crystalisreading 's review for:

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange

4.0

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Ntozake Shange's choreopoem is deceptively short. What seems like it would be an easy read is actually heavy to wrestle with, full of sadness and joy and scars not only personal, but also ancestral and cultural, written in a distinctive voice that seems to speak for black women across America. I picked this book up because I needed to read a book that is also a play for a reading prompt, and because this author was recommended to me by one of my friends. The first time I picked the book up, I read for awhile, and got distracted, as I frequently do with at least half the books I read. Today I picked it back up, while I have been concurrently reading This Will be My Undoing by Morgan Jerkins, and suddenly much more of what Ntozake and the other women on stage with her were saying made sense to me. It echoed so much of Morgan Jerkin's heartfelt honesty about the struggles and grief she faced, but in the voice of poetry and choreography, echoing and adding a broader range of history and locations to the experience, to create a beautiful, if heart-wrenching overall picture of the African American female experience. I read it in one day, not wanting to set it down. I'd recommend this work if you are willing to take the time to listen and learn and appreciate it, for both its art form and its content. (Also the cover is just beautiful.)