Fires In The Mirror

Shange is a black female playwright, poet, and novelist in her mid-forties. She smokes and takes off an earring to talk on the phone for her interview concerning identity. She speaks of her identity in terms of a place that is both a part of her and not: “I am a part of my surroundings / and I become separate from them / and it’s being able to make those differentiations clearly / that lets us have an identity / and what’s […] our identity / is everything that’s ever happened to us” (3). In this way, Shange presents identity as both a psychic and physical place, a desert that is the culmination of a person’s experiences.

This white woman is in her mid-thirties, wearing a wig and loose-fitting clothes. She is surrounded by several children, and her girls help her with the housework. She finds amusement in the confusion of the young black boy who turns off her family’s radio on Shabbas: “and we laughed that he probably thought: / And people say Jewish people are really smart and they don’t know / how to turn off radios” (8). She understands perceptions of communal