"Change the Joke[r] and Slip the Yoke": Boal's "Joker" System in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls ... and spell #7

Abstract

This paper examines the reinvention of Augusto Baal's “‘Joker' system," in which a central character acts as a master of ceremonies by inviting the audience to join in the action, in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and spell #7. In these two plays and others, Shange creates unique dramatic forms that convey her activism and creative vision — a vision which receives much of its vigor from her reclamation of African-American and other indigenous ritual traditions. She brings to these traditions a New World sense of hybridity as she situates herself within the world that Africans and Native peoples in the Americas made. But for Shange, the hybridity, as reflected in her work, is not simply a careful sampling of the work of other artists of color in the Americas. When Shange "change[s] the joke[r] and slip[s] the yoke," to borrow Ralph Ellison's phrase, she speaks to her recognition of difference in the work of other artists of color, even as she posits a desire for community among them in the Americas. Shange's reinvention of Argentinian theorist Augusto Boal's "Joker" system, moreover, underscores the intertextuality inherent in any work by people of color.