Sanchez, Sonia

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Sonia Sanchez

American poet Sonia Sanchez (born 1934) helped define the mid-twentieth century Black Arts Movement, using the language of the streets to write about the frustrations of Northern urban blacks. As an educator, she pioneered a black studies program at San Francisco State College (later became University).

Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934 in Birmingham, Alabama to Wilson L. and Lena (Jones) Driver. When Sanchez was one year old her mother died trying to deliver twins; the twins perished as well. Sanchez and her sister Pat were raised by their paternal grandmother and relatives until Sanchez was six.

Shaped By Birmingham

[sw-3]Birmingham was a large southern industrial city in the later 1930s and ran under the rules of segregation. When she was a young child, Sanchez experienced an eye-opening incidence of discrimination involving her aunt Pauline. She was riding the bus with her aunt who was on her way to work. At each stop the bus became more crowded with white people who wanted to ride it, the bus driver eventually stopped the bus and told the blacks to get off. Her aunt refused. When the bus driver threatened to throw her off, she spat on him. Her aunt was arrested and taken downtown. The family decided she would have to leave town that evening in order for the rest of them to be able to stay and not be harassed.

Sanchez suffered a huge loss at age six when her grandmother died. It also proved to be a significant turning point in her life. "I began writing when I was a little girl," Sanchez explained to Susan Kelly of the African American Review, "and I began stuttering and being tongue-tied. The loss of Mama, my grandmother, made me begin that whole process of writing things down." In 1943, Sanchez and her sister moved to Harlem to live with their father and his third wife. Sanchez began writing poems. "I think writers are born, like mathematicians and scientists," she told David Reich of UU World (the magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association). "What stuttering made me do is write earlier." Sanchez frequented the library and credited one librarian as a significant influence. When Sanchez was 11 or 12 the librarian "gave me an anthology of what at that time was called Negro poetry.… I'll never forget this black woman," she told Reich.

Participated in Black Arts Movement

In 1955, Sanchez graduated from Hunter College with a B.A. in political science. She did postgraduate work at New York University in 1958, studying poetry with Louise Bogan. Along with other poets from what became known as the Black Arts Movement, Sanchez formed a writer's workshop in Greenwich Village. Other members included Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Askia Muhammad Touré. She performed her first poetry reading in a local bar with this group of poets, because they wanted to reach people that didn't normally hear poetry. Baraka recalled an early impression of Sanchez in his autobiography (as quoted in The Columbia History of American Poetry), "[she was] a wide-eyed young woman, quiet and self-deprecating, was herself coming out of a bad marriage and she came to our programs announcing very quietly and timidly that she was a poet." Married and divorced from Puerto Rican immigrant Albert Sanchez, she kept his last name when writing. It was during this workshop that she published her first poem.

By the early 1960s she had joined with Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight, to form the "Broadside Quartet," a group of militant poets. Sanchez published her poetry through the Broadside Press, a newly established black press. "We thought it would be very important to begin our own institution and support our own institution," she told Kelly. "So that's what we did. Many of us turned our royalties back in to that company so they could then continue to publish and survive, and also publish younger writers." Later, she married and divorced Knight. They had three children together—Anita, Morani Neusi, and Mungu Neusi.

The writings of the Black Arts Movement were directly related to the changing environment in which black Americans were living. The civil rights movement was unfolding and Sanchez's personal beliefs were taking shape. She was an integrationist in the early 1960s and supported the philosophy of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), but later she embraced the views of Malcolm X and took a separatist point of view, focusing more on her black heritage. "Malcolm articulated all that we thought … he gave us his voice," Sanchez told Reich. "That's why many of our poems became so angry at that time-because we picked up on his voice. We said in our poetry what he was saying from stages." Sanchez's poetry created a language of its own. Interestingly, because her father was a schoolteacher, Sanchez grew up speaking standard English rather than a Southern or black dialect, but she captured the voices around her. "Her poetry rejected the language of academia and took on the language of the streets," wrote Beth Schneider in African American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, "using lowercase letters, abbreviations, phonetic spellings, and hyphens."

Developed Early Black Studies Program

In 1965, Sanchez began her career as an educator in San Francisco, sharing her words of revolution which expressed her anger about racial and economic oppression. While at San Francisco State College (now University) she played an integral role in developing some of the first black studies courses in the nation, including a class in black English. She went on to teach at the University of Pittsburgh and became an assistant professor at Rutgers University from 1970-1971. Around this time, Sanchez separated from the "Broadside Quartet" and became a poet on her own. She began focusing more on black women in her writing, while her career in academia continued at Manhattan Community College and City College of the City University of New York, and as an associate professor of English at Amherst College in 1972.

It was always clear to Sanchez that her politics had an impact on her career. While at San Francisco State College the FBI pressured her landlord to put her out because she was a radical. After being arrested during a strike at Manhattan Community College in New York City, she felt she was kept from getting other teaching jobs in New York. Yet Sanchez enjoyed a long and distinguished career in academia. She later taught at the University of Pennsylvania and began teaching at Temple University in 1977. By 2003, she had lectured at over 500 universities and colleges in the United States.

