Ntozake Shange was born Paulette Williams into an upper middle-class African-American family. Her father was an Air Force surgeon and her mother a psychiatric social worker. Cultural icons like Dizzie Gillepsie, Miles Davis and W.E.B. DuBois were regular guests in the Williams home.
Shange attended Barnard College and UCLA, earning both a bachelors and master degree in American Studies. Shange’s college years were difficult, however, and frustrated and hurt after separating from her first husband, she attempted suicide several times before focusing her rage against the limitations society imposes on black women. While earning a master’s degree, she reaffirmed her personal strength based on a self-determined identity and took her African name, which means “she who comes with her own things” and she “who walks like a lion.” Since then she has sustained a triple career as an educator, a performer/director, and a writer whose work draws heavily on her experiences of being a black female in America.
Shange is perhaps most famous for her play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975). A unique blend of poetry, music, dance and drama called a “choreopoem,” it “took the theatre world by storm” in 1975 noted Jacqueline Trescott in the Washington Post, as it “became an electrifying Broadway hit and provoked heated exchanges about the relationships between black men and women…Its form—seven women on the stage dramatizing poetry—was a refreshing slap at the traditional, one-two-three-act structures.” Mel Gussow, writing in the New York Times, stated that “Miss Shange was a pioneer in terms of her subject matter: the fury of black women at their double subjugation in white male America.”
The play uses female dancers to dramatize poems that recall encounters with their classmates, lovers, rapists, abortionists, and latent killers. The women survive abuse and disappointment and come to recognize in each other the promise of a better future. The play received both enthusiastic reviews and criticism for its portrayal of African-American men. However, “Shange’s poems aren’t war cries,” Jack Kroll wrote in a Newsweek review of the Public Theatre production of For Colored Girls. “They’re outcries filled with a controlled passion against the brutality that blasts the lives of ‘colored girls’—a phrase that in her hands vibrates with social irony and poetic beauty.
Shange’s next productions, A Photograph: A Study of Cruelty (1977), Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1977), Spell No. 7 (1979) and Black and White Two Dimensional Planes (1979) impressed critics with their poetic quality. As Richard Eder wrote in the New York Times, “more than anything else, she [Shange] is a troubadour. She declares her fertile vision of the love and pain between black women and black men in outbursts full of old malice and young cheerfulness. They are short outbursts, song-length; her characters are perceived in flashes, in illuminating vignettes.” Don Nelson, writing in the New York Daily News, deemed Spell No. 7 “black magic …. The word that best describes Shange’s works, which are not plays in the traditional sense, is power.”
Shange has also published essay collections, including See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays, and Accounts 1976-1983 (1984) and If I Can Cook You Know God Can (1999). The latter is full of conversational essays that take the reader to the tables of African Americans, Nicaraguans, Londoners, Barbadoans, Brazilians, and Africans. A Booklist reviewer noted that the recipes are interwoven with a “fervent, richly impassioned chronicle of African-American experience” that examines political turmoil and relates “how connections are made beyond issues of class or skin color.” In addition to poetry, novels, essays, and screenplays, Shange has taken on the field of children’s literature with the publication of four books for children: Whitewash (1997), the tribute to Mohammed Ali Float Like a Butterfly (2002), Ellington Was Not a Street (2003), and Daddy Says (2003).
Shange also edited The Beacon Best of 1999, a collection of poems, short stories, and essays written by lesser-known men and women of color. Shange defines the work of writers she profiled in Beacon’s Best as “artful glimpses of life at the end of the twentieth century,” which perhaps also describes Shange’s work at its most acclaimed and creative.