BooksSolution Sessions

solution sessions: ntozake shange’s final blessing

October 29, 2018

Photo by Terrence Jennings for AFROPUNK

 

In a time when it seems like we’re losing more and more of our creative leaders, it’s important we give them their roses while they’re still here to enjoy them.

The AFROPUNK family was blessed to host the iconic playwright and poet Ntozake Shange at our Brooklyn Solution Sessions celebrating re(Sisters) and the power of Black women this summer in what would become one of her last public readings.

Charming, powerful, and energetic as ever at 69 (she passed just ten days after her 70th birthday), Shange spoke of blue Blackness, the resilience of Black beauty and Black joy. The power and strength of words reverberated through the performance hall as she took as to cotton fields and the streets of Chicago. “Won’t somebody/ anybody sing a Black girl’s song?” Shange pleaded in her seminal 1976 theater piece “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf.” On our Brooklyn stage, an audience of Black women gave Shange a much-deserved standing ovation. She sang our song and we are forever changed and grateful.

Subscribe to AFROPUINK SOLUTION SESSIONS now on Apple Podcasts.

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