And the pioneering black feminist poet, novelist and playwright Ntozake Shange has died at the age of 70 in Bowie, Maryland. Shange is best known for writing “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf.” The story focuses on seven black women dealing with issues including racism, sexism, abortion and domestic violence. This is Shange in an interview from 2010 talking about writing during the early 1970s.
Ntozake Shange: “It was very tumultuous time. The war in Vietnam was not over yet. Attica had just happened in ’71. They shot up most of the Black Panthers in Chicago in the office one morning, 44 people. And the Black Panther movement was coming apart at the seams in California. It was just a really furiously alive community in both black and Latin communities, and in music and art and poetry, as well.”
Speaking on her work, Shange once said, “When I die, I will not be guilty of having left a generation of girls behind thinking that anyone can tend to their emotional health other than themselves.”