Song, and Dance, my first and only play. All of these performing and workshop experiences were heading to
something: her theatrical approach was incubating, soon to be born fully blossomed.
During dance class, while undulating, turning, leaping, and extending, she enjoyed the grace of synchrony
between drums and movement, between her body and spirit. She could then go home and write. And she might
write into the middle of the night with
renewed vision and insight, oftentimes
until within a few hours before she had
to get on the road in her turquoise blue
Volvo to make the hour-and-a-half
drive across the Golden Gate Bridge
to Sonoma State University where she
taught English and Women’s Studies.
Sure, she could have lived among the
rolling hills, where Sonoma State was
situated, but she preferred the vitality of
San Francisco over the rural monotony of
Northern California. The crazy, painful,
invigorating reality of urban life was what
sustained her.
It was during those inspiration-filled
wee hours of the morning that I could
get a call at perhaps 3 a.m.: “Hey Halifu,
whatcha doin’? I want you to listen to
something and tell me what you think.”
A sleep-filled voice would answer back,
“What you think I’m doing? What most
folks with any sense are doing, but go
‘head; what you been working on?” It
was during these creative nocturnal Zake monologues that I first heard the poems that would eventually move
across the proscenium to thousands of America’s diverse public. It was during these early morning poems that
I first heard the inchoate versions of for colored girls who considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.
For colored girls was christened a “choreopoem” and the genre was born. She was a dancer; she was just
a much better writer than a dancer. If she had moved into the arena of dance and choreography, the general
public would not have taken the same notice, not only because dance works with a different exigency of
communication, but also because of the Western privileging of Logos over Eros, the latter of which dance is
associated with. Yet, Zake’s marriage of the two genres was unique and groundbreaking. She broke away from
the Eurocentric musical, which had become standard fare as early as the 1920s when “we” were first allowed
on Broadway with Shuffle Along. A little dialogue segueing into a song that linearly evolves out of the themes
just uttered, or a dance routine in chorus unison enlivening the show and usually accompanying the song as a
wake-up call to the audience is essentially the Broadway musical. Zake’s creative sensibility is different, non-
Western, indeed African.
Anyone who has attended a traditional African festival or ceremony knows that radical juxtaposition is
normative. Performance art is not new. Word, song, and dance interrelate as in a vertiginous dynamo that picks
you up, shuffles the deck, and deposits you where the transformative process will. African ritual is indeed
antecedent to Zake’s staged choreopoem. In for colored girls, Sechita’s dance, for example, is at once word
and deed in one — imagery and movement wed as only a Black woman writer, who is also a dancer, can lay
african Voices
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