An Old-New Poetic Voice – Sonia Sanchez
This is not a small voice you hear.
Sonia Sanchez
Sonia Sanchez was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement (~ 1965 – 1975), and Sanchez is known for her ability to blend musical formats (like jazz and blues) with traditional poetic forms (like ancient Japanese haikus and tankas). She credits her inspiration to poets like Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, who celebrated the unique and personal sounds of Black English and slang words of the 1960s and 1970s. In these years, she focused on the necessity of separatism (similar to Malcom X).
Her first collection of poems, Homecoming (1969), is known for its blues influences in both form and content. The themes in this collection include the stresses caused by efforts to define black identity, as well as deep celebrations of black culture. Continuing in the 1970s, her themes included the everyday lives of black men and women. Taking her cue again from the nature of jazz, she made use of urban black vernacular, experimental punctuation, spelling, and spacing.
In later decades she focused less on sociopolitical matters and more on love, community, and empowerment while focusing on strong female protagonists. Sonia Sanchez has been said to be an early leader in black feminism.
the day he traveled to my daughter's house
it was june. he cursed me with his morning nod
of anger as he filtered his callous
walk. skip. hop. feet slipshod
from 125th street bars, face curled with odd
reflections. the skin of a father is accented
in the sentence of the unaccented.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
i was a southern Negro man playing music
married to a high yellow woman who loved my unheard
face, who slept with me in nordic
beauty. i prisoner since my birth to fear
i unfashioned buried in an open grave
of mornings unclapped with constant sight
of masters fattened decked with my diminished light.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
this love. this first wife of mine, died in childbirth
this face of complex lace exiled her breath
into another design, and i died became wanderlust
demanded recompense from friends for my heartbreak
cursed the land for this new heartache
put her away with youthful pause
never called her name again, wrapped my heart in gauze.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
became romeo bound, applauded women
as i squeezed their syrup, drank their stenciled
face, danced between their legs, placed my swollen
shank to the world, became man distilled
early twentieth-century black man fossilled
fulfilled by women things, foreclosing on my life.
mother where do i go before i arrive?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
she wasn't as beautiful as my first wife
this ruby-colored girl insinuating her limb
against my thigh positioning her wild-life
her non-virginal smell as virginal her climb
towards me with slow walking heels made me limp
made me stumble, made my legs squint
until i stopped, stepped inside her footprint.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
i did not want to leave you son, this flame
this pecan-colored festival requested me
not my child, your sister, your mother could not frame
herself as her mother and i absentee
father, and i nightclub owner carefree
did not heed her blood, did not see my girl's eyes
shaved buckled down with southern thighs.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
now my seventy-eight years urge me on your land
now my predator legs prey, broadcast
no new nightmares no longer birdman
of cornerstone comes, i come to collapse the past
while bonfires burn up your orphan's mask
i sing a dirge of lost black southern manhood
this harlem man begging pardon, secreting old.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
i was told i don't remember who
i think i was told he entered his sister's house
cursed me anew, tried to tattoo
her tongue with worms, tried to arouse
her slumbering a veins to espouse
his venom and she leaned slapped him still
stilled his mouth across early morning chill.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
rumor has it that he slapped her hard
down purgatorial sounds of caress
rumor has it that he rushed her down a boulevard
of mad laughter while his hands grabbed harness—
like her arms and she, avenger and heiress
to naked lightning, detonated him, began her dance
of looted hems gathering together for his inheritance.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
blood the sound of blood paddling down the road
blood the taste of blood choking their eyes
and my son's body blood-stained red
with country-lies, city-lies, father-lies, mother-lies,
and my daughter clamoring to exorcise
old thieves trespassing in an old refrain
conjured up a blue-black chord to ordain.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
wa ma ne ho mene so oo
oseee yei, oseee yei, oseee yei
wa ma ne ho mene so oo
he has become holy as he walks toward daresay
can you hear his blood tissue ready to pray
he who wore death discourages any plague
he who was an orphan now recollects his legs.
wa ma ne ho mene so oo: he is arising in all his majesty
oseee yei: a shout of praise
This is not a small voice
you hear this is a large
voice coming out of these cities.
This is the voice of LaTanya.
Kadesha. Shaniqua. This
is the voice of Antoine.
Darryl. Shaquille.
Running over waters
navigating the hallways
of our schools spilling out
on the corners of our cities and
no epitaphs spill out of their river
mouths.
This is not a small love
you hear this is a large
love, a passion for kissing learning
on its face.
This is a love that crowns the feet
with hands
that nourishes, conceives, feels the
water sails
mends the children,
folds them inside our history
where they
toast more than the flesh
where they suck the bones of the
alphabet
and spit out closed vowels.
This is a love colored with iron
and lace.
This is a love initialed Black
Genius.
This is not a small voice
you hear.
