African American Drama, Essay Example

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.”

In these texts, the female protagonists are in quest of themselves, endeavoring to understand and express their multiple selves by tracing where they came from and how experiences have changed them. This quest for identity and self-expression and the results of this quest, including spiritual renewal, self-acceptance, and newly defined identities, are described through dance. Similarly, a group of women characters in Shange’s text poetically worship their kinship and inspirational support of each other as they dance away the blues of gender and race. They chant in choral poems and dance, solo and ensemble, their personal encounters with racism and sexism, as well as the triumphs and loves that summarize their individual identities as black women. The play is an eye opener, symbolized by the metaphor of bringing a lady in brown amidst ladies dressed in the rainbow colors, which embody the concept of a “colored girl” among the presence of “a girl of many colors.” Facets of the black woman ranging from oppression, social victimization, triumphant spell weaver and selfish person coagulate an array of rainbow – binding the possible selves that establish the promiscuous black female identity.

Shange uses dance as a metaphor to signify their character’s self-discoveries, self-expression, and self-endorsement. While dance events within the narrative free the protagonists to redefine and be themselves, dance rhythms often pervade this author’s prose, freeing the texts from traditional language, structures, and genres. As Barbara Christian observes, “In every society where there is the denigrated other . . . , the other struggles to declare the truth and therefore create the truth in forms that exist for her or him” (“Creating” 160). If the forms do not exist, writers who are others depicting marginality must create new forms. These new structures or genres in themselves perform “formal signifying” (Gates 294), structurally parodist commentary on or protest against earlier texts and styles, especially those of white patriarchal literary tradition, but also those of earlier African American writers. Creating these new structures or genres is an act of “rhetorical self-definition” (Gates 290). Shange encourage readers to find new ways to make meanings about race and gender, to read these texts with greater flexibility.

The colorfully dressed women in Ntozake play assertively take control of the stage and create a blended poetry-dance-theatrical experience, a staged “choreopoem” that surely alters the course of dramatic and dance history in America. Gotfrit’s observation about women dancing in the Toronto dance club is equally applicable to Shange’s performative text: “The appropriating of space [through dancing] exclusively for women’s pleasure, control, and solidarity is radical” (186). Reading Shange’s innovative text is also a radicalizing experience. Hearing it read or performed is even more radicalizing. This hybrid genre is both choreographed poetry and Greek choral drama (although we note with amusement Shange’s revision of Greek drama in the text’s demand for only women, while Greek choral dramas featured only men). Individual actor-dancers recite their poems as they gesture and move to the meanings and the feelings of their words–thinking through the body–while the rest of the ensemble is immobile and silent; or the ensemble chants and moves together in response to the individual’s solo plaint, physically and verbally supporting her in travail. This travail usually involves the woman’s search for identity, mistreatment by a man, the problems of poverty, or racial prejudice. Even when the other women of the ensemble are apart from the dancer/speaker who is in the spotlight, their attentive listening to her recitation creates a unifying and supportive energy, which also elicits the support of the reader/audience.

Unity and support are apparent, for example, in the poignant “no more love poems #4,” where the lady in yellow, solo, through speech and gestures discloses her surprise at her persistent vulnerability to pain and disappointment in a love relationship: “i shd be immune/if i’m still alive”(47). She then confesses that she is not immune, that in her future she will still need to love and be loved even though she will probably be hurt again. She survives “on intimacy and tomorrow” (48). The slang diction (“the music waz like smack” [48]), unconventional spelling, and non-capitalization of the words signal to readers the vernacular quality of the language and the ordinary, candid, human cast of this woman’s words. Through these linguistic devices, we feel as if she is conversing with us (she asks us, ‘do you see the point?” [48]). We sense an urgency in the woman’s communication and feel an intimacy with the communicant. Then the woman distills the essence of being black and female in these words: “bein colored is a metaphysical dilemma/I haven’t conquered yet/ . . . my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul and gender/my love is too delicate to have thrown back in my face” (48).

Shange’s stage directions indicate the physical, linguistic, and psychological movement of the scene: “The dance reaches a climax and all of the ladies fall out tried but full of life and togetherness” (52). Thus, dance motifs that alternate immobility with energetic motion and apartness with unity, together with dramatic staging, colorful costumes, choral interpretations of poetry, and the quickening tempo of chanting all convey the centrality and intensity of love and sisterhood in these women of color’s lives. Generic innovations that merge dance, choral recitative, poetry, and drama implement Shange’s feminist commitment to rethink conventional genres’ depictions of women, iterating her desire to depict and clarify individual women’s lives, “unearthing the mislaid, forgotten, &/or misunderstood, women writers, painters, others, cowgirls, & union leaders of our pasts” (xiv-xv). Charles Johnson has perceptively written that Shange’s play both fits in with the tradition of avant-garde black theatre established by Baraka and also “transcends the imperialism of male gender that dominated many earlier plays in the history of black drama” (99).

