Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf is a perfect example of postmodern theater, which rejected the old forms of writing plays. The dawning of a new century has brought new power conflicts and politics, new challenges, new opportunities, and new kinds of theater—like `the theater of images.' Shange's work is representative of the experimental group of the sixties and the seventies. The colored ladies in the choreopoem are representative of black women who are on a journey of self-discovery. Shange traces the transition of the black women's lack of selfhood to their love of self and self-assertion. The black women's love and dependence on men and their emotional vulnerability bring them to the depths of nothingness, despair, and eventually suicide. From this nothingness and a reduction to nonbeing, they empower themselves with their will `to be,' to live, and to participate in the community of `be-ing,' which is their own becoming and being. The ray of light and new hope is found in the rainbow. Shange makes her colored girls scatter and gather; sometimes they freeze in a place, and at times they move all over the stage. She makes her characters speak at times in turn and sometimes together. She makes them collectively enact their lives and experiences. This paper presents an analysis of For Colored Girls by examining the choreopoem in terms of the issues, structure, and techniques employed.

Ntozake Shange was born in New Jersey on October 18, 1948. Her father Paul T Williams, a surgeon, and her mother, Eloise Williams, a psychiatric social worker, named her Paulette Williams. But she legally adopted an African name `Ntozake,' meaning "she who comes with her own things," and `Shange,' meaning "one who walks like a lion" (Brown, p. 115). As she grew up in a well-to-do, intellectual environment, she had the opportunity to read a lot of Russian, French, and Spanish writers.

Her study of dance under Raymond Sawyer, Ed Mock, and Halifu also influenced her works. Judy Grahn's The Work of a Common Woman gave Shange the model to begin a series of seven poems that were meant to explore the realities of seven different kinds of women (xii). For Colored Girls was presented on Broadway in 1976.

American Literature Journal, European Psychology, Intellectual Environment, Experimental Group, Sexual Exploitation, Generic Innovation, Socio-sexual Hierarchy, Bourgeoisie Individualism, American Society, African Culture, Phallocentric Value System, Linguistic Devices.