Source: Wounded in the House of a Friend (Beacon Press, 1995)
Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman
1
Picture a woman
riding thunder on
the legs of slavery ...
2
Picture her kissing
our spines saying no to
the eyes of slavery ...
3
Picture her rotating
the earth into a shape
of lives becoming ...
4
Picture her leaning
into the eyes of our
birth clouds ...
5
Picture this woman
saying no to the constant
yes of slavery ...
6
Picture a woman
jumping rivers her
legs inhaling moons ...
7
Picture her ripe
with seasons of
legs ... running ...
8
Picture her tasting
the secret corners
of woods ...
9
Picture her saying:
You have within you the strength,
the patience, and the passion
to reach for the stars,
to change the world ...
10
Imagine her words:
Every great dream begins
with a dreamer ...
11
Imagine her saying:
I freed a thousand slaves,
could have freed
a thousand more if they
only knew they were slaves ...
12
Imagine her humming:
How many days we got
fore we taste freedom ...
13
Imagine a woman
asking: How many workers
for this freedom quilt ...
14
Picture her saying:
A live runaway could do
great harm by going back
but a dead runaway
could tell no secrets ...
15
Picture the daylight
bringing her to woods
full of birth moons ...
16
Picture John Brown
shaking her hands three times saying:
General Tubman. General Tubman. General Tubman.
17
Picture her words:
There’s two things I got a
right to: death or liberty ...
18
Picture her saying no
to a play called Uncle Tom’s Cabin:
I am the real thing ...
19
Picture a Black woman:
could not read or write
trailing freedom refrains ...
20
Picture her face
turning southward walking
down a Southern road ...
21
Picture this woman
freedom bound ... tasting a
people’s preserved breath ...
22
Picture this woman
of royalty ... wearing a crown
of morning air ...
23
Picture her walking,
running, reviving
a country’s breath ...
24
Picture black voices
leaving behind
lost tongues ...
Background
Sonia Sanchez was born in 1934 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her given name is Wilsonia Benita Driver. She earned her BA in political science from Hunter College in 1955, did postgraduate work at New York University and studied poetry under the mentorship of Louise Bogan. Sanchez is the author of more than 20 books, including Homecoming (1969), We a BaddDDD People (1970), Love Poems (1973), I've Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (1978), A Sound Investment (1980), Homegirls and Handgrenades (1984), Under a Soprano Sky (1987), Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (1998), Shake Loose My Skin (1999), Morning Haiku (2010), and, most recently, Collected Poems (2021).
In addition to being a contributing editor to Black Scholar and The Journal of African Studies, she has edited an anthology, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans (1973).
Sanchez is a recipient of the 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Does Your House Have Lions? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Sanchez is the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 Robert Frost Medalist and a Ford Freedom Scholar from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. She was one of 20 African American women featured in Freedom’s Sisters, an interactive exhibition created by the Cincinnati Museum Center and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, which toured from 2008 to 2012, displaying key historical figures who fought for equality for all Americans. In December 2011, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter selected Sonia Sanchez as Philadelphia’s first poet laureate, calling her “the longtime conscience of the city.” BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, a documentary about Sanchez’s life as an artist and activist by Barbara Attie, Janet Goldwater, and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon, was nominated for a 2017 Emmy. Sanchez’s poetry was featured in the movie Love Jones. Her work is also explored and studied in BMA: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, the first African American journal that discusses her work and contributions to the Black Arts Movement.
Sanchez was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple. Awards and honors include the 2004 Harper Lee Award, an Alabama Distinguished Writer, the 2005 Leeway Foundation Transformational Award, the National Visionary Leadership Award for 2006, the 2009 Robert Creeley Award, the 2016 Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award in 2018 presented by the Academy of American Poets, the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, the 2021 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the 2022 Edward MacDowell Medal, the 2022 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award (also administered by Poets & Writers), and the 2022 Jackson Poetry Prize, an $80,000 prize awarded annually by Poets & Writers.
Sanchez has lectured at more than 500 universities and colleges in the United States and has traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, Cuba, England, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe, Nicaragua, the People’s Republic of China, Norway, and Canada. She lives in Philadelphia.
Exploration 1: Can you think of other poets and/or traditions that combine music and poetry
Exploration 2: In your opinion, does a movement toward “separatism” still exist in the Black community?
Exploration 3: In “Haiku and Tanka for Harriet Tubman", can you catch the rhythm of traveling? Where is the speaker going and why?
ReplyDelete1. All poetry is musical; some of it dissonant.
2. You mentioned Malcom X as a separatist, but he rejected separatism after his pilgrimage to Mecca where he saw people from all over the world getting along.
There are lots in the White community who still think separatism is a good idea.
3. Harriet Tubman is going towards freedom because we all want to be free, while remembering we are always slaves to the happiness of others.