For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf

The choreopoem requires dance, and dance requires music, so music is the most prominent motif in the choreopoem. Throughout the work, music and song help set the tone for each piece, taking the audience from dark heavy emotions to light-hearted ones and back. Shange’s composition makes the entire work function like a modern music album. In the choreopoem, individual poems would be analogous to tracks on an album, while the transitional pieces of song, chant, dance, humorous conversation mimic interludes that artists include on albums to create a sense of seamlessness between tracks. Shange’s interludes operate the same way, adjusting the tempo, shifting the mood, providing comic relief, and helping to hold the poems together to create a cohesive work.

In the sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions, God sends a rainbow after 40 days of rain and flooding wipe out all life on Earth. The rainbow is a sign of His promise to restore the Earth and never flood it again. Through this passage, rainbows have entered the collective imagination as a symbol of healing, restoration, and joy returned. They symbolize those things in for colored girls as well.