from the ASALH

Had the pleasure of presenting on a plenary panel at the annual Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) in Cincinnati. The session was dedicated to the legacy of Michael Jackson and I was joined by Dawn Ellisa-Fischer and the legendary Sonia Sanchez. First heard Ms. Sanchez speak/read 25 years ago and still cherish my signed copy of HomeGirls and Hand Grenades. Thought I'd use this occasion to reprint my review Sanchez's 2004 recording, Full Moon of Sonia.

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Critical Noir: The Full Moon of Sonia

by Mark Anthony Neal

“Black people’s reality is controlled by alien forces. This is why Sonia Sanchez is so beautiful & needed; this is also why she is so dangerous.”

—Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee)

For those who’ve heard ever Sonia Sanchez perform, you know that she possesses a spirit that seemingly gains energy with each word that she offers to the world. Indeed, I can still her poly-syllabic chants in my head as if I was 19 year-old again watching her weave her poetic magic the first time I saw her perform in 1985. For those who’ve never heard Sonia Sanchez perform, she has just released her first solo recording, Full Moon of Sonia.

Sonia Sanchez was born more than seventy-years ago in Birmingham (Bombingham), Alabama. Ms. Sanchez is more likely though, to claim herself as a native of New York, the city that she moved to as a nine-year old and the place where she began to cultivate her poetic skills after graduating from Hunter College in 1955. Sanchez’s poetry workshops in the 1960s at places like the Downtown Community School proved politically challenging to her employers. According to Sanchez, she was “white-balled” in New York and eventually left New York taking teaching positions as various schools until she landed at Temple University in 1977. She retired from Temple in 1999.

Ms. Sanchez’s first collection of poetry, Homecoming, was published by Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in 1969, followed by We a BaddDDD People in 1970. Both collections featured poetry that literally screamed off the page as if Sanchez was struggling to find language to fully convey the emotions that informed her poetry, whether it was the plight of African-Americans in the United States or her failing marriage with the late “prison” poet Etheridge Knight. As Ms. Sanchez told MELUS, “you must remember, when we were reading poetry at that time, there was not an interest in poetry. People had their ears tuned to radios…something with a beat.” Sanchez and many of her peers such as Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) and Nikki Giovanni found success in the late 1960s and early 1970s by gearing their poetry to the dance-floor and the street.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Sanchez’s legacy is being recovered by the hip-hop generation, particularly among spoken word poets. Danny Simmons, executive producer of Def Poetry, refers to Ms. Sanchez as the “spiritual mother” of spoken word. And indeed Ms. Sanchez gives love back citing the late Tupac Shakur (who she pays tribute to on Full Moon of Sonia), Rakim, and Ursula Rucker (who bears a striking resemblance to Ms. Sanchez) as exemplars of hip-hop generation wordsmiths. More than anything Full Moon of Sonia is an attempt to speak more directly to the hip-hop generation.

Recorded during the National Black Arts Festival in 2003, where Ms. Sanchez was celebrated as a “living legend”, Full Moon of Sonia is Ms. Sanchez’s first solo recording after more than thirty-five years as a published poet. Backed by a stream of R&B, Funk, Jazz, Soul, Blues and Gospel, Ms. Sanchez brings to musical life a range of poetry that captures the demons and passions of African-American life. Poems such as “Bubba” (which first appeared in Home Girls and Hand Grenades), “Tupac” and “For Langston/I’ve Known Rivers” (for the legendary poet) recalls figures from Ms. Sanchez’s past, allowing her memories of them to speak to the humanity of black men in the midst of on-going demonization.

Earlier in her career, Ms. Sanchez was often lock-step with the most fiery expressions of 1960s styled black nationalism. Though Ms. Sanchez remains fiery, Ms. Sanchez black nationalist politics are muted these days, in part because of her embrace of feminist politics. So a piece like “Poem for Some Women” performed to the gospel track “There’s a Leak in this Old Building” gives light to a women who leaves her baby in a crack-house, indicting the men who take advantage of both the woman and her child, as well as a society that offers little support for poor single mothers. Even more powerful is a track like “He/She” which examines the utter tragedy of domestic abuse. And still Ms. Sanchez takes time to have fun as she does with “Good Morning Sex.”

Full Moon of Sonia, represents Sonia Sanchez as a poet women at her peak. At once she embodies the power and promise of African-American expression and a clarion example of longevity and vitality for a hip-hop generation in dire need for artistic role models.