There are as many ways of looking at Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf as there are hues in a rainbow. One can take it as an initiation piece…. Colored Girls also might be seen as a black feminist statement in that it offers a black woman's movement. Still another approach is to view it as a literary coming-of-age of black womanhood in the form of a series of testimonies which, in Shange's words, "explore the realities of seven different kinds of women." Indeed, the choreopoem is so rich that it lends itself to multiple interpretations, which vary according to one's perspective and experiences.
I would suggest, however, that the least appropriate responses are those exemplified by reviewers who said that black men will find themselves portrayed in Colored Girls "as brutal con men and amorous double dealers", or that "The thematic emphasis is constantly directed at the stupid crudity and downright brutality of [black] men." Comments such as these are particularly misleading because they appear in reviews which contain generous praise for Colored Girls, thus suggesting that it is the condemnation of black men which gives the book its merit. Too, such comments have the effect of diminishing the work to nothing more than a diatribe against black men, when, quite the contrary, Shange demonstrates a compassionate vision of black men—compassionate because though the work is not without anger, it has a certain integrity which could not exist if the author lacked a perceptive understanding of the crisis between black men and women.
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