Author: Margret Echeverria

Thoughts of suicide are not okay, common wisdom tells us.  Once we learn that, many of us will shut up about it because the last thing we want are people in positions of authority trying to “help.” When you are a woman and colored, there are many authoritarians ignorant of who and what you are dictating what is best for you.  In For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, Ntozake Shange presents us with a sacred space of sisterhood where these hidden stories are delivered through poetry and dance showing us how some sisters ultimately chose pleasurable survival despite assignation of second class citizen statuses. No one asks, Are you okay? because these women are beyond all the ineffective platitudes.  They are honest, passionate expressions of joy won through living and learning their pain over and over again.