Contemporary Southern Literature

Start Free Trial

The Southern Imagination of Sonia Sanchez

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: Gabbin, Joanne Veal. “The Southern Imagination of Sonia Sanchez.” In Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, pp. 180-203. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Gabbin focuses on the literary career of Sonia Sanchez, stressing her blending of political and personal, urban and rural elements in her works.]

Death is a five o'clock door forever changing time. And wars end. Sometimes too late. I am here. Still in Mississippi. Near the graves of my past. We are at peace … I have my sweet/astringent memories because we dared to pick up the day and shake its tail until it became evening. A time for us. Blackness, Black people. Anybody can grab the day and make it stop. Can you my friends? Or maybe it's better if I ask:


Will you?1

The woman who utters this challenge at the end of Sonia Sanchez's play Sister Son/ji has the gift of second sight: she is a visionary, a prophet, a revealer of truths. She has touched love, births, deaths, danger, tumult, upheaval, and change and has distilled from these experiences “sweet/astringent memories.” Willing to pick up the day and “shake its tail until it became evening,” she helped to bring into being an order that transformed time and defied death itself.

In many ways, Sister Son/ji becomes a metaphor for the poet herself and the visionary quality and sense of the past that pervade much of her poetry. Like Sister Son/ji, Sonia Sanchez has been a singer during turbulent times, a translator of the needs and dreams of black people. Sanchez has written to challenge black people—all people—to change the world, “to make people understand … that we are here to perpetuate humanity, to figure out what it means to be a human being,”2 “to show what is wrong with the way that we are living and what is wrong with this country … to correct misinterpretation and bring love, understanding, and information to those who need it.”3 If this all sounds idealistic, it is. For Sanchez matured as a writer in an era in which ideas took on an elasticity heretofore unheard of. It was a time when a visionary president challenged the nation to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade; when a black power movement, led by such political thinkers as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, and Elijah Muhammad, ushered in a change in race relations in America; when 250,000 people, culminating several difficult years of boycotts, sit-ins, voter registration drives, marches, and riots, marched on Washington to make America accountable to black and poor people. It was a time when Americans protested an undeclared war in Vietnam, and the country mourned and immortalized its fallen heroes: John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. This era shaped the mettle of the poet, and like the Mississippi woman, Sanchez has become an armed prophet whose voice is at once a prod and a sword.

In her eight volumes of poetry, which appeared between 1969 and 1987, Sanchez's voice is sometimes abrasive but never as profane as the conditions she knows must be eradicated; her tone ranges from gentle to derisive, yet the message is one of redeeming realism. Also undergirding her poetic expression is a deep concern for heritage; for the sovereignty of time with all its ramifications of birth, change, rebirth, and death; for the impress of the past and memories; and for nurture, nature, and God. Moreover, these themes reveal Sanchez's strong Southern imagination, one that was born in the impressionable times of her youth in Alabama, where the tensions of struggle were fed with mama's milk.

Homecoming (1969), Sanchez's first book of poems, is her pledge of allegiance to blackness, to black love, to black heroes, and to her own realization as a woman, an artist, and a revolutionary. The language and the typography are experimental; they are aberrations of standard middle-class Americanese and traditional Western literary forms. As such, they reflect her view of American society, which perceives blacks as aberrations and exploits them through commercialism, drugs, brutality, and institutionalized racism. In this book and the poetry that follows, the vernacular and the forms are clear indications of her fierce determination to redefine her art and rail against Western aesthetics. Homecoming also introduces us to a poet who is saturated with the sound and sense of black speech and black music, learned at the knees of Birmingham women discovering themselves full voiced and full spirited. The rhythm and color of black speech—the rapping, reeling, explosive syllables—are her domain, for she is steeped in the tradition of linguistic virtuosity that Stephen Henderson talks about in Understanding the New Black Poetry. Black music, especially the jazz sounds of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Pharoah Sanders, pulse, riff, and slide through her poetry.

In her second volume, We a BadddDDD People (1970), Sanchez is wielding a survival sword that rips away the enemy's disguise and shears through the facade of black ignorance and reactionism. Arranged in three groups, “Survival Poems,” “Love/Songs/Chants,” and “TCB/EN Poems,” the poems extend the attack begun in Homecoming and tell black people how to survive in a country of death traps (drugs, suicide, sexual exploitation, psychological slaughter via the mass media) and televised assassination. Her message, however, is not one of unrelieved gloom, for it is rooted in optimism and faith: “know and love yourself.” Like Sterling A. Brown's “Strong Men” and Margaret Walker's “For My People,” “We A BadddDDD People,” the title poem of the volume, is a praise song that celebrates black love, talent, courage, and continuity. The poems appear rooted in a courage learned early from aunts who spit in the face of Southern racism and sisters who refused to be abused by white men or black men. In this volume, Sanchez reveals her unmistakable signature, the singing/chanting voice. Inflections, idiom, intonations—skillfully represented by slashes, capitalization (or the lack of it), and radical and rhythmic spelling—emphasize her link with the community and her role as ritual singer.

In It's a New Day (1971), a collection of poems “for young brothas and sistuhs,” Sanchez nurtures young minds, minds that must know their beauty and worth if the nation is to be truly free. Her belief in the seed-forced of the young led her to write the children's story The Adventures of Small Head, Square Head and Fat Head (1973).