Writing Took Off

Sanchez published her first book of poetry, Homecoming, in 1969. William Cook wrote in The Columbia History of American Poetry, "her first book of poems reflects thematically and stylistically the Black Arts aesthetic and its focus on the theme of cultural and consciousness development." Cook continued, "Sanchez knows the power of humor and of tenderness, qualities not often associated with Black Arts poetry." She followed with We a BaddDDD People in 1970, a book that experimented with the use of the black dialect as a poetic medium. Although Sanchez readily acknowledges there was an earlier tradition of using black English by poets such as Sterling Brown who wrote about poor Southern black men and women, she also realized she had broken new ground. "I took the whole idea of using black English and dealing with it in an urban setting," she explained to Kelly, "incorporating the hipness that was in that black urban setting."

Sanchez was also writing plays, such as The Bronx Is Next, produced in New York in 1970. Sanchez told Kelly, "[The play's] point was to talk about how destructive Harlem was. Harlem had had its moments, but the kind of Harlem I was beginning to see … the change was coming through drugs and decimation." The University of Michigan Black Arts Movement Website stated that her plays deal "with characterization of women in [their] work, that make clear the stereotypes that Black women faced in the 1960s and 1970s."

Sanchez's writing was prolific at this time. In the 1970s she published six more books of poetry and had four more plays produced. She also published three books for children, including her first book of poetry for children, It's a New Day: Poems for Young Brothas and Sistuhs. In 1972, she received a $1,000 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a PEN Writing Award. In 1977-78, she received the National Education Association Award. The monetary gift that accompanied it allowed her to continue her creative work. She published I've Been a Woman in 1978.

Joined Nation of Islam

Between the years of 1972 and 1976, Sanchez belonged to the Nation of Islam. She has given various reasons for why she left the Nation. In Black Women Writers at Work, Sanchez was quoted as saying: "It was not easy being in the Nation. I was/am a writer. I was also speaking on campuses. In the Nation at that time women were supposed to be in the background. My contribution to the Nation has been that I refused to let them tell me where my place was. I would be reading my poetry some place, and men would get up to leave, and I'd say, 'Look, my words are equally important.' So I got into trouble." She added, "I had to fight a lot of people in and outside of the Nation due to so-called sexism. I spoke up. I think it was important that there were women there to do that." However in her interview with Kelly in 2000, she stated: "I had gone into the Nation because I was raising my children by myself, and the public school situation was really pathetic. The Nation was one of the places to receive a good education at the time.… But I was not greeted well in the Nation, because they said I was … a revolutionary Pan Africanist and socialist. That was told to me point-blank. So I understood, truly, that my days in the Nation were numbered." Sanchez denied to Kelly that she had left the Nation because of feminist issues.

Became Highly-Regarded Poet

Homegirls and Handgrenades won an American Book Award in 1985. Sanchez followed with Under a Soprano Sky (1987), then Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995). Throughout her writing career, Sanchez tackled the most difficult of subjects, including violence, bigotry, drug abuse, gender issues, and poverty. Her 1997 book Does Your House Have Lions? was about her stepbrother who had died of AIDS. It was nominated for both the NAACP Image and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She followed with Like the Singing Coming off the Drums: Love Poems (1998). The subject matter of Sanchez's writings was always real life and never shied away from the political. The form of her writing drew equal attention. One notable experiment was her combination of black English and the haiku, as displayed in Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (1999). Of the last book, which offered a selection drawn from over 30 years of Sanchez's poetry, Library Journal's Ann K. van Buren wrote that it "leaves one in awe of the stretches of language Sanchez has helped to legitimize." Publisher's Weekly wrote: "This collection should draw wide attention to the consistency of Sanchez's achievement, and to the success of her formal adaptations."

Made Additional Inroads

In addition to her writing career, Sanchez made occasional recordings of her work as well, including her early books of poetry Homecoming and We a BaddDDD People. Later came creations such as her 1971 recording Sonia Sanchez and Robert Bly, her 1982 recording IDKT: Captivating Facts about the Heritage of Black Americans, and Sacred Ground, with Sweet Honey and the Rock (1995). She was sought out for her poetry readings, which were impassioned and full of spontaneity. She traveled extensively to such far reaches as Cuba, Africa, the People's Republic of China, Australia, and Norway to read her work.

A contributing editor to Black Scholar and The Journal of African Studies, Sanchez has also edited two anthologies: We be Word Sorcerers, 25 Stories by Black Americans and 360 degrees of Blackness Coming at You.

Sanchez retired in 1999 from Temple University after they awarded her the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. She began teaching at Temple in 1977 and was their first Presidential Fellow and later became the Laura Carnell professor of English and women's studies. In May 2004 she was awarded an honorary degree from Haverford College.

Sanchez continued to make her home in Philadelphia, writing and taking speaking engagements. She remained committed to social change. "All poets, all writers are political," Sanchez told Reich. "They either maintain the status quo, or they say, 'Something's wrong, let's change it for the better.' That's what my life has really been about." As for her inspiration, she told Kelly: "It is that love of language that has propelled me, that love of language that came from listening to my grandmother speak black English."