Ntozake Shange is a contemporary black poet, playwright, and novelist. Like many postcolonial writers, Shange attempts to forge a place within the literary tradition for forms, styles, and subject matter that have been excluded from it. That tradition has largely been determined by white males, and Shange’s verse draws attention to the cultural and gender specificity of their concerns. Whereas the white male tradition has fore grounded sameness and universality, traditions that politically serve to support its own value systems and ideology, Shange’s poetry foregrounds difference and demands that difference be allowed to make it felt.

Shange’s prioritization of feminine traits is mirrored in the form of her poetry, which is fluid and circular rather than pointed and direct. Her verse is oriented toward the body and in particular highlights the nonrestrictive impetus of black feminine culture. The imagery of gestation and birth that she frequently employs emphasizes the connection between femininity and creative fecundity. Just as her celebratory poems about black culture often resemble song, so the verse she writes in support of femininity relies on dance. Dance becomes Shange’s means of drawing attention to the natural movements of the female body. In poems like “i’m a poet who,” from her hold yr head like it was ruby sapphire/i’m a poet who writes in English/come to share the worlds witchu …we come here to be dancing/to be dancing…”

In the play for the Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, she equates dance with femininity. Since dance provides a vehicle for the expression of feminine experience: Western culture has for long appreciated dance as an activity that empowers, offering a platform for individual representation of self-expression, or acting like a religious entity that coagulates the community and spiritually rejuvenates the individual. She also emphasizes the “participation mystique” of dance, comparing it to religious lyrics and “poems of community” (295-96).

A printed text is not enough to illustrate the full emphasis of a performance of the play; Shange’s stage directions entail us in a subtle sense of defining interrelationships among the performers and of their responsive dance movements and gestures. The play starts and ends with the character in brown. The other six dancers incarnate the rainbow colors; the ladies in orange, red, yellow, blue, purple and green. The various expressions of “bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma” are manifested through the gestures, words, dance, and music of the seven ladies, who reflect and improvise during their multiple roles performance. During 1970s, when Shange performed in for the play, she continually refined and revised the poems, finely weaving new temporal movements in her quest to establish a female black identity. Improvisation is the potent characteristic in her celebration of the aberration and inexplicable uniqueness of the black female body and her language, which participates in the play’s internal theme to fight the movement of subjugation of the black feminine gender. In fact, she had advocated in her preface to her readers that while they listen to the play, a sense of retrieval from the pain and apathy of the societal bias should be sensed within them; “She has moved on, as she expects her readers to do as well.”