(Motive) The world women live in today is one with overbearing patriarchy, wage gaps, sexual assault and dating violence, academic discrimination, and diminishing rights. Supposedly all humans are the agents of their own bodies, yet the ownership of women’s bodies has been stolen and put in the hands of a politician with a harmful agenda. America proudfully boasts of equality and virtue, yet 51% of its population is mistreated with a wide deficiency of standards. Women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men; one in five women have been raped in college; the U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t mandate paid maternity leave and has not ratified the international bill of rights for women (CEDAW). In a country where women are the majority of the population, only 20% of the Senate and 18% of the House of Representatives is constituted of women. (problem/question/reason) America’s current system directly contradicts one of the objectives of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights: gender equality. Further and more specifically, black women are at an increased disadvantage when it comes to just and fair treatment. Today's society exploits black women in more ways than imaginable. This problem is not broadcasted nor widely recognized by white males or females, but also by black males. The injustice black women face is hidden under the rug of women’s rights; black women’s victimized experiences are only secluded among themselves, for no one has paid any attention to the lowest rung on the social-class ladder until they started to speak out and shake all the rungs above them. (Thesis) In the choreopoem, For Colored Girls, the ladies display the immense struggles that black women must persevere through in society. These struggles include the frustrated desire for male companionship, violence, the urge to be free from masks, and the universe suffocating their voices. Shange uses the rainbow metaphor, gives the characters their own authentic, autonomous voices, and incorporates unique word choice to produce a continuous flow of movement throughout the poem.
Struggles to break free from traditional gender expectations and male control:
What is needed in order to triumph? Are they successful?
A persistent pattern of frustrated desire for male companionship and love runs throughout the poems. However, the women are unable a suitable man who is honorable, attentive, and returns the love that these women have to offer. This leads to the unhealthy, male controlled state of mind where men are the center of women’s thoughts. This sways the women hide their upsetness in acts of defense by adopting self-destructive masks of arrogance, revenge, and self-sufficiency. The ladies hope their masks are impenetrable from pain. However, these masks get debunked, leaving the ladies alone with their pain and vulnerability. Reaching this turning point of self-honesty, the lady in purple declares, “i want you to love me/let me love you/ i dont wanna dance wit ghosts/snuggle lovers i made up in my drunkenness/lemme love you just like i am/ a colored girl/i’m finally bein/real/no longer symmetrical and impervious to pain” (44). She is finally cognizant that she must face the world openly instead of falsely disguising herself to please men. Yet, she is still proclaiming her intense affection for an unworthy man, which reverses her progress. The lady in yellow regrets her “dependency on other livin beins for love” because she knows that her love will only be “thrown back on [her] face” (45). Still, feelings of regret don’t signify true victory over male control. Overall, the ladies decide that the only way to live is to interact with men and pay the consequences. By accepting the entailing violence and continuing to long for male relationships, the ladies ultimately fail to triumph.
Within For Colored Girls, the ladies engage in several different performances and dances. These expose even more of the complex struggles that black women face, such as dating violence. Transcendent moments of joyous dancing are halted by harsh realities. The poem “latent rapists” interrupts celebratory dancing at the end of “i’m a poet who” with a sudden change of light that causes the ladies “to react as if they had been struck in the face” (16). They stop dancing and withdraw into themselves. This arrest of movement announces the topic of rape: an awful occurrence in which trust is betrayed by overpowering male domination and violence. Domination through physical force and the strain of living amongst unruly males, imposes a unnerving control over these women. This demoralizing effect contradicts counters the true purpose of dancing: to be alive, to participate in life to the fullest degree, to enjoy. Yet, the dancing makes the women vulnerable. The girl in “abortion cycle #1” pays a terrible price for just one night of celebrating joy in dance and sexual awakening. She danced to abandon and forget about her struggles suddenly finds herself alone and strapped down on a hospital gurney in preparation for emotionally and physically torturous procedure. Even so, the women can’t escape the attractiveness of dancing nor urge to celebrate and be completely alive.
In some cases, dancing provides the opportunity for honor and respect towards the women. Sechita, a carnival dancer, tries to evade the risks of vulnerability involved in dancing by remaking herself with so severely that she “made her face immobile/ she made her face like nefertiti” (24-25). The jewelry, makeup, and scandalous costume were all to please the drunken men in the audience. Then, Sechita uses the very dance meant to display her for the men’s enjoyment to turn the tables on her audience. Rather than being the object of their lewd gazes, she becomes an Egyptian goddess “performin the rites/the conjurin of men”, which holds them in enchantment” (25). During this performance, Sechita commendebly creates honor where none existed before. However, even the triumph of Sechita’s new control as she “kicked vicariously thru the nite”, is indeed a failure because in the end, she is still alone (25). With her mask she lures men to her bed then orders them to leave before dawn and punishes them for having the arrogance to want her. But, she still cried herself to sleep after recording her exploits in her diary. Thus, the immobility of Sechita’s mask is hampering towards her desire to live life without a mask. It serves only to showcase that women can’t “survive on intimacy & tomorrow” because it’s only temporary and a lie. It does no good to assume a false display because the fakeness prevents true love and intimacy. Even though love may bring pain, it is better to risk being vulnerable, to be “real/no longer symmetrical & impervious to pain” and possibly find real love and fulfillment.
Unfortunately, some black women are victimized by the lacking agency of their own voice. In “a nite with beau willie brown,” Crystal gets pregnant a second time, so Willie beats her. She combats his violent behavior by getting a court order denying him access to the children. When he comes to visit her to prove he’s a good husband and father at last, Crystal is too bogged down by the pain from their past to move toward him. She holds her children so tightly that getting possession of them becomes Willie’s sole objective. The strain “there waz no air” weaves through the poem, indicating suffocation of women’s voices. In response to Willie’s demand for acceptance of him, Crystal can only whisper in his oppressive presence. Her words fail her because she has no “voice” in the relationship or in her world. Her quiet response leads to Willie dropping the children out of the fifth-story window. If Crystal had been allowed to have a voice, she could have stopped Willie. But, “there waz no air”.