In 1973, her fourth volume, Love Poems, appeared. Haki Madhubuti calls this “a book of laughter and hurt, smiles and missed moments.”4 The poems are collages of the images, sounds, aromas, and textures of woman-love. With the clarity and precision of Japanese ink sketches, Sanchez skillfully uses the haiku to evoke emotion:

did ya ever cry
Black man, did ya ever cry
til you knocked all over?(5)

Using the haiku, the ballad, and other traditional forms that advance her preference for tightness, brevity, and gemlike intensity, she fingers the raw edges of a woman's hurt and betrayal:

When he came home
from her
he poured me on
the bed and slid
into me like glass.
And there was
the sound of splinters.(6)

The poet also celebrates the magic that love has to transform and transcend:

i gather up
each sound
you left behind
and stretch them
on our bed.
          each nite
i breathe you
and become high …(7)

A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1974) is a dramatic departure from the poetry of earlier volumes. The scope here is large and sweeping. The language is no longer the raw vernacular of Homecoming, though, as in We A BadddDDD People, it is possessed by the rhythms of the chants and rituals. At its most prosaic, it is laden with the doctrine of the Nation of Islam and ideologically correct images. At its best, it is intimate, luminous, and apocalyptic. Tucked inside A Blues Book is a striking spiritual odyssey that reveals the poet's growing awareness of the psychological and spiritual features of her face.

In 1978, Sanchez culled some of her best poetry from earlier volumes in I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems. To these she adds a collection of haiku and tankas that is dominated by the theme of love: the sensual love of a man, the love of old people and young, the love for a father and spiritual mothers. She brings to this theme a style that is replete with irony, wit, and understatement. And in most of her poetry, her feelings are intensified and her symbols, those of nurturing, birth, growth, freedom, civilization, are deeply feminine. Here, as Margaret Walker Alexander states, is poetry of “consistently high artistry that reflects her womanliness—her passion, power, perfume, and prescience.”8

In homegirls & handgrenades (1984), Sanchez shows the further deepening of the poet's consciousness, for it is a sterling example of her going inside herself, inside the past, to pull out of her residual memory deeply personal experience. From the past, she draws images that explode the autobiographical into universal truths. The predominant genre in this volume is the sketch, much like those that stud Jean Toomer's Cane. Bubba, “the black panther of Harlem,” lost in a sea of drugs and unfulfilled dreams; Norma, black genius that lay unmined; or the old “bamboo-creased” woman in “Just Don't Never Give Up on Love” all live again and vividly show Sanchez distilling “sweet/astringent memories” from her own experience.

Distinguishing much of her poetry is a prophetic voice that brings the weight of her experience to articulating the significant truths about liberation and love, self-actualization and being, spiritual growth and continuity, heroes, and the cycles of life. Her vision is original because it is both new (a fresh rearrangement of knowledge) and faithful to the “origins” of its inspiration. Therefore, it is not surprising that in her most recent volume of poetry, Under a Soprano Sky (1987), the mature voice of the poet is giving expression to the sources of her spiritual strength, establishing and reestablishing connections that recognize the family-hood of man/womankind, and singing, as another Lady did, of society's strange fruit sacrificed on the altars of political megalomania, economic greed, and social misunderstanding.

Throughout her poetry, which will be the focus of this study, Sanchez demonstrates the complexity of her Southern imagination. Though she spent a relatively short period of her life in the South, her way of looking at the world is generously soaked in the values she learned during her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama. The importance of the family and love relationships, her fascination with the past and her ancestry, her search for identity amid the chaos and deracination of the North, her communion with nature, her exploration of the folk culture, her response to an evangelical religious experience, and her embracing of a militancy nurtured in fear and rage are Southern attitudes that inform her poetry. Especially in A Blues Book, I've Been a Woman, and Under a Soprano Sky, Sanchez's fascination with the concept of time, her faith in the lessons of the past, and her deep notion of continuity firmly root her in the tradition of southern imagination.

In The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History, Hugh Holman explores the relationship between the concept of time and the Southern writer:

The imagination of the Southerner for over one hundred and seventy-five years has been historical. The imagination of the Puritans was essentially typological, catching fire as it saw men and events as types of Christian principles. The imagination of the New England romantics was fundamentally symbolic, translating material objects into ideal forms and ideas. The Southerner has always had his imaginative faculties excited by events in time and has found the most profound truths of the present and the future in the interpretation of the past.9

In part two of A Blues Book, the poet invites her readers to:

Come into Black geography
you, seated like Manzu's cardinal,
come up through tongues
multiplying memories
and to avoid descent
among wounds
cruising like ships,
climb into these sockets
golden with brine.(10)

Describing history as the spiritual landscape of events and images, she invites the reader to travel back in time, through what George Kent calls her “spiritual autobiography,” her “own psychological and spiritual evolution in the past.”11 Sanchez has the past define the features of her identity and uncover her origins. Calling on the earth mother as the inspiration and guide on the journey, she implores her to reveal the truths locked in time:

Come ride my birth, earth mother
tell me how i have become, became
this woman with razor blades between
her teeth.
                                        sing me my history O earth mother
about tongues multiplying memories
about breaths contained in straw.(12)

The poet realizes that the essential clues to who she is are there in the dusty corners of history, in the myths and tales preserved by “tongues multiplying memories,” in the seemingly inconsequential bits that can be gleaned from those who live in the spirit and in the flesh. Because she is in tune with her oral tradition, she shares with other Southern black writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Ernest Gaines, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker, what Ellison calls some of the advantages of the South:

I believe that a black Southern writer who does know his traditions has some of the advantages which William Faulkner or other white Southern writers have had: the advantage of contact with a long accumulation of history in a given place; an experience which has been projected in other forms of artistic expression, which has traditional values and variants, and which has been refined by being defined by generations of people who have told what it seemed to be: “This is the life of black men here. …”


This is one of the advantages of the South. In the stories you get the texture of an experience and the projection of values, and the distillation of a kind of wisdom.13

For Sanchez, who she is and who she is to become have much to do with the texture of experience, the values, and the wisdom alive in the folk community of Birmingham, Alabama.

