Identity

"When I die, I will not be guilty," Shange proclaimed in an interview with Claudia Tate in Black Women Writers at Work, "of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves." Shange has expressed a desire to make/or colored girls .... a play that explores the pain and promise of "bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored," available on library and school bookshelves or given as a gift to young women coming of age in America. This play is to supplement the widely available information on contraception with "emotional information," the kind of information Shange says did not get as a child, even though she grew up in an affluent, loving home. This work, like her other pieces, is meant to dispel the myths and lies that little girls hear and to replace them with something they...