SANCHEZ, Sonia

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Nationality: American. Born: Birmingham, Alabama, 9 September 1934. Education: Hunter College, New York, B.A. in political science 1955; New York University, 1959–60; Wilberforce University, Ohio, Ph.D. in fine arts 1972. Family: Married Etheridge Knight, (divorced); one daughter and two sons. Career: Staff member, Downtown Community School, 1965–67, and Mission Rebels in Action, 1968–69, San Francisco; instructor, San Francisco State College, 1967–69; lecturer in black literature, University of Pittsburgh, 1969–70, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1970–71, Manhattan Community College, New York, 1971–73, and City University of New York, 1972; associate professor, Amherst College, Massachusetts, 1972–73, and University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1976–77; associate professor of English, 1977–79, since 1979 professor of English, Faculty Fellow, Provost's Office, 1986–87, Presidential Fellow, 1987–88, and Laura Carnell Chair in English, Temple University, Philadelphia. Columnist, American Poetry Review, 1977–78, and Philadelphia Daily News, 1982–83. Awards: P.E.N. award, 1969; American Academy grant, 1970; National Endowment for the Arts award, 1978; Smith College Tribute to Black Women award, 1982; Lucretia Mott award, 1984; Before Columbus Foundation award, 1985; PEW fellow, 1993; Legacy award, Jomandi Productions, 1994. Honorary doctorate: Baruch College, 1993. Address: Temple University, Women's Studies, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Homecoming. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1969.

We a BaddDDD People. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1970.

Liberation Poem. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1970.

It's a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1971.

Ima Talken bout The Nation of Islam. Astoria, New York, Truth Del.,c. 1971.

Love Poems. New York, Third Press, 1973.

A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women. Detroit, Broadside Press, 1974.

I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems. Sausalito, California, Black Scholar Press, 1978; revised edition, Chicago, Third World Press, 1985.

Homegirls and Handgrenades. New York, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1984.

Under a Soprano Sky. Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press, 1987.

Wounded in the House of a Friend. Boston, Beacon, 1995.

Does Your House Have Lions? Boston, Beacon, 1997.

Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems. Boston, Beacon, 1998.

Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems. Boston, Beacon, 1999.

Recordings: Homecoming, Broadside Voices, 1969; We a BaddDDD People, Broadside Voices, 1969; A Sun Woman for All Seasons, Folkways, 1971; Sonia Sanchez and Robert Bly, Black Box, 1971; Sonia Sanchez: Selected Poems, 1974, Watershed, 1975; IDKT: Captivating Facts about the Heritage of Black Americans, Ujima, 1982; Sacred Ground, with Sweet Honey in the Rock, EarthBeat! Records, 1995.

Plays

The Bronx Is Next (produced New York, 1970) Published in The Drama Review (New York), summer 1968.

Sister Son/ji (produced Evanston, Illinois, 1971; New York, 1972). Published in New Plays from the Black Theatre, edited by Ed Bullins, New York, Bantam, 1969.

Dirty Hearts '72, in Break Out! In Search of New Theatrical Environments, edited by James Schevill. Chicago, Swallow Press, 1973.

Uh, Uh: But How Do It Free Us? (produced Evanston, Illinois, 1975). Published in The New Lafayette Theatre Presents, edited by Ed Bullins, New York, Doubleday, 1974.

Malcolm Man/Don't Live Here No Mo' (produced Philadelphia, 1979).

I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't (produced Atlanta. 1982).

Black Cats Back and Uneasy Landings (produced Philadelphia, 1995).

Short Stories

A Sound Investment. Chicago, Third World Press, 1980.

Other

The Adventures of Fathead, Smallhead, and Squarehead (for children). New York, Third Press, 1973.

Crisis in Culture. N.p., Black Librarian Press, 1983.

Editor, Three Hundred Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin' at You. New York, 5X, 1972.

Editor, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans. New York. Bantam. 1973.