Sonia Sanchez was born in Birmingham on September 9, 1934. Her parents, Wilson L. Driver and Lena Jones Driver, faced with naming a second girl (the first daughter was named Patricia), gladly turned over the task to relatives, who returned quickly enough with the name Wilsonia Benita. The communal name turned out to be a portent of the role relatives would play in her upbringing, for when she was one year old, her mother died in childbirth, and she thus began a series of moves from one relative's home to another during the next nine years.

After her mother's death, Wilsonia and her sister were cared for by her father's mother. Elizabeth “Mama” Driver, whom Sanchez describes as a “heavy-set, dark complected woman,” was the head deaconess in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In an interview, Sanchez remembers her grandmother: “My grandmother spoiled my sister and me outrageously. She loved us to death … she loved us so much that she used to walk us to Tuggle Elementary School. This old, old woman used to walk very slowly up that hill. …”14 Mama Driver brought the girls into the circle of the rituals of the A. M. E. Church. They experienced the sonorous roar of the minister, who strode across the pulpit of the wood frame church; the buzz of the congregation when a sister got “happy” and threw her pocketbook “clean across the aisle”; and the wonderment of the spirituals when all those choir members, dressed in white, sounded like the angels at the gates of the city.

Sanchez remembers the many occasions her grandmother had allowed them to sit quietly at her knees while she talked with the women who visited their modest house in a Birmingham housing development. In “Dear Mama” in her most recent book, Under a Soprano Sky, she recalls vividly the Saturday afternoons when she “crawled behind the couch” and listened to the old deaconesses as they told of their lives “spent on so many things”:

And history began once again. I received it and let it circulate in my blood. I learned on those Saturday afternoons about women rooted in themselves, raising themselves in dark America, discharging their pain without ever stopping. I learned about women fighting men back when they hit them: “Don't never let no mens hit you mo than once girl.” I learned about “womens waking up they mens” in the nite with pans of hot grease and the compromises reached after the smell of hot grease had penetrated their sleepy brains. I learned about loose women walking their abandoned walk down front in church, crossing their legs instead of their hands to God. And I crept into my eyes. Alone with my daydreams of being woman. Adult. Powerful. Loving. Like them. Allowing nobody to rule me if I didn't want to be.


And when they left. When those old bodies had gathered up their sovereign smells. After they had kissed and packed up beans snapped and cakes cooked and laughter bagged. After they had called out their last goodbyes, I crawled out of my place. Surveyed the room. Then walked over to the couch where some had sat for hours and bent my head and smelled their evening smells. I screamed out loud, “oooweeee! Ain't that stinky!” and I laughed laughter from a thousand corridors. And you turned Mama, closed the door, chased me round the room until I crawled into a corner where your large body could not reach me. But your laughter pierced the little alcove where I sat laughing at the night. And your humming sprinkled my small space. Your humming about you Jesus and how one day he was gonna take you home. …15

Mama Driver also gave the children a sense of continuity as she acquainted them with the long line of aunts, uncles, and cousins who made up their extended family. She acquainted them with a community that held dear the notion of family ties and took for granted the willingness of family members to take another member in: “My life flows from you Mama. My style comes from a long line of Louises who picked me up in the nite to keep me from wetting the bed. A long line of Sarahs who fed me and my sister and fourteen other children from watery soups and beans and a lot of imagination. A long line of Lizzies who made me understand love. Sharing. Holding a child up to the stars. Holding your tribe in a grip of love. A long line of Black people holding each other up against silence.”16

When Mama Driver died, the small frail child of five experienced the manufactured adult mystery of death and the insensitivity of relatives who shut children out of this fact of nature. As a way of managing the loss and the pain, she withdrew behind a veil of stuttering that remained with her for the next twelve years. When she and her sister lived with her father and his second wife, the stuttering protected her from the brunt of her stepmother's cruelty. In part two of A Blues Book, she raises the specter of this woman:

                                        And YOU U U U U U U—step/mother.
                                        woman of my father's youth
                                        who stands at a mirror
                                        elaborate with smells
                                        all shiny like my new copper penny.
                                        telling me through a parade of smiles
                                        you are to be my new mother. and your painted lips
                                        outlined against time become time
                                        and i look on time and hear you
                                        who threw me in angry afternoon closets
                                        till i slipped beneath the cracks
                                        like light. and time stopped.
                                        and i turned into myself
                                        a young girl breathing in crusts
                                        and listened to those calling me.
to/ no matter what they do
be/ they won't find me
chanted/ no matter what they say i won't come out.17

The collective images of the woman—her stepmother's resentment, her rages, her neglect, and her authoritarianism that weighed heavily on the two girls—had the effect of distorting time itself (“and your painted lips / outlined against time”). The mature sensibility records the prominence of the cruel punishment that loomed prodigiously in the child's mind (“and time stopped / and i turned into myself”) and indelibly marks her personality. She, the youngest, had hidden behind her “black braids and stutters”; she, the strange one, the quiet one, would not come out. When her father learned of his second wife's treatment of the children, he sent them to live with relatives, and they remained with relatives or friends until their father married again and took them to New York, reenacting the solemn ceremony that many thousands of black people performed as they migrated to Northern cities.

