This one’s for all the ‘colored girls’
● “This is for colored girls who have considered suicide but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.”
This dedication sets off the powerful narrative that is Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf.
It is an intoxicating, provocative work that weaves together poetry, song and dance with gritty, profoundly real language that bubbles up from streets, kitchens and bedrooms to tell the stories of eight nameless women known only as Lady in Red (or Purple or Blue, one for each colour in the rainbow).
Only the second play by an African American woman ever to run on Broadway, it gave voice to the lived experiences of a generation of women in the 1970s, placing their lives, loves, losses, struggles, despairs, abortions, rapes and suicides front and centre in a rebellious act of provocation, and in the hope of better days to come.
What is haunting is that this play, written more than four decades ago, grapples with many of the same issues that bedevil women’s lives today. Shange’s work has proved itself to be universal and timeless with every new production — because, as one of the play’s characters puts it, “bein’ alive & bein’a woman & bein’ coloured is a metaphysical dilemma I haven’t conquered yet”.
This is the first time this work is going to be staged in Africa. It is also one of the matric set works, and Swankie Mafoko is one of the women in it. She is very effectively resisting my probing interview style, refusing to tell me which of the women she plays and encouraging me rather to come to the premiere next week to experience it all in person.
She is, however, telling me how honoured and proud this production makes her feel over lunch at Modena in Parkhurst. It is a brief Italian interlude in the gloriously designed super-chic café during a hectic rehearsal schedule.
The play is directed by Joburg Theatre’s James Ngcobo. James and I had lunch when he took the helm at the theatre, and it is exciting to see his vision and energy manifesting themselves in ambitious and necessary productions like this one, which aim to fill the theatre with young audiences.
“James works from the inside. He wants there to be a connection between the story about the women and the women themselves. There is great chemistry between the cast members. Shange has taken these different women’s stories, but in telling their stories one after the other you see that it is actually just one woman — just different versions of that woman.
“To some degree, they could all be one person. I’m looking at all these different stories, and they could have been experienced in South Africa.”
Swankie has an open face and wonderful, forthright manner that is disarming. She tried to use it on her parents when she discovered her passion for acting while growing up in KwaZulu-Natal. She needed to get herself to the National School of the Arts, but they were having none of it.
She persevered, and eventually her mother moved with her to Joburg so she could attend the institution. But she had to keep taking a stand for her thespian dreams after she matriculated.
“I had, like, four distinctions and the rest were Bs, and they were like, ‘Why aren’t you becoming a doctor? Why aren’t you studying law?’ And I was like, ‘No.’ In rebellion, I applied to just one university, Wits, and I had only one choice on my application form — drama school. And my mom was absolutely livid. But it worked out, so ... ”
The working out part has been episodic. She has done stints in TV, on radio as an award-winning news journalist, and as a public-speaking coach.
“I think I didn’t really understand the nature of the industry that we’re in and how tumultuous it is and how it can be. And I came to that realisation around 2018, so I moved back home. Now, this is just before Covid-19. I was doing side jobs that had nothing to do with what I studied, because the goal was to make a living, and I decided at the end of 2019 that I was going to pack my bags and leave the industry. I had applied for a job in China.”
Fortunately for us, How to Ruin Christmas came calling, and she was cast in the Netflix comedy that ran for three seasons.
“I always say to people that acting is a craft but comedy is a science. I feel the country has very few comedians that don’t lean towards slapstick, and that makes me scared, because I don’t want to be, like, Swankie Slapstick. So, yeah, it follows me around. But what’s really exciting now is that I’m the new presenter of Our Perfect Wedding, which is really amazing.”
She tells me that recently a very moving story went viral, tugging on heartstrings nationwide. It involved a couple who had lived together for decades but could not afford to get married.
I wonder what she has learnt about womanhood from For Colored Girls.
“I have learnt that nothing is linear, and that women express themselves in different ways and are perceived in different ways. I’m 30, and I’m only now starting to understand what that’s like — and that’s without a husband or a child. I’m just beginning to understand myself as a woman in society.
“It’s really shifting my thinking, as we grow up being taught that women are meant to speak in a specific way, and that if we don’t follow the roles we are confined to then we are not proper women.
“I think that is wrong. I have found ways, even on stage, to express that I am still a woman without sitting upright, crossing my legs, or wearing a dress.
“The definition of being a woman — what it looks like and what the experience of being a woman is — can evolve. What it is to be a woman today might not be the same in 2037 or 2051.”