38 pages • 1-hour read
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf
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Symbols & Motifs
Music
The choreopoem requires dance, and dance requires music, so music is the most prominent motif in the choreopoem. Throughout the work, music and song help set the tone for each piece, taking the audience from dark heavy emotions to light-hearted ones and back. Shange’s composition makes the entire work function like a modern music album. In the choreopoem, individual poems would be analogous to tracks on an album, while the transitional pieces of song, chant, dance, humorous conversation mimic interludes that artists include on albums to create a sense of seamlessness between tracks. Shange’s interludes operate the same way, adjusting the tempo, shifting the mood, providing comic relief, and helping to hold the poems together to create a cohesive work.
Rainbows
In the sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions, God sends a rainbow after 40 days of rain and flooding wipe out all life on Earth. The rainbow is a sign of His promise to restore the Earth and never flood it again. Through this passage, rainbows have entered the collective imagination as a symbol of healing, restoration, and joy returned. They symbolize those things in for colored girls as well. Shange’s reference to rainbows is personal, too. Shortly after the play debuted, she gave an interview describing her struggles with depression and attempted suicide. Shange shared that seeing a double rainbow made it clear to her that the challenge was over. She worked that experience into the title and motifs of the choreopoem. At the beginning and the end of the choreopoem, Shange dedicates the work to women who have moved or are moving “to the ends of their own rainbows” (64), meaning women who have healed or are in the process of healing.
Rainbows also represent women’s unity in this choreopoem. Each woman in the play wears a different color from the rainbow, her only identifying feature. Erasing their names and only giving them cultural identity markers supports the sisterhood themes in the choreopoem. Like the colors of the rainbow are disparate and unique on their own, the women in for colored girls function together to create a universal symbol of something greater than its parts. Every color, poem, and woman represents a unique iteration of womanhood or one of the many roads a woman can take. Putting the women and the poems together in one work allows the audience to glimpse the entire breadth of Black women’s experiences.
Colors and Adornment
In “one” and “sechita,” colors and adornment become a way for the women protagonists to create a façade. Sechita’s environment is dirty, and everything she owns is in a state of disrepair. Mostly adorned in orange, yellow, and red, Sechita’s colors allude to any of the many female deities from Diasporic African religious traditions who represent sexuality, sensuality, creativity, rebirth, and wealth (Osun, Sekhmet, etc.). Shange deliberately employs these colors so that readers understand Sechita’s role is a sacred one, that she is a powerful representation of feminine power even amid visible filth and chaos. Despite it all, Sechita controls her environment and can reap wealth from it, symbolized by the coins the audience throws at her.
At the same time, the nameless protagonist in “one” also employs colors and symbols that refer to similar deities and their hundreds of stories. However, she uses them as a way to hide her sense of powerlessness out of shame, frustration, or both. While she wields her sexuality as a lure and weapon, she finds herself crying herself to sleep on the other side of it all. In both instances, Shange’s uses of color and adornment evoke entire lessons, stories, and worldviews embedded in the names and images of these feminine deities from Diasporic African religious traditions, which would immediately resonate with members of her Black audience.
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