Reflecting on her childhood, Sanchez said that, despite the unhappy experiences, she had “a good Southern girlhood.”18 Her grandmother had initiated her into the rituals of black life; aunts and uncles and cousins had given connections, continuity to her sense of self, and Birmingham, Alabama, had rooted her in a history of black struggle, with its lessons of fear, segregation, rebellion, and an awareness of her place. Years later, in her first published poem, she urges from her subconscious the memory of a cousin who, when made to move from her seat on the bus, spits in the white driver's face.

From 1944 until she graduated from Hunter College, Wilsonia Driver lived in Harlem at 152d and St. Nicholas Place, where there was “no space.” In the small apartment she shared with her sister, her father, and his third wife, she felt hemmed in. Her tiny bedroom, whose window faced a redbrick wall, further mocked her sense of loss, now far from the greener, open space of the South. She also felt hemmed in by the kind, yet restrictive, care of her new stepmother and by the unwritten expectation placed on a young girl growing up in an environment that did not offer its girl-women protection but demanded that they protect themselves or run the risk of scorn and censure:

coming out from alabama
to the island city of perpetual adolescence
where i drink my young breasts
and stay thirsty
always hungry for more than the
georgewashingtonhighschoolhuntercollegedays
of america.
                    remember parties
                    where we'd grinddddDDDD
                    and grinddddDDDD
                    but not too close
                    cuz if you gave it up
                    everybody would know. and tell.(19)

In those early Harlem days, the young girl was hungry for more than the restrictions of the island city, so she daydreamed and began to write. In an Essence magazine article, Sanchez recalls that she started writing because it was a way to express herself without the annoying stuttering. She remembers writing a poem about George Washington's crossing of the Delaware. The poem, which was left out while she rushed to rewash dishes, was found by her sister, who began reading the poem to their parents in a singsong rhyme. “I reached for the poem, but she pulled it away and finished reading it to everybody in the kitchen. They all laughed. I don't really remember it as cruel laughter, but I was a very sensitive little girl. So I was very much upset and after that I began hiding my poems. I doubt if anyone knew I was still writing.”20

This incident recalls a similar experience related by Richard Wright in his book Black Boy. After he read one of his stories to a woman in his neighborhood, he realizes that she cannot possibly understand his desire to write: “God only knows what she thought. My environment contained nothing more alien that writing or the desire to express one's self in writing.”21 According to Ladell Payne in Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition, Richard Wright's life of imagination sustained him in his estrangement but also served to isolate him further from his family and community.22 Similarly for Sanchez, from the very beginning, writing was a solitary endeavor that simultaneously isolated her from others and gave her the distance that she needed to see herself, her family, and community reconstituted in a new light.

As the young woman matured, her estrangement extended into most areas of her life. At Hunter College, she wanted more than the benign indifference that left her sense of self unnourished. She was not only alienated from those at school, but she was also separated from those on her block. They left the serious-eyed, quiet, college girl alone.23 However, in “Bubba” in homegirls & handgrenades, the poet remembers one who saw more in her than she was prepared to acknowledge: “One summer day, I remember Bubba and I banging the ball against the filling station. Handball champs we were. The king and queen of handball we were. And we talked as we played. He asked me if I ever talked to trees or rivers or things like that. And I who walked with voices for years denied the different tongues populating my mouth. I stood still denying the commonplace things of my private childhood. And his eyes pinned me against the filling station wall and my eyes became small and lost their color.”24

And the alienation reached her in her home. She had not really known her father. Though she lived with him from the time she was ten until she left college, on many levels, they remained strangers. “A Poem for My Father” in We A BadddDDD People and “Poem at Thirty” in Homecoming tell poignantly of this relationship.

But more significantly, the young poet felt alienated from herself and her roots. In A Blues Book, she recalls those times when she “moved in liquid dreams”:

and i dressed myself
in foreign words
                    became a proper painted
                    european Black faced american
                    going to theatre parties and bars
                    and cocktail parties and bars
                    and downtown village apartments
                    and bars and ate good cheese
                    and caviar with wine that
                    made my stomach stretch for artificial warmth.
                    danced with white friends who
                    included me because that was
                    the nice thing to do in the late
                    fifties and early sixties
and i lost myself
down roads
i had never walked.
and my name was
without honor
and i became a
stranger at my birthright.(25)

Perhaps it was this sense that she had lost her birthright that turned her thoughts to her past. And the South became the place where the mysteries of her past could be discovered. There too was the knowledge of her mother.

It was not until she graduated from college that she learned anything about her mother. When her father showed her a photograph of Lena Jones Driver, a beautiful Latin-looking woman with fair skin and dark eyes, she became aware of the void that existed in her life. On a pilgrimage to the South in 1980, she found a wizened old man who held the knowledge that had long since been lost in county records. He told her that her mother was the daughter of a black plantation worker and her white boss by the name of Jones. The revelation convinced the poet of her intimacy with historical events and finds its way into her upcoming novel, After Saturday Night Comes Sunday, in which a woman who is going crazy because of a man must spiritually find her mother's mother. Only then, when she had traversed the void, can she become the kind of woman she is capable of becoming. In After Saturday Night Comes Sunday, as in part two of A Blues Book, the reader experiences an almost cinematographic sensation, as Sanchez reverses the projector, making the frames from the past flick in rapid retrogression. In much the manner of Alejo Carpentier as he envisions a “journey back to the source” (Guerra Del Tiempo), the poet manipulates time and harnesses the power and magic of the rivers to give birth to herself:

tell me. tellLLLLLL me. earth mother
for i want to rediscover me. the secret of me
the river of me. the morning ease of me.
i want my body to carry my words like aqueducts.
i want to make the world my diary
and speak rivers.(26)

