Ntozake Shange

Ntozake Shange (born October 18, 1948) is an American playwright, and poet. As a self-proclaimed black feminist, she addresses issues relating to race and feminism in much of her work.

Quotes

• …The characters in Sassafras did say awful things and trash one another, but there are people who do. In the time of the Sassafras narrative certain women's collectives existed that were very dramatic and people had a lot of lovers. We didn't even call it promiscuity. It was very different from the environment today. People today sit down and think about how they really want to be monogamous. It was not anybody's goal fifteen years ago.
  • On being criticized by women that Sassafras, Cypress and Indigo was homophobic in “INTERVIEW WITH NTOZAKE SHANGE” in The Massachusetts Review (1986 Dec 22)

• I think I always see a young child or an adolescent of color, but not necessarily right this minute. I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy—a yearning I had as a teenager. I hate that word. But as an adolescent—to have done something that I didn't have and I didn't know what it was 'cause I had never heard about it…
  • On who she once envisioned as the audience in “INTERVIEW WITH NTOZAKE SHANGE” in The Massachusetts Review (1986 Dec 22)

• …I think unless black women are writing the pieces, we're being left out the same way we used to be left out of literature. We don't appear in things unless we write them ourselves. In the white male literary establishment women attain what looks like positions of power or influence or economic stability, but they're structured in such a way that they become unthreatening.
  • On sexism functions differently in the Black and White writing communities in “INTERVIEW WITH NTOZAKE SHANGE” in The Massachusetts Review (1986 Dec 22)

• …gender is cultural: we have menarche to deal with, virginity, menopause, pregnancy, childbirth; these things are unavoidable. And in some places they've been wise enough to have ritual and ceremony about significant events. It is unfortunate in our culture-meaning north American mainstream culture—that all this has been minimized to the point where little girls are even afraid to say that they are starting to menstruate when they should be very happy. Grown women are afraid to say that they are approaching the menopause, when that means that they have lived a whole successful life. They've lived so long that they can have this…
  • On her views that gender is a culture of its own in “Drama or Performance Art? An Interview with Ntozake Shange” in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (Fall 1991)

• i found god in myself
  & i loved her/i loved her fiercely
  • for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1976)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Ntozake Shange at Wikipedia