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Critical Studies: "Sonia Sanchez and Her Work" by S. Clarke, in Black World (Chicago), June 1971; "The Poetry of Three Revolutionists: Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni" by R. Roderick Palmer, in CLA Journal (Baltimore), September 1971; "Sonia Sanchez Creates Poetry for the Stage" by Barbara Walker, in Black Creation (New York), fall 1973; "Notes on the 1974 Black Literary Scene" by George Kent, in Phylon (Atlanta), June 1974; Black Women Writers at Work edited by Claudia Tate, New York, Continuum, 1983; Black Women Writers (1950–1980) edited by Mari Evans, New York, Doubleday, 1984; "Pre-Feminism in the Black Revolutionary Drama of Sonia Sanchez" by Rosemary K. Curb, in The Many Forms of Drama, edited by Karelisa Hartigan, Lanham, Maryland, UPs of America, 1985; "Sonia Sanchez: Will and Spirit" by D.H. Melhem, in MELUS (Amherst, Massachusetts), 12(3), fall 1985; "Our Lady: Sonia Sanchez and the Writing of a Black Renaissance" by Houston A. Baker, in Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory, edited by Baker and Joe Weixlmnn, Greenwood, Florida, Penkevill, 1988; "Sonia Sanchez's Homegirls and Handgrenades: Recalling Toomer's Cane" by James Robert Saunders, in MELUS (Amherst, Massachusetts), 15(1), spring 1988; "The Southern Imagination of Sonia Sanchez" by Joanne Veal Gabbin, in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge and Doris Betts, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1990; "Refusing to Be Boxed In: Sonia Sanchez's Transformation of the Haiku Form" by Frenzella Elaine De Lancey, and "The Blue/ Black Poetics of Sonia Sanchez" by Regina B. Jennings, both in Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 1992; "The Black Arts Poets" by William W. Cook, in The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993; The X-Factor Influence on the Transformed Image of Africa in the Poetry of Haki Madhubuti and Sonia Sanchez: Issues of Re-Naming and Inversion (dissertation) by Regina B. Jennings, Temple University, 1993; Keepers of the Oral Traditions: An Afrocentric Analysis of Representative Plays by African-American Females, 1970–1984 (dissertation) by Julyette Tamy Adams, Bowling Green State University, 1995; interview with Danielle Alyce Rome, in Speaking of the Short Story: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, edited by Farhat Iftekharuddin, Mary Rohrberger, and Maurice Lee, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

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As a mature poet, Sonia Sanchez continues to write for political, economic, and social purposes, seeing no necessary dichotomy between cause-oriented, utilitarian writing and art. Earlier, as a leading poet of the black arts movement and believing that African-Americans were expressing thoughts that previous generations had been afraid to utter, she saw the times as propitious and urgent for black artistic militancy. "I write because I must," she once declared, and "if you write from a black experience, you're writing from a universal experience as well."

In an early poem Sanchez writes, "white people /ain't rt bout nothing," and she chastises blacks who adopt white values and lifestyles. To blacks who "have come to / believe that we are/ not" she gives the prescription "inhale the ancient black breath." Thus, she teaches that African-Americans must know their enemies, accept themselves, demonstrate ethnic pride and unity, be moral, act communally, and go about the serious business of intelligent and courageous self-direction. In delivering such messages, then and now, much of her poetry is direct, uncompromising, demanding, militant, even abrasive. Yet it is not without tenderness, a quality openly evident in her poems for children and in her love poems, notably those dealing with love among African-Americans and between man and woman.

As her collected works show, Sanchez's poetry has not been static in substance and technique. Homecoming is a young poet's grappling with conceptions of self, others, and the world. We a BaddDDD People stresses black strength and self-love, identification of the human and institutional enemies of black people, "we"ness in place of the personal and subjective "I." It's a New Day, "poems for young brothas and sistuhs," warns of dangers and points out the necessity for unity, wholeness of spirit, and clearness of purpose and actions. Having by this time joined the Nation of Islam, Sanchez in Love Poems tones down her language as she explores the dynamics of healthy relationships among black people. The poet's still evolving technical style is apparent in A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women, an autobiographical, perhaps confessional, volume. Addressed to "Queens of the Universe" and divided into the sections "Past," "Present," "Rebirth," and "Future," it is not an anthology or collection but rather thematically united poetry that ironically and satirically echoes T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. While Eliot is pessimistic, however, Sanchez is determinedly optimistic.