The ritual invocation of the earth mother has its analogue in the rituals of the Orisha, the Yoruba gods. As if drawing on the Jungian collective unconscious, the poet reveals a close relationship between the riverain goddesses who reside at the bottom of the river, and Earth, whom they recognize as the pure force, the ashe, the power to make things happen.27 In Flash of the Spirit, Robert Farris Thompson gives a description of one of the riverain goddesses, who has an uncanny resemblance to the spirituality revealed in A Blues Book:

Divination literature tells us that Oshun was once married to Ifa but fell into a more passionate involvement with the fiery thunder god, who carried her into his vast brass palace, where she ruled with him; she bore him twins and accumulated, as mothers of twins in Yorubaland are want to do, money and splendid things galore. … When she died, she took these things to the bottom of the river. There she reigns in glory, within the sacred depths, fully aware that so much treasure means that she must counter inevitable waves of jealousy with witchcraft, by constant giving, constant acts of intricate generosity. Even so, she is sometimes seen crowned, in images of warlock capacity and power, brandishing a lethal sword, ready to burn and destroy immoral persons who incur her wrath, qualities vividly contrasting with her sweetness, love, and calm.28

Oshun, in fact, can well be a metaphor for Sanchez's power. For in her poems, one senses a power that is feminine, and consciously so. It comes from her understanding of her connections with the universe, her connections with her ancestors, and her strong matrilineal ties with a universe that has given to its kind not only the responsibility but, indeed, the power to bear the children and nurture seed. Her power comes from a faith in continuity; seeds grow into flowers and produce their own seeds. Sanchez clearly presents the life cycle and cherishes it.

Sanchez calls the phenomenon that makes sense out of these mystical connections and recurrent archetypal images “residual memory.” It is her capacity to draw on this memory that deepens the implications of her poetry. And on another level, it provides a source of implications that even the poet cannot fathom. Some would call this simply—inspiration.

In speaking about how she writes, Sanchez explains a process in which one sees the art of the poet and the role of the prophet merging. In an interview that appeared in Essence magazine (July 1979), she says that sometimes lines of poetry come and she jots them down and that sometimes a feeling comes and she will write down lines that respond to that feeling. Often for Sanchez, the inspiration comes after rereading a favorite book or the work of a poet she admires. During her best time for reflection—early in the morning, from twelve midnight until four, she reads and reworks lines, “fussing at those things that obviously don't work.”29 However, sometimes the poet gives way to the prophet, whose voice “derives its authority, not from some inner reservoir, but from an outside … source.”30 Sanchez says: “Sometimes I actually see something that moves me or makes me angry or whatever, and then line by line just pours out from God knows where. Whenever people compliment me after a reading or tell me they enjoyed one of my books, I'll say, ‘Thank you so much.’ But inside I'll say to myself, ‘It's not just me.’ Everything that you or I could write has been written before; there's that energy there in the universe for us to pull from. Many of us just become attuned to that energy.”31

It was this energy that helped Sanchez begin her career as a writer. While attending New York University, she began to write seriously. At NYU, she took a course from poet Louise Bogan, a prolific writer and teacher who disliked intensely “bad writing and bad writers.”32 Sanchez found Bogan fascinating and sincerely interested in her growth as a writer, and she did not sense in her the patronization and indifference that she had encountered at Hunter.

Encouraged by this experience, she organized a writers' workshop that met every Wednesday night in the village; there she met Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Larry Neal, the poet-critics who became the architects of the black arts movement, and began to read with them in jazz night spots. She also joined the New York CORE and the Reform Democrats Club. At this time, she was married to Albert Sanchez, a first-generation Puerto Rican American. He did not understand her intense commitment to causes or her need to write. After four years of marriage and the birth of her first child, Sanchez found herself moving away from the narrowly defined bounds of that relationship:

and visions came from the wall.
bodies without heads, laughter without mouths.
then faces crawling on the walls
like giant spiders,
came toward me
and my legs buckled and
          i cried out.(33)

And when the break was complete, she

woke up alone
to the middle sixties
full of the rising wind of history …(34)

In 1967, Sanchez started teaching at San Francisco State College. Her two-year tenure there was marked by student unrest, demonstrations, and the fledgling stretching of the black power movement. She found herself in the midst of the struggle to make black studies a part of the college's offerings. She, along with psychologist Nathan Hare, played a significant role in the establishment of the first black studies program in the country. She also began to document the ironies and nuances of the overall struggle for black awareness in poems that would appear in her first volume, Homecoming.

Also during this time, Sanchez met poet Etheridge Knight through Gwendolyn Brooks and Dudley Randall. While he was in prison, they began to correspond, and in 1969, they married. Twin sons, Mungu and Morani, were born to them. After little more than a year, the marriage ended in an uneasy alliance. “Poem for Etheridge,” “last poem i'm gonna write bout us,” and other poems in We A BadddDDD People and Love Poems reveal the often poignant, sometimes tragic nature of their relationship. However, what is significant in these poems is the ability of the poet to transcend the bounds of her own experience and speak with an authority that comes from going many times to her own personal wailing wall. For example, in “Poem No. 8,” Sanchez brilliantly captures the sense of interminable waiting that only a woman knows intimately:

i've been a woman
          with my legs stretched by the wind
                    rushing the day
                              thinking i heard your voice
                                        while it was only the night
                                                  moving over
                                                            making room for the dawn.(35)

From 1967 to 1975, Sanchez was intensely involved in continuing her career as a poet and a teacher. During that time, she completed nine books and published her poems and plays in several periodicals, including Black Scholar, Black Theatre, Black World, Journal of Black Poetry, Liberator, Massachusetts Review, Minnesota Review, New York Quarterly, and the Tulane Drama Review. She also taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Rutgers University, Manhattan Community College, and Amherst College. While at Amherst, from 1972 to 1975, she taught one of the first courses on black women writers offered in an American college. For a brief period from 1972 to 1975, she was a member of the Nation of Islam, directing its cultural and educational program and writing for Muhammad Speaks. She resigned from the Nation of Islam in 1975 and one year later came to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania. After a year, Sanchez began teaching at Temple University, where she has taught Afro-American studies, English, Pan-African studies, and creative writing since then.

