SOURCE: "'A Laying on of Hands': Transcending the City in Ntozake's Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf," in Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, edited by Susan Merrill Squier, University of Tennessee Press, 1984, pp. 230-248.

In the following essay, Mitchell discusses Shange's choreopoem in terms of how it portrays an African American woman's perspective of the city.

Ntozake Shange's choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, presents the paradox of the modern American city as a place where black women experience the trauma of urban life, yet find the strength to transcend the pain.¹ The women depicted by Shange become physically and spiritually whole, thus free, through the psychic/psychological healing power that resides in the ancient, fundamentally religious act called "the laying on of hands." The believer "knows" that touch...