Writing Homework Help

After reading the excerpt from For Colored Girls . . ., answer the following questions.

This is optional. You do not have to do this assignment.

What is the overall theme of the poem presented by the lady in green?

What is her “stuff” and why is it so important to her?

How does this poem speak to ideas of “third-wave” feminism?For Colored Girls who’ve Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf

Shange (suffering from depression) saw a huge rainbow over the city of Oakland, California, and realized that she and other women had a right to survive, because, as she related in a New York Times interview, they “have as much and as much purpose for being here as mountains do.” In that same interview, Shange explained that she realized that the rainbow is “the possibility to start all over again with the power and beauty of ourselves,” b; “The rainbow is a fabulous symbol for me [….] If you see one color, it’s not beautiful. If you see them all, it is. A colored girl, by my definition, is a girl of many colors. But she can only see her overall beauty if she can see all the colors of herself. To do that, she has to look deep inside her. And when she looks inside herself, she will find love and beauty.”

Shange’s work is technically what we call a choreopoem – a poem set to movement. And it, like Dutchman and Raisin . . . was meant to be performed rather than read. With that in mind, the “Lady in Green” is featured below.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide: Lady in Green performed by Tiffany Snow

Shange’s work as well as that of many other black women in the 1970s and 1980s, focuses on the issues that are central to black women’s lives. Many black women didn’t feel that they had much in common with what they saw as a “white woman’s feminism”. While women of the 1950s and 1960s saw Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” as a rallying cry, many women of color didn’t see their concerns represented in this struggle. Specifically, issues of race, class and gender complicate notions of womanhood and are just as important as issues of sex in the lives of many women. Alice Walker coined the term “womanist” in response to a feminism that she believed did not incorporate her full identity. She states: “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender”. Women’s concerns are much richer and vibrant that what was being espoused in many feminist discourses. The women whose voices needed to be heard were not white middle-class and heterosexual. They were our working poor women, our black poor women, our queer women, etc. This wave of feminism, known as “third-wave feminism” sought to address these concerns.

Oftentimes the black women who were most vocal regarding this needed representation were accused of betraying the race because their critiques involved the ways in which not only white society was oppressing them, but the ways in which black men practice patriarchy by, in turn, oppressing the women in their lives. This criticism of patriarchy (supposedly) worked against ideas of racial solidarity. Maybe some of you have read or even seen The Color Purple by Alice Walker. A lot of the criticism of that work was aimed at what may saw as the negative portrayals of black men. But if you look closely at the work, Mister’s portrayal was balanced by a more nuanced portrayal of his son, Harpo who had to learn a different way of relating to women.

What do you think? How can we solve the dis-ease within our communities if we don’t confront the ways in which white patriarchy has been internalized by us. Audre Lorde and bell hooks took up this charge in their works as well.

Audre Lorde: For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

bell hooks: “the patriarchy has no gender”

Look at what the lady in green is trying to tell us. Someone almost walked away with all of her stuff. Her stuff isn’t anything material; it’s the essence of her being. And although it looks like the culprit is a black man, she puts the responsibility of owning herself squarely on her own shoulders. It’s time to redefine our worth and our relationships with our male counterparts. This work isn’t meant to destroy black communities, but to reconfigure them.