Blues for Mister Charlie, written by James Baldwin is based on the case of Emmett Till. Till was a young black man who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 who had allegedly whistled at a white woman. The murderer was acquitted after subsequent trials. The play is cyclical in its portrayal and structure, opening and ending with the advent of killing Richard, while reminiscent of lapses of flashbacks to highlight the reasons for his death. This play allows us to ponder on issues like as racial discrimination, sex, and Christianity.

Richard Henry, the African American protagonist of James Baldwin’s’ Blues for Mister Charlie (1964), is undeniably problematic. Indeed, the play opens with the gunshot that signals his murder at the hands of white Lyle Britten. As the play oscillates between flashbacks of Richard’s life before the murder and the aftershocks that follow his death, Richard becomes defined by his arrogant, defiant, rebellious behavior that teeters precariously between angry insubordination and suicide in his Deep South hometown. Is Richard Henry, as many critics have suggested, no more than a stereotypical provocateur, a cardboard cut-out whose final talus is nothing more than a meaningless, avoidable death at the hands of a white bigot? Is he so predictably problematic that he negates any possibility for fruitful critical discussion?

In order to save Richard Henry from literary oblivion, since he cannot, after all, be saved from death, one must see Richard as both the object of significant historical weight and the small but significant seed of potential revolution. Richard Henry is, according to Baldwin, loosely based on Emmett Till. Like Emmett, Richard’s death is dually tragic; not only do both Emmett and Richard need to die under the weighty rules of Southern “justice” (and they are both, indeed, murdered), but they are also, ironically, able to accomplish significantly more through their inevitable deaths than they could be expected to accomplish through their lives.

Through a clearer understanding of the reasoning behind the characters’ anger, idiosyncrasies, and extremism, the reader can seek to understand them in lieu of dismissing them. The reader can begin to see how Richard, as a reflection of Emmett, breaks with traditional Southern conformity, permanently alters the father/son cycle that threatens to repeat a racist history, rekindles demands for racial equality, and creates an opening–however small–for the possibility of revolution.

Very few critics have chosen to tackle Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie at all, while fewer still give serious critical attention to the character of Richard Henry. Baldwin’s play did not fare significantly better with contemporary critics either. His play is rarely mentioned and, when it is, both the play and Richard are often disparaged as artless, angry, and detrimentally antagonistic. In 1967, Loften Mitchell offered a relatively kind condemnation of the play and of Richard in Black Drama, stating: “The playwright took great pains not to romanticize his black characters nor his white ones–sometimes too much. His leading character is hardly idealized” (Mitchell 201). What is it about Richard that is so aggravating, so polarizing? Carolyn Wedin Sylvander, author of James Baldwin (1980), discusses Richard’s “inability to adjust to the racial realities of the Southern town of his birth” by arguing “He is not humble, soft-spoken, or discreet, and he inevitably gets into trouble with Lyle Britten and his wife, Jo, who are representative of white townspeople who can’t imagine what has gone wrong with all the ‘good niggers’ they grew up with” (Sylvander 99). Richard’s friends and family, however, present him as both spiritual and spirited; he is remembered at first through two songs–the hymn “His Eye is on the Sparrow” and the blues song “Midnight Special” (Baldwin 16-17). He quickly becomes rooted, therefore, in the black church and the black blues tradition; the reader is readily aware of his Southern community connections.

Works Cited

Baldwin, J “Blues for Mister Charlie “New York: Vintage Books, 1964.

Mitchell, L “Black Drama” New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967.

Gates, H. L. Jr. “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey” Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Gates. New York and London: Methuen, 1984. 285-321

Sylvander, C. D “James Baldwin” New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1980.

Shange, N “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf” New York: Bantam, 1975.

Walton, P. L. “Ntozake Shange: Overview” Contemporary Poets. Thomas Riggs, 6th Ed. New York: St. James Press 1995.

Waxman, B. F “Dancing Out of Form, Dancing into Self: Genre and Metaphor in Marshall, Shange, and Walker.” 1994