Home > Does Your House Have Lions? Summary & Study Guide

Does Your House Have Lions? (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

  • Author: Wilsonia Benita Driver
  • First Published: 1997
  • Type of Work: Poetry
  • Genres: Poetry

In DOES YOUR HOUSE HAVE LIONS? Sonia Sanchez, the author of thirteen previous books, has written a book-length poem memorializing the life and death of her brother, a young black man who died of AIDS after a brief, furious exploration of the gay subculture in New York City.

Sanchez’s poem is written in four parts, “sister’s voice,” “brother’s voice,” “father’s voice,” and “family voices/ancestors’ voices.” The first three sections, and most of the fourth section, use a modified terza rima rhyme scheme; each individual unit poem has a rhyme scheme of ABABBCC. This tight structure suggests the emotional confinement her brother is rebelling against.

The first section, “sister’s voice,” presents the most detached, assured poetry, as the sister (a persona representing Sanchez herself) describes her brother’s immersion into the New York gay subculture as “a migration unlike/ the 1900s of black men and women/ coming north for jobs.” To repay his father’s desertion, he sold his body as a prostitute, auctioning off “his legs. eyes./ heart. in rooms of specific pain.” By contrast, the second section, “brother’s voice,” is written with the emotional directness of pain. He begins by saying, “father. i despise you for abandoning me,” and tells of trying to make a new life on the New York streets, “a country of men/ where dollars pump their veins.” “Father’s voice” tells poignantly of a father’s neglect and is remarkably alive with the rhythms of the music the father plays professionally; “i come to collapse the past/ while bonfires burn up your orphan’s mask,” the father sings about trying to reconcile with a son approaching death.

The last section is the most magisterial. Most of these poems represent the voices of the family, but several represent “the ancestor,” and have a distinct African folk quality to them. Together, they chart the family’s attempt to heal even as one of them is dying. The cumulative effect is both wrenching and uplifting. This is poetry which demands performance; a reader almost has to imagine the poetry being staged to fully appreciate it.

The title, DOES YOUR HOUSE HAVE LIONS? comes from an interview with jazz great Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and in this context speaks of a household’s need to face life with courage. Sanchez’s poem is a record of how one family found the courage of lions.