In 1978, Sanchez published I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems. In this volume, she concludes with a group of new poems that fall under the rubric “Generations.” These poems attest to the significance she places on the vestiges of the past that have been gathered to bring meaning, value, direction, and inspiration to an individual's present.

In “A Poem of Praise,” which is dedicated to Gerald Penny, a student who died on September 23, 1973, and to the Brothers of Amherst College, Sanchez reconciles the loss of a young warrior by giving promise to the cycles of his life. The truth of the poem is that the man has been on earth and has experienced a life that is no less beautiful, dramatic, or meaningful because it has been short. One sees the poet developing a view of the universe that holds man as a traveler, who comes from another space, walks from the morning through day, to evening, tasting “in himself the world”:36

In your days made up of dreams
in your eyes made of dawn
you walked toward old age,
child of the rainbow
child of beauty
through the broad fields
and your eyes gained power
and your limbs grew long like yellow corn
an abundance of life
an abundance of joy
with beauty before you, you walked
toward old age.(37)

This traveler brings to mind another one who came “trailing clouds of glory.” William Wordsworth's youth must travel from the East, farther from the splendid vision of celestial light that was his when he was born. However, consistent with the teaching of Islam (during the writing of this poem, the poet was a follower of the teachings of Elijah Muhammad), Sanchez envisions a universe in which the young man walks toward the light, wisdom, and rebirth:

For i am man
and i must
run with the evening tide
must hold up my hands
for my life is opening
before me.
I am going to walk far to the East
i hope to find a good morning
somewhere.(38)

This youth need not content himself with the memory of radiance that once was, for life moves in cycles and progresses toward endings that have, at their center, beginnings.

Sanchez's poetic kinship with Native American tribal poets is striking here. There is the same understanding of “the cyclic continuities” that make up the circle of life.39 There is the same respect for the generative power of language, a language that is medicinal, rooted in nature, dignified, and spare. Kenneth Lincoln, in his book Native American Renaissance, writes:

Oral tribal poetry remains for the most part organic, for tribal poets see themselves as essentially keepers of the sacred word bundle. … They regard rhythm, vision, craft, nature, and words as gifts that precede and continue beyond any human life. The people are born into and die out of a language that gives them being. Song-poets in this respect discover, or better rediscover, nature's poems. They never pretend to have invented a “poetic” world apart from nature, but instead believe they are permitted to husband songs as one tends growing things; they give thanks that the songs have chosen them as singers.40

In a real way, Sanchez's attitude about her purpose as a poet is rooted in a way of thinking about the world that is similar to that of the poet-singers of more than five hundred Native American cultures who send out the voice. Her early Southern experience watered her sensibility—the greening of her mind—and nourished her purpose as a poet: to create positive values for her community. She writes in “The Poet as a Creator of Social Values” that the poet is a manipulator of symbols and language—images that have been planted by experience in the collective subconscious of a people. She believes that “the poet has the power to create new or intensified meaning and experience” and, depending on the visibility of the poet and the efficacy of the poetry itself, “create, preserve or destroy social values.”41

However, even more than these conditions, the poet's power depends on the clarity of her vision, her ability to interpret human nature, and her willingness to speak in tongues that will confirm her vision. For Sanchez, poetry is “subconscious conversation.” She says, “When I say something on stage, I make them remember similar experiences that they have not even brought up, but I bring them up and say look remember and people say, ‘Yes, I remember.’” And given this process, “poetry is as much the work of those who understand it as those who make it.”42 Thus, when Sanchez eulogizes the Amherst student whose life ended prematurely, she is sending a voice among the people who hear and speak:

There is nothing which does not
                    come to an end
And to live seventeen years is good
                    in the sight of God.(43)

The cycle-of-life theme that provides the frame for “A Song of Praise” gets a deeper, subtler exploration in “Kwa mama zetu waliotuzaa.” Significantly, the poem begins with the line, “death is a five o'clock door forever changing time,” which first appeared in Sister Son/ji, a play written in 1970. By repeating the line, the poet emphasizes the consistency, the predictability, and the weight she attributes to this theme. According to critic Joyce Ann Joyce:

This line along with the title of the poem echoes the “In the beginning / there was no end” of Blues Book. Just as Sister Son/ji reaches out to the audience and asks if they will “grab the day and make it stop,” “Kwa mama zetu waliotuzaa” illustrates how the physical, temporal, historical reality becomes an embodiment of the spiritual. For if we grab the day and make it stop, we will see that death is a concrete reality (a five o'clock door) that rules the process of life. For the death of the natural world brings forth the birth of the spiritual (forever changing time) as Sister Son/ji learns.44

