For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf by Ntozake Shange is a choreopoem as opposed to a play.  From the introduction Shange stated her intent was “a series of seven poems … which were to explore the realities of seven different kinds of women.  They were numbered pieces: the women were to be nameless & assume hegemony as dictated by the fullness of their lives.”  This chorus and choreography consisted of seven roles, each female and named after an individual colour; the characters work harmoniously onstage (and in life) as a rainbow, “the poems & the dance worked on their own to do & be what they were.  As opposed to viewing the pieces as poems, I came to understand these twenty-odd poems as a single statement, a choreopoem.”  Essentially For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf is a universal performance piece, like The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler, told “in the words of a young black girl’s growing up, her triumphs & errors, our struggle to become all that is forbidden by our environment, all that is forfeited by our gender, all that we have forgotten.”

Stylistically the choreopoem is at first off-putting with its lack of capitalisation and its abbreviation of words (also, as you can even see from the introductory quotes above, “and” is always an ampersand).  However, it is a powerful piece and I would love to see it performed.  The striking poster I noticed hanging on the wall of the teacher Ms. Rain’s apartment in the film adaptation of Precious (still to be reviewed), which encouraged me to read the book; furthermore, it may have the most curious title of anything I have ever read before.   There is comedy and tragedy in the rainbow stories and some emotive soliloquies especially the tragic lady in red/crystal story narrated over five pages towards the end.  The quotes below reflect both the comedy and the drama and some lines were simply poetic, “more than aureliano buendia loved macondo” (an allusion to One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez).

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf is a feminist work and the issues it relates, those facing women of different realities including love, domestic violence, and rape.  Some resonated more than others but the choreopoem style and the concept of a harmonious rainbow, with the women complementing each other, was effective; it is a celebration of womanhood and all its trials and of life.

this note is attached to a plant/ i’ve been waterin since the day i met you/ you may water it/ yr damn self

the other colours ran off

lady in blue

a friend is hard to press charges against

lady in red

if you know him

you must have wanted it

lady in purple

a misunderstanding

lady in red

you know

these things happen

lady in blue

are you sure you didn’t suggest

lady in purple

had you been drinkin

lady in red

a rapist is always to be a stranger

to be legitimate

someone you never saw

a man wit obvious problems

lady in blue

bein betrayed by men who know us

lady in purple

& expect

like the stranger

we always thot waz comin

lady in blue

that we will submit

i loved you on purpose

i was  open on purpose

i still crave vulnerability & close talk

& i’m not even sorry bout you bein sorry

you can carry all the guilt & grime ya wanna

just don’t give it to me

i can’t use another sorry

next time

you should admit

you’re mean/low-down/triflin/& no count straight out

steada bein sorry alla the time

enjoy bein yrself

To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski is the fourth of her novels that Persephone Books have published but was the first of those four to be published, in 1946 under the pseudonym “Sarah Russell”.  A unique take on the experience of women in WWII England, To Bed With Grand Music opens with the arresting line, “Graham and Deborah Robertson lay in bed together and tried to say goodbye to each other”; Deborah’s husband is due to leave for Cairo for a desk-job in the war effort and in their goodbye he promises to be unfaithful to his wife, for the duration of his time overseas, only with women who cannot be compared to her, whilst Deborah vows her fidelity. The novel follows with Deborah’s failure to keep that promise throughout wartime until victory and her husband’s impending return home.

That is where I come unstuck.  I have found it difficult to gather my thoughts and present them concisely on this book because Deborah exasperates, repels and flummoxes me. It is difficult for me to fully articulate my thoughts on this book because I have so many; it is thoroughly though-provoking and Darlene was right in suggesting it for me, on the basis that she entered into a dialogue with herself whilst reading it and thought that I would do likewise.  Deborah is most vexing as is the situation presented.  A husband freely admits -in advance- to being unfaithful to his wife whilst he is serving his country and yet she is to remain the docile wife at home with their son; the double-standard employed in the power dynamic of their marriage infuriates me and yet it was is seen as the norm because men have needs.  Goodness forbid that a woman has sexual needs of her own and that she seeks that fulfillment outwith the sanctimony of marriage, let alone during wartime.  The premise of To Bed With Grand Music is a shocking one but shocking in the sense that such things have rarely been tackled in literature and certainly not on the back of the war itself, when people were acclimatising to peace-time; Mollie Panter-Downes deals with it to an extent in her Mrs Craven short stories and Elizabeth Bowen depicted the sensuality found in the Blitz (or the darkness it resulted in) in The Heat of the Day, which Sarah Waters picked up on decades later in The Night Watch but for the main, those stories of the Home Front have been endearing (I think of Henrietta’s War, myself). What Laski has done is expose the underbelly of how the women left at home could -and often did- occupy themselves whilst the men were at the front (the preface by Juliet Gardiner makes fascinating reading).