I've Been a Woman is a gathering of new and selected poems. In the evolving of her poetry Sanchez has tended not to move from exhorter to persuader, but she is always the teacher. "C'mon yall," she encourages, "on a safari / into our plantation jungle / minds / and let us catch the nigger / roamen inside of us," and she invites, "Come into Black geography / you, seated like Manzu's cardinal, / come up through tongues / multiplying memories." Under a Soprano Sky continues her technical and thematic predilections. The volume especially continues the topicality and real-person subjects in her poems and demonstrates well her use of the specific in the conveying of broader philosophical positions.

In Wounded in the House of a Friend Sanchez's volition for entering the pain-filled corridor of human life is apparent. She supports her own contention that "this is not a small voice / you hear," as she nimbly and powerfully speaks in the multiple voices of the hopeless and the hope filled. She broadens her political, social, and cultural landscape of racism and sexism to include a heightened awareness of the daily and personal traumas of infidelity, drug addiction, abuse, and rape that afflict a global humanity. Sanchez stages the title poem as an absurdist drama in which the loss of shared values destroys a marriage. The male and female speakers trudge through the emotional sludge of suspicion and hurt and of recognition and resolution, finally to understand that the husband's "wolfdreams" of adulterous relationships and his aspirations for a spiraling corporate career are opposed to the wife's penchant for down-to-earth activism.

Sanchez's voice resonates with the clarity of a seasoned eavesdropper as she shares the narratives of human pain. Drug abuse is the dominant theme in "Love Song No. 3," in which an eighteen-year old addict hammers her grandmother to death to gain access to insurance money, and in "Poem for Some Women," in which a drug-addicted mother temporarily trades the "prettiest little girl," her seven-year-old daughter, to satisfy her "jones jones jones / habit habit habit" for drugs. In "Eyewitness:/Case No. 3456" the female speaker "nicks" the reader with the wrenching agony of the knife she endures at the hands of a rapist. Sanchez's ability to gaze at life with an unflinching stare and to capture and manipulate the screaming and moaning voices that enter her cultural, political, and social domain is evident in both the physical and emotional scars of the victims and the psychological wounds of the perpetrators.

Sanchez seeks balance in the work by ending with a signature series of haiku and tanka that breathlessly alter the terrain with fragments of memory: "if i had known then / what i know now, i would have / picked my own cotton." But it is through her tributes that Sanchez's persistent and resilient spirit soars. She weaves the trials of the past with the hopes of the future as she pays homage to Essence magazine, Spelman College, Bill Cosby, James Baldwin, and the singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock.

Does Your House Have Lions? is Sanchez's elegy for her half brother who died of AIDS following his youthful trek from the south to "embrace the city and the streets" of New York, where he "enslaved his body to cocaine." In complicated, yet noble rhyme royal stanzas, Sanchez imagines the poignant voices of the estranged family as they make the arduous journey through desertion, alienation, and pain to reconciliation and love. The brother's illicit engagements in New York conjure up all of the family's old hurts and angers. His terminal illness forces them to prepare him for the final journey to their ancestors, who sing out, "come here African," and the brother, who finally accepts his fate, responds, "I am coming." Sanchez tackles a difficult social issue, but, by deft handling of form, language, and tone, she invites us all to participate in restoring our loved ones to a place of dignity and rest.

In Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems Sanchez forcefully extends her experimentation with form to create a volume predominantly comprised of Japanese haiku, tanka, and sonku, along with new blues haiku and tributes to notable people like Ella Fitzgerald, Bill and Camille Cosby, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Sanchez playfully redefines the ethnic culture of the haiku by using the black vernacular in "let me be yo wil / derness let me be yo wind / blowing you all day," and she shares an ironic passion in "I have caught fire from / your mouth now you want me to / swallow the ocean." Relentlessly challenged by newness, Sanchez, who has publicly embraced the controversial hip-hop poets and been hailed "an ambassador of hip-hop," includes two poems for slain rapper/poet Tupac Shakur. In "Love Poem [for Tupac]" she writes, "I will not / burp you up / I hold you close to my heart," and in "For Tupac Amaru Shakur" she asserts in a blend of African chants, "ayyee—ayyeeayyee / I'm going to save these young niggaz / because nobody else want to save them / nobody ever came to save me …"

Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems is a compilation taken from Sanchez's most highly regarded works, including I've Been a Woman, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions?, and Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, and it includes a section of new poems. Although the collection can boast of the vast landscape of Sanchez's more mature and technically honed works from 1978 to 1998, it notably excludes her most revolutionary poetry from the black arts movement, with which she first gained prominence.

Several new poems in Shake Loose My Skin are riveting in their urgent cry for a unified humanity. The haunting refrain of "Mrs. Benita Jones Speaks" recalls Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun. The irony of Sanchez's contemporary monologue is its thematic similarity of racial ostracization; a single mother of three children laments the racial hostility initiated by her new community of white "Christians" that leaves her "shipwrecked by circumstances." In "Morning Song and Evening Walk" the narrator revives Martin Luther King's injunctions against a racist society: "… the storm will / not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of / the earth enables men [and women] everywhere to live / in dignity and human decency. " And in "For Sweet Honey in the Rock," the name of the singing group, the speaker merges poetry and a familiar spiritual, "I'm gonna stay on the battlefield," as she urges a divided society of brown, yellow, black, white, gay, and lesbian people to "come to this battlefield / called life. "

Over the years Sanchez has come to depend less on poetic statement and more on indirection, thereby requiring the reader's active participation in explication. In her later works the thematic concerns are clear: love, reconciliation, and a unified humanity. In her figurative language she favors the imagistic, metaphorical, and ironic. Many of her allusive constructs depend upon emotive and intellectual recognition by African-Americans, a recognition often reliant on what critic Stephen Henderson would call the reader's and hearer's ethnic "saturation." For example, in an ironic image reversal Sanchez writes about patriarchal poet Sterling A. Brown as the "griot of the wind / glorifying red gums smiling tom-tom teeth," and in a poem about singer Billie Holiday she says, "speak yo / strange / fruit amid these / stones." Yet it is abundantly clear in her later works that Sanchez is addressing a wider breadth of social concerns and a broader audience. "Love Conversation [AIDS day 1994 in Philadelphia, for Essex Hemphill]" is an assertive appeal of a female AIDS victim to her African gods: "… oya olukun oya sistah … I ammmmmmm / hiv positive but I ammmm / still, woman, lover, mother, / sistah, artist, organizer, activist."

As to structure, Sanchez usually fits form to substance. Her poems are modern in their nontraditional spatial configurations, unconventional syntax and mechanics, portmanteau terms, and improvisational quality. She occasionally uses the sonnet form and rhyme royal. In her later work she has composed more haiku and tanka, and although they follow line and syllabic conventions, they tend in substance to be statements rather than suggestive evocations of fleeting experiences. Though over time her poetry has shifted from a literal to a more subtle and cerebral tone, it is still characteristically pointed.

Much of Sanchez's poetry is addressed principally to African-Americans, among whom she is highly respected. She also, however, has a sizable following among white readers, especially among those whom she characterizes as "progressive" whites. Critics' assessments of Sanchez's poetry vary. It is not unusual for academic and establishment critics and anthologists, who rely upon traditional, received criteria and canons, to pay only passing attention to her earlier work. Women critics tend to regard her poetry favorably and in fact began paying serious attention to her work well before her rediscovery by African-American critics. African-American critics and literary academicians generally consider Sanchez to be an unusually talented and significant poet.

—Theodore R. Hudson and

B.J. Bolden