The lines that follow dramatically show the cyclic nature of life and ironically reveal the human attempt to still a process that is as unrelenting as waves against a shore:

                    and it was morning without sun or shadow;
a morning already afternoon. sky. cloudy with incense.
                    and it was morning male in speech;
feminine in memory.
but i am speaking of everyday occurrences:
of days unrolling bandages for civilized wounds;
of guady women chanting rituals under a waterfall of stars;
of men freezing their sperms in diamond-studded wombs;
of children abandoned to a curfew of marble.(45)

The poem, whose title translates “for our mother who gave us birth,” is at once a praise poem for the mothers (biological and spiritual) of black women and a eulogy for Shirley Graham DuBois, biographer, teacher and lecturer, whose career spanned over forty years and took her to Africa, Asia, and Europe. In the opening passages, the poet remembers her father's third wife, Geraldine Driver, a kind, caring Southern woman who was saddled with notions of her place and feared breaking loose to ride out her potential. Here, however, in memorializing her (she died of cancer in Detroit), Sanchez uses the symbolism of nature to represent continuity, growth, fruitfulness, and joy, and in effect, she undercuts the pain and unfulfillment that were hers in life:

                    mother. i call out to you
traveling up the congo. i am preparing a place for you:
                              nite made of female rain
                              i am ready to sing her song
                              prepare a place for her
                              she comes to you out of turquoise pain.
                              restring her eyes for me
                              restring her body for me
                              restring her peace for me
                    no longer full of pain, may she walk
                    bright with orange smiles, may she walk
                    as it was long ago, may she walk
                    abundant with lightning steps, may she walk
                    abundant with green trails, may she walk
                    abundant with rainbows, may she walk
                    as it was long ago, may she walk …(46)

For Shirley Graham DuBois, who was “a bearer of roots,” who taught the poet the truth of the African past, who “painted the day with palaces,” Sanchez, in broad sweeps of pantheism, calls up the bells, Olokun (the goddess of the sea), the spirits of day and night. For through their persistence, their repetitiveness, their predictability, they reassure the poet of her mentor's continuity and her triumphal passage to the land of the ancestors.

At several turns in the poem, the privileged perception cuts through the eulogy:

as morning is the same as nite death and life are one.
at the center of death is birth
death is coming. the whole world hears
the buffalo walk of death passing thru the
archway of new life.(47)

From the very first metaphor, the poem is unified by the epigrams concerning death. Death is one with life and continuity; at its center is a beginning.

The dimensions of Sanchez's Southern imagination become imposing in homegirls & handgrenades. Her fascination with time and the past, her communion with nature, her reverence for the folk, her search for identity and self-actualization through meaningful relationships, and her intense spirituality born of a faith in roots and continuity predict the themes and metaphors that unify the book. With a language pregnant with the images of war, armaments, and nuclear proliferation, the poet suggests that love and the greening of the mind are the only reasonable weapons in a world dangerously toying with annihilation. In the most effective vignette in the volume, “Just Don't Never Give Up on Love,” the poet recounts her meeting with an eighty-four-year-old woman who inveigled her to hear her message on the power of love:

“… C'mon over here next to me. I wants to see yo' eyes up close. You looks so uneven sittin' over there.”


Did she say uneven? Did this old buddah splintering death say uneven? Couldn't she see that I had one eye shorter than the other; that my breath was painted on porcelain; that one breast crocheted keloids under this white blouse?


I moved toward her though. I scooped up the years that had stripped me to the waist and moved toward her. And she called to me to come out, come out wherever you are young woman, playing hide and go seek with scarecrow men. I gathered myself up at the gateway of her confessionals.48

As Mrs. Rosalie Johnson talks with her about her husbands and love, the young woman cries for herself and “for all the women who have ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins.” Mrs. Johnson's message is cathartic; by allowing the old woman's healing words to slough off the bitterness and fear built up from past relationships, she is again open to love.

Moving the urgency of her message to global relationships, she concludes the volume with “A Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King” and “MIA's.” Though very different in form, they are companion pieces that share Sanchez's urge to articulate the democratic evils (racism/apartheid/imperialism) that stunt the spiritual growth of black youth, corrupt hope by gradualism, and stall freedom. On the occasion of Martin Luther King's fifty-fourth year (the poet addresses the slain leader as a living spirit), she declares anew a faith in the regenerative power of blackness, which eschews fear and moves toward “freedom and justice for the universe.” The letter ends with an explosion of feeling as the poet, remembering the chanting of black South African women at the death of Stephen Biko, adopts the chant “Ke wa rona” (he is ours) and calls the roll of black deliverers:

… On this your 54th year, listen and you will hear the earth delivering up curfews to the missionaries and assassins. Listen. And you will hear the tribal songs.

                    Ayeeee                    Ayooooo                    Ayeee
                    Ayeeee                    Ayooooo                    Ayeee
Malcolm … Ke wa rona
Robeson … Ke wa rona
Lumumba … Ke wa rona
Fannie Lou … Ke wa rona
Garvey … Ke wa rona
Johnbrown … Ke wa rona
Tubman … Ke wa rona
Mandela … Ke wa rona
                    (free Mandela
                    free Mandela)
Assata … Ke wa rona
As we go with you to the sun,
as we walk in the dawn, turn our eyes
Eastward and let the prophecy come true
and let the prophecy come true
                    Great God, Martin, what a morning it will be!(49)

In “MIA's (missing in action and other atlantas),” the datelines—Atlanta, Johannesburg, El Salvador—serve to show the world of oppression in microcosm, and the machinations that promote death (murder / assassination / “redwhiteandblue death squads”). The centerpiece of the poem is a disturbingly accurate account of the death of Biko. Here one is aware of the substantial capacity of the poet to work with the ironic voice, which gains power by the incremental repetition of “we did all we could for the man”:

                    sept. 13:
hear ye. hear ye. hear ye.
i regret to annouce that stephen
biko is dead. he has refused
food since sept. 5th. we did
all we could for the man.
he has hanged himself while sleeping
we did all we could for him.
he fell while answering our questions
we did all we could for the man.
he washed his face and hung him
self out to dry
we did all we could for him.
he drowned while drinking his supper
we did all we could for the man.
he fell
                    hanged himself starved
drowned himself
we did all we could for him.
it's hard to keep someone alive
who won't even cooperate.
hear ye.(50)

Whether conjuring up Stephen Biko, or the “youngblood / touching and touched at random” in the killing fields of Atlanta, or the young men with “their white togas covering their / stained glass legs” in Central America, she exhorts the men and women to harvest their share of freedom.

