SOURCE; "The Pain of Women, The Joy of Women, The Sadness and Depth of Women," in Callaloo, Vol. 2, No. 5, February, 1979, pp. 147-49.

[In the following review, Williams asserts that the poems in Sanchez's I've Been a Woman speak for and to all women.]

The Black Scholar Press has recently published a new book from Sonia Sanchez, and a powerful book it is indeed. A collection which includes a fine cross-section of Sanchez's earlier work as well as some of her latest poems, I've Been a Woman recounts the journey of one woman from the early stages of herself into the meaningfulness of herself as a woman and as a human being. One hears in the voice of this woman-poet the pain of women, the joy of women, the sadness and depth of women. The voice of this woman is pregnant with the voices of women, and ail readers of the collection are advised to listen closely.

I've Been a Woman is divided into six sections. The first four sections are comprised of poems and passages drawn from Sanchez's earlier volumes. In these four sections, there are many of those poems, as readers familiar with her work will recognize, that have come to safeguard our ears and our steps: from Homecoming: "Poem at Thirty," "Malcolm," and "Personal Letter No. 2"; from We a Baddddd People: "Blk/Rhetoric" and "Indianapolis/Summer/1969/Poem"; from Love Poems: "Poem No. 7" and "Old Words"; and from Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women: those indispensable passages which describe growing up in America and the fundamental transformation which occurs in the necessary reaching back to oneself. However, it is the final two sections of I've Been a Woman that we are concerned with here, because they are the new works of the poet, and, more importantly, because they are the celebration and praise of life that the transformed self, facing the death constantly masquerading before our eyes, must engage in daily.

Each of the short poems in "Haikus/Tankas & Other Love Syllables," the fifth section of the volume, is a re-energization of many of the words we have come to take for granted: love, responsibility, concern, pain. These poems line the world up with the immediacy and accuracy of our moment to moment feelings and sensations:

          never may my thirst
          for freedom be appeased by
          modern urinals.
 
          my body waiting
             for the sound of yo/hands is loud
             as a prairie song.
 
          these autumn trees sit
       cruel as we pretend to eat
    this morning goodbye.
 
          these words stained with red
       twirl on my tongue like autumn
             rainbows from the sea.

Sanchez's fingers are nimble here as she catches moments, hours and sometimes days in seventeen syllables:

     the rain tastes lovely
     like yo/sweat draping my body
     after lovemaking.
 
     who are you/   iden./
     tify yourself. tell me your
     worth amid women.
 
     i listen for yo/
     sounds prepare my nostrils for
     yo/smell that has detoured.
 
     you have pierced me so
     deeply i can not turn a
     round without bleeding.

These poems/these words are like a cutting flame burning deeply to the inside, welding together again/somehow reuniting a divided flesh.

The final section of this book, "Generations," is the poems of praise. They speak sufficiently for themselves. In a poem for Sterling Brown, Sanchez writes:

     how shall i call your name
     sitting priest/like on mountains
     raining incense
     scented dancer of the sun?
             ....
     you. griot of fire.
     harnessing ancient warriors.
             ....
     you. griot of the wind
     glorifying red gums smiling tom-tom teeth.

and in the poem for a young brother named Gerald Penny:

     At first you do not speak
     and your legs are like orphans
     at first your two eyes cross
     themselves in confusion
     at first your mouth knows only
     the full breasts of milk
     a sweet taste of this world.
               ....
     Silently to life
     you spoke
     young male child.
 
     You praised life
     coming as a river between hills
     and your laughter
     was like red berries in summer
     and your shouting like giant eagles

and in the last piece in the book, "kwa mama zetu waliotuzaa," (for our mothers who gave us birth):

        call her back for me
        bells. call back this memory
        still fresh with cactus pain.
 
        call her name again. bells.
        shirley. graham. du bois
        has died in china
        and her death demands a capsizing of tides. olokun.
        she is passing yo/way while
        pilgrim waves whistle complaints to man olokun.
        a bearer of roots is walking inside
        of you.
        prepare the morning nets to receive her.

In these words we are able to see ourselves/to hear ourselves, emerging into our own vision of life. Sonia Sanchez's poems in this book are commendable and we thank her.