Deborah is a thoroughly dislikable character from the outset; she is brattish and selfish.  Being a housewife and a mother to Timmy, their two-year-old son, frustrates and bores Deborah and it is not long after Graham’s embarkation -at the instigation of her mother and housekeeper- leaves the family cottage and goes to find work in London, returning only on weekends to see her son.  Before she  has even set herself up in London, Deborah has experienced her first sexual encounter with another man; she is disgusted with herself but it is not long after moving to London that she conducts her first extra-marital affair and then another and then another, each one more seedy and briefer than the one before.  By the novel’s end, the transformation is complete and Deborah has gone from a doting wife to a tart without a heart who seeks lessons in becoming a good mistress.

There is such difficulty in evaluating what becomes to Deborah because I rail against judging a woman for her sexual liberation and support a woman’s right to use her own body as she wishes but, in effect, Deborah prostitutes herself for dinners and drinks, hats and bags, and black-market stockings and nail-varnish.  Laski presents such a quandary because I struggled so hard not to judge Deborah but I succumbed; Deborah disgusted me in her wanton disregard for the pain she was inflicting (the potential pain that had to be surmised) on the innocent victims of her adultery: her son and the wives of those married men she went with; she even begins to think of her actions as in the best interests of her child.  My own strong feelings against adultery made it impossible to read this novel objectively; it wasn’t an immoral book but I’m not sure of Laski’s intent, whether she was writing a straight-up expose or a condemnation; she certainly did not pain Deborah in a sympathetic light.  Deborah deludes herself  in justifying her actions and it does make compelling reading, if not a completely enjoyable experience because of the frustration felt at Deborah’s actions and her justifications.  It is most definitely a disconcerting read, more for my own reactions to it, and for the unique take on the home front that it provides, which is truly illuminating post black-out.

Despite lacking the emotional intensity of Little Boy Lost, To Bed With Grand Music still has me reeling and unable to express and do justice to how good -not to mention versatile- a novelist Laski is.  I do think that, like me, she judged Deborah and she makes a persuasive argument for doing so.  Graham, the husband, only appears in that opening bedroom scene -excluding some gushing and sexist letters- so we can only surmise how he has been conducting himself whilst absent from home; his absence excuses him from culpability, which is enraging, and is very effective in evoking the double-standard applied to cheating spouses.  This novel is very much one about gender, power and sexual freedom, whether that was Laski’s intention or not.  Yet again Laski has evoked a powerful reaction in me as a reader.

Some representative passages:

It was not until the end of August that Deborah’s content began to break up.  Each autumn in wartime, everyone is slightly more depressed than they were each spring, for they look forward to cold and black-out and bombing, and another Christmas of war.  They have forgotten the fantastic hopes they entertained as the last winter faded away, or, if they remember them, it is only to contrast their past expectations with present reality.

Deborah understood him.  ‘You’re at least the third person,’ she said, ‘who has asked me if it mightn’t be better if I went home to my chee-ild.  Well, darling, that’s just one of the things I’ve really thought out for myself and I know it’s better to be happy than unhappy, and not only for me but for my baby as well.  I like this sort of life, in fact, I love it, and seeing as how I’m hurting no one and doing myself quite a lot of good, I rather think I’ll carry on with it.  I’ve come to the conclusion that conventional morals were invented by a lot of unattractive bitches to make themselves feel good.

The end-papers from To Bed With Grand Music are taken from a 1940 Jacqmar scarf, ‘Good Night Everybody’ from a private collection.

Some favourite passages:

One of the things that I did enjoy about Persepolis was Satrapi’s art and that is continued in Embroideries so I felt that it was almost one continuous story set in the same policed world albeit with a far less dry installment. I thoroughly enjoyed Embroideries and its insights into the lives of multi-generational women in Iran. Marjane and her family members gather with friends and neighbours for an afternoon samovar, the function of which was discussion; although the afternoon of tea and chat is translated as “discussion” I think it is more literally “gossip”, or as Marjane’s grandmother describes it, “To speak behind others’ backs is the ventilator of the heart.” I love that image and it is one continued later, where one of the neighbours is crying and another says “let her air out her heart. There’s nothing better than talking”. I respond well to female company, to good chats over tea or coffee and find it often immeasurably cathartic, illuminating or plain entertaining and Embroideries is all of these things. The discussions often involve sex and the experiences of the women discussing it; some have had horrible experiences with marriage and men and others entertaining ones or the women are recounting stories of women they know. From the childhood friend who razor-bladed her husband’s testicle on their wedding night in an attempt to recreate the loss of her virginity (already lost) to the married woman who had never seen a penis or knew what the “white stuff” was that another story referred to, the discussions that take place around tea are highly amusing. Not all the stories are entertainingly shocking or amusing, however, but all deal with women’s issues and the positions of women being forced to married the wrong man, the lengths they will go to keep a man, the steps taken to leave a man, in a culture that value men over these courageous, intelligent, witty women.

Some of the women who surround Marjane are strong and subversive, resilient and positive role models for a young woman and I am not surprised that Satrapi chose to write about them. I was entertained whilst being given insight into a cultural tradition that, albeit not very different in nature from Western women meeting up for coffee, is conducted behind closed doors. The stories recounted are rich in humour and experience and my only complaint is that Embroideries was so slight as I could happily have read something longer and more substantial, rather than barely a glimpse.

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