"BEIN ALIVE BEIN A WOMAN BEIN COLORED": THE METAPHYSICAL DILEMMA IN NTOZAKE SHANGE, SHERLEY ANNE Williams, AND TONI MORRISON/ "BEIN ALIVE BEIN AWOMAN BEIN COLORED": O DILEMA METAFISICO EM NTOZAKE SHANGE, SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS E TONI MORRISON

This essay is an analysis of three literary works by black women writers from the U.S.: Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf Sherley Ann Williams' novel Dessa Rose, and Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. In my analysis, I use Shange's trope of the "methaphysical dilemma" to consider the intersections of gender, race, and sexuality in these writers' textual representations of black women's bodies. Writing against a historical legacy of colonialism and domination that defined black bodies as "primitive" or "unbridled" (bell hooks 1991), I argue that these works illustrate some of the artistic/ literary strategies contemporary black women writers use to re-claim the power of voice/voicing as they depict black women's subjectivities as unfinished, complex, but self-fashioned creations.