Nina Simone contributed only one original song to her 1966 album Wild Is The Wind, but it isn’t easily forgotten. “Four Women” offers four verses of concise, moving portraits that get beneath the surfaces of four stereotypes of African-American womanhood with such attention to psychological detail that, by each verse’s end, it’s impossible to see them as stereotypes anymore. Playwright and poet Ntozake Shange might have had Simone’s song in mind when she penned her 1975 theater piece For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf, a collection of 20 choreographed poems—“choreopoems,” to use Shange’s term—voiced by seven performers. Each is identified only by the color of her clothing, and each offers a vivid, lyrical expression of different experiences of what it was like to be a black woman in America at a time when such expressions were rarely heard onstage, much less on TV or in movies. A version of Simone’s song joining her voice to contemporary singers plays over the closing credits of For Colored Girls, Tyler Perry’s adaptation of Shange’s play. It’s an unnecessary update of the song, but a respectful one. The same can’t be said of the film.
