Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara: Genre Contamination and the Tradition of Black Women’s Writing

The article will unveil the multiple intersections in terms of style and content between two works written by two Black women writers across the Atlantic: Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (1976) and Bernardine Evaristo’s first verse-novel, Lara (1997), published nearly twenty years later. Firstly, in both works, for colored girls and Lara, it is possible to draw a parallelism between the indeterminacy of their generic classification, on the one hand, and their complex polyvocality, on the other. In the two literary texts, poetry proves to be the common component allowing for the hybridization of genres, which, in my view, reinforces their oppositional nature with respect to the fixity of the Western literary canon. As for the thematic component of Shange’s and Evaristo’s work, it should be noted that it underlines the physicality of the Black female body in terms which prove to be oppositional with respect to dominant discourses. Indeed, be it debased, humiliated or, on the contrary, exalted, the Black female body is simultaneously liberated from the constraints of the hegemonic practices of discursive pathologization and animalization affecting the representation of Black people and Black women in particular.