, suggests aspects of her work for further study, and contextualizes Shange’s drama within appropriate literary traditions.