This week’s post was supposed to be about perfection; rejecting the very idea of it, to be exact. But as the week crept along and I got closer to my Saturday plans to see Tyler Perry’s “For Colored Girls,” I tucked the idea away for next time and anticipated the Movie. I wasn’t disappointed. It is a beautiful movie. I loved it.


I don’t plan on spoiling things for those of you who haven’t seen the film, even though there are many scenes bouncing around in my head that I could write about. Instead, I want to focus on my personal reaction to the movie and the original play by Ntozake Shange.

A little over a year ago, I say the play, “For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf," with a group of women at a small community theater in Atlanta. I had not read the play. I tried to a week or two before the show, but I couldn’t get through it. That should have been a warning sign.

The performance was wonderful. As colorful and entertaining as you can imagine; each actress, including Robin Givens and Nicole Ari Parker, delivered their poetic soliloquies with great artistic skill. The performance, in fact, was so good that it conjured up memories and emotions that I had not faced or dealt with truthfully. At the end of the show, after making my way out of the crowded theater, I escaped out the back door. On the way home, I made one call to the friend who had coordinated the outing and promised an explanation for my exit later that night. I did a lot of crying that evening as I took a long look at the ugliness in my past. Seeing the play marked a turning point in my life. I started letting go of people, shame, fantasies, and pain that was old and crusted over. Not all at once. Not even completely, but my efforts have allowed an opening in my heart that has never existed before. And with that opening, I started getting my “stuff” back.

“For Colored Girls” in stage play or movie format is not easy or pretty or soft and sweet. It is raw truth; unapologetic truth. And the characters—the women they represent—even with their weaknesses splashed all over the stage floor, or the film screen, are symbols of strength. They are strong because they all tell secrets that every one of us—black, brown, white, yellow, or purple—have all been instructed, in some way or another, to keep to ourselves. They are strong because they speak at the pain so many women pretend is not permanently in their way. They are strong because their confessions, their honesty, allows for growth and in the end, enlightenment—a knowing that who they are and what they come with is not only precious and valuable, but demands reverence.

Sitting in the movie theater Saturday, again with a group of women, I knew upon entry that I would be okay when the final credits rolled down the screen. I knew that I would be able to absorb each story, see myself in them, and feel whole and solid in my foundation. A little over a year after experiencing the play, I knew that I had been released from so much of the burden I had been carrying for years. Not completely. Not in some fantastic or magical way. What I am living is a process of transformation that has no end.

Okay, I have to spoil the movie just a little bit: In the final scenes the women gather together and each fills in the blank to this declaration: My love is too _________ to be thrown back in my face. As I watched each woman take her turn, I asked myself how I would define my love. “Powerful” stood out from all of the other words that began to swirl around in my head. I accept and embrace this definition of my love because nothing that has happened to me or that I have done to myself has destroyed my power as woman, as a human being, or as a child of God.

See the movie. Define your own love. -MBL