WE WIN Institute, Inc., an organization dedicated to the academic and social success of all children, brought students from their Cooper High School Mentoring Program to experience the words of the extraordinary Ntozoke Shange. The event was hosted by Alexs Pate, a University of Minnesota professor and author of the book Amistad.
Shange was born Paulette Williams in Trenton, NJ. She changed her name to Ntozake Shange which means "she who comes with her own things" and "she who walks like a lion" in Xhosa, a Zulu language from southern Africa.
Shange is most famous for her choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf. The choreopoem (a word created by the author) is composed of a series of stories by the ladies in brown, yellow, orange, purple, red and blue. The setting of the play is a naked stage where each women lives in a different city: Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Baltimore, San Francisco, Manhattan, and St. Louis. It is one uninterrupted movement from beginning to end comprised of twenty titled poems. Shange explains that, “the women were nameless and assume the hegemony as dictated by the fullness of their lives."
She is the only poet to have her poetry transformed successfully on Broadway. One of the famous lines from the choreopoem was the words of the lady in yellow, “I found god in myself and I loved her I loved her fiercely"
Besides her plays, Shange has written poetry, novels, and essays. She has taught at California State College, the City College of New York, the University of Houston, Rice University, Yale, Howard, and New York University. Among her many awards are an Obie, a Los Angeles Time Book Prize for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize.
Through Shange’s writings she initiates an awareness of present-day femininity in society. She also brings an awareness of the realities of African American life, the good times and the struggles. She demonstrated some of the hardships with her poem, “With no Immediate Cause,” which visibly moved her audience at the Humphrey Institute.
With No Immediate Cause
every 3 minutes a woman is beaten
every five minutes a
woman is raped/every ten minutes
a lil girl is molested
yet i rode the subway today
i sat next to an old man who
may have beaten his old wife
3 minutes ago or 3 days/30 years ago
he might have sodomized his
daughter but i sat there
cuz the young men on the train
might beat some young women
later in the day or tomorrow
i might not shut my door fast
every 3 minutes it happens
some woman's innocence
rushes to her cheeks/pours from her mouth
like the betsy wetsy dolls have been torn
apart/their mouths
menses red & split/every
three minutes a shoulder
is jammed through plaster and the oven door/
chairs push thru the rib cage/hot water or
boiling sperm decorate her body
i rode the subway today
& bought a paper from a
man who might
have held his old lady onto
a hot pressing iron/i don't know
maybe he catches lil girls in the
park & rips open their behinds
with steel rods/i can't decide
what he might have done i only
know every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes every 10 minutes/so
i bought the paper
looking for the announcement
the discovery/of the dismembered
woman's body/the
victims have not all been
identified/today they are
naked and dead/refuse to
testify/one girl out of 10's not
coherent/i took the coffee
& spit it up/i found an
announcement/not the woman's
bloated body in the river/floating
not the child bleeding in the
59th street corridor/not the baby
broken on the floor/
there is some concern
that alleged battered women
might start to murder their
husbands & lovers with no
immediate cause"
i spit up i vomit i am screaming
we all have immediate cause
every 3 minutes
every 5 minutes
every 10 minutes
every day
women's bodies are found
in alleys & bedrooms/at the top of the stairs
before i ride the subway/buy a paper/drink
coffee/i must know/
have you hurt a woman today
did you beat a woman today
throw a child across a room
are the lil girl's panties
in yr pocket
did you hurt a woman today
i have to ask these obscene questions
the authorities require me to
establish
immediate cause
every three minutes
every five minutes
every ten minutes
every day.
The woman in the ordinary
The woman in the ordinary pudgy downcast girl
is crouching with eyes and muscles clenched.
Round and pebble smooth she effaces herself
under ripples of conversation and debate.
The woman in the block of ivory soap
has massive thighs that neigh,
great breasts that blare and strong arms that trumpet.
The woman of the golden fleece
laughs uproariously from the belly
inside the girl who imitates
a Christmas card virgin with glued hands,
who fishes for herself in other's eyes,
who stoops and creeps to make herself smaller.
In her bottled up is a woman peppery as curry,
a yam of a woman of butter and brass,
compounded of acid and sweet like a pineapple,
like a handgrenade set to explode,
like goldenrod ready to bloom.
