Kitwana, Bakari. The Hip Hop Generation: Young
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New York: Civitas Books, 2002.
Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture
in Contemporary America. Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Detavio Ricardo Samuels
Shange, Ntozake (1948– )
Ntozake Shange is known the world over as the
fiercely articulate author of the “choreopoem” FOR
COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN
THE RAINBOW IS ENUF (1974). Shange has written
and published prodigiously in the quarter of a
century since for colored girls premiered on Broad-
way, but her name and image will forever be linked
to this play, which explores the rites and rituals of
modern black womanhood. Shange’s description
of her work in the preface of the published play
could characterize her entire oeuvre: “our struggle
[is to] become all that is forbidden by our environ-
ment, all that is forfeited by our gender, all that we
have forgotten.”
Ntozake Shange was born Paulette Linda Wil-
liams in Trenton, New Jersey. The oldest of four
children of Paul and Eloise Williams, Shange was
reared in a socially and intellectually stimulat-
ing environment. Her father, a surgeon, and her
mother, a psychiatric social worker and educator,
instilled in their children a strong sense of their
cultural heritage as politically engaged people
of color in the African diaspora. The Williams
counted among their friends and acquaintances
such artists, performers, and social activists as
Josephine Baker, Dizzy Gillespie, Chuck Berry,
Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and W. E. B. DUBOIS.
The Williams family tells the story of Shange as an
infant being carried up to bed by DuBois, who was
visiting at the time. Looking back, it seems appro-
priate that she should be linked with one of her
intellectual models so early on.
When Shange was eight, she moved with her
family to a then racially segregated St. Louis, where
she was among the first students to integrate a
German-American school, an event she recounts
in colored girls and in the semiautobiographical
novel Betsey Brown (1985). The family moved back
to Trenton when Shange was 13, and it was there
that she began in earnest to broaden her intel-
lectual horizons, reading a wide variety of books,
including the works of Dostoevsky, Melville, Car-
son McCullers, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Simone de
Beauvoir, and Jean Genet. Her parents supported
and encouraged her artistic predilections by pro-
viding music lessons (she played the violin), dance
lessons, an introduction to the opera, and even
crafts such as knitting.
In 1966, Shange enrolled in Barnard College
in New York City, where she graduated with hon-
ors in 1970. During her years at Barnard, Shange
became personally aware of social, political, and
gender inequities in society. Her parents had in-
stilled in their children a strong social and politi-
cal conscience, especially with regard to people of
color. Her undergraduate years were a time of dis-
covery and emotional turmoil. Shange attempted
suicide after a separation from her husband, then
a student in law school. However, she soon turned
her considerable creative energies toward life-
and spirit-sustaining endeavors. She eventually
used her experiences and the experiences of her
women friends and colleagues to create art that
spoke to and for a generation on issues of race
and gender.
In 1971, while studying for a master’s degree
in African-American studies at the University of
Southern California, Shange, then Paulette Wil-
liams, decided to take an African name: In the Zulu
dialect Zhosa, Ntozake means “she who comes
with her own things,” and Shange means “who
walks like a lion.” Shange’s name change signaled
her embrace of the tenets of BLACK NATIONALISM,
an intellectual movement among black youth that
shaped the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT and the BLACK
POWER movement. In the years since that time,
Shange has come to play a significant role in shap-
ing and defining the black aesthetic.
From 1972 to 1975, Shange taught women’s
studies and Afro-American studies at Sonoma
State College, Mills College, and University of
California Extension. During the same period, she
was dancing and reciting poetry with the Third458 Shange, Ntozake