Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls...The work that changed everything comes to the city again
by Gaëtan L. Charlebois
I admire Tyler Perry. I think I'd even like him. But is is not Tyler Perry's For Colored Girls...
No! From the first moment of its existence, it has been Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls. From the poem, to the poem adapted to theatre form for a bar in California, to New York and a Tony nomination, to the publication of that play version, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf has always been Ntozake Shange's work. I say this because history has a strange way with this kind of wondrously fragile material...before you know it is just a movie made by Tyler Perry that is being remembered and not the the woman—Ntozake Shange—who gave us this lush, violent, heart-breaking and often very funny series of verses about the lot of women of colour in North America. I have known of the work since I was in my teens; I read it (devoured it) when I was in my early 20s. I, simply, adore this work.
