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About "For Colored Girls..."

There are as many ways of looking at Ntozake Shange’s "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf" as there are hues in a rainbow. One can take it as an initiation piece, for instance, particularly with its heavily symbolic “Graduation Nite” and the girlhood perspectives of the mama’s little baby/ Sally Walker segment and the voice of the eight-year-old narrator of “Toussaint.”

Colored Girls also might be seen as a black feminist statement in that it offers a black woman’s perspective on issues made prominent by the women’s movement.
Still another approach is to view it as a literary coming-of-age of black womanhood in the form of a series of testimonies, which, in Shange’s words, “explore the realities of seven different kinds of women.”

Excerpt taken from:
Colored Girls: Textbook for the Eighties
Sandra Hollin Flowers
Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 15, Issue 2 (Summer, 1981), 51-54