In Sanchez's most recent volume, Under a Soprano Sky, she captures in the poem “for Black history month/February 1986” the essence of her Southern sensibility as she reflects on her visit to the Great Wall of China. As she “started to climb that long winding trail of history and survival,”51 her thoughts turned to voices and visions that propelled history, demanded survival, and forged the cultural links of which continuity is made. Moving deeply within her culture, Sanchez “had to peel away misconceptions about Blacks.” As she sang the blues, hummed the spirituals, explored the myths, and walked “a piece” down the road with Nat Turner, Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Garrison, John Brown, Martin Delany, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, David Walker … her racial memory nourished in Southern soil bears fruit. Her sense of reality, her sense of history rejected Old Black Joe, one of the plantation tradition's favorite sons, “Sambo-hood,” and Jim Crow. Her sense of history embraced Lady Day's voice as she sang of strange fruit and blood on the magnolia, embraced Robeson's voice as he sang of deep rivers and the quest of the soul for peace on the other side of Jordan or the Mississippi or the Ohio. Her sense of the past, her roots, her ostensibly Southern imagination has allowed her to keep sight of her vision, a vision of peace and community that was first conceived in the green days of an Alabama childhood.

Notes

  1. Sonia Sanchez, Sister Son/ji, in New Plays from the Black Theatre, ed. Ed Bullins (New York: Bantam, 1969), 104.

  2. Sonia Sanchez, “Reflector Interview: Sonia Sanchez,” Reflector (literary magazine of English Department, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, 1984), 20.

  3. Lateifa Hyman, “Multi-dimensional Struggle,” African Woman 24 (November/December 1979): 18-19.

  4. Haki Madhubuti, “Sonia Sanchez: The Bringer of Memories,” Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 422.

  5. Sonia Sanchez, Love Poems (New York: Third Press, 1973), 35. Also in I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (Sausalito, Calif.: Black Scholar Press, 1978), 37.

  6. I've Been a Woman, 39.

  7. Ibid., 30.

  8. Margaret Walker Alexander, review of I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems by Sonia Sanchez, Black Scholar 11 (January/February 1980): 92.

  9. C. Hugh Holman, The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 1.

  10. Sonia Sanchez, A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (Detroit: Broadside, 1974), 21.

  11. George Kent, “Notes on the 1974 Black Literary Scene,” Phylon 6 (June 1975): 197.

  12. Sanchez, A Blues Book, 23.

  13. Ralph Ellison and James Allan McFerguson, “Indivisible Man,” Atlantic 226 (December 1970): 59.

  14. Sonia Sanchez, interview with Joanne V. Gabbin, at the poet's home in Philadelphia, 13 December 1983.

  15. Sonia Sanchez, Under a Soprano Sky (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1987), 54-55.

  16. Ibid., 55.

  17. Sanchez, A Blues Book, 26-27.

  18. Gabbin interview.

  19. Sanchez, A Blues Book, 28.

  20. Anita Cornwell, “Attuned to the Energy: Sonia Sanchez,” Essence 10 (July 1979): 10.

  21. Richard Wright, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 133.

  22. Ladell Payne, Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 66.

  23. Gabbin interview.

  24. Sonia Sanchez, homegirls & handgrenades (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1984), 55-56.

  25. Sanchez, A Blues Book, 31-32.

  26. Ibid., 23.

  27. Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983), 74.

  28. Ibid., 79.

  29. Cornwell, 10.

  30. Enrico Maria Sante Pablo Neruda, The Poetics of Prophecy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982), 15-16.

  31. Cornwell, 10.

  32. Ruth Limmer and Louise Bogan, Journey around My Room: The Autobiography of Louise Bogan (New York: Viking, 1980), xix.

  33. Sanchez, A Blues Book, 33.

  34. Ibid., 37.

  35. Sanchez, I've Been a Woman, 50.

  36. Ibid., 94.

  37. Ibid., 95.

  38. Ibid., 95.

  39. Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 45.

  40. Ibid., 44.

  41. Sonia Sanchez, “The Poet as a Creator of Social Values,” in Crisis in Culture: Two Speeches by Sonia Sanchez. (New York: Black Liberation Press, 1983), 1-2.

  42. Ibid., 2.

  43. Sanchez, I've Been a Woman, 97.

  44. Joyce Ann Joyce, “The Development of Sonia Sanchez: A Continuing Journey,” Indian Journal of American Studies 13 (July 1983): 67.

  45. Sanchez, I've Been a Woman, 99.

  46. Ibid.

  47. Ibid., 99-101.

  48. Sanchez, homegirls & handgrenades, 11.

  49. Ibid., 71.

  50. Ibid., 73-74.

  51. Sanchez, Under a Soprano Sky, 96.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

The Burden of Home: Shirley Ann Grau's Fiction

Next

Lee Smith: The Storyteller's Voice