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Sonia Sanchez, honoring our ancestors

© Dorothy Harris

In February, on the night before Sonia Sanchez was to come to our campus, I remembered that I wanted to bring one of her books with me to campus for her autograph. As I went over to our bookshelf with Sanchez on my mind, I focused immediately on one of her older books entitled Love Poems (1973). It's an old one, I thought, as I wondered where it came from. I knew that it didn't belong to me, as I didn't remember having this particular book. I opened the book whose once purple and white paper cover had faded and yellowed over time, no longer protecting the color or edges of the original binding. When I opened it, my heart skipped as I noticed that it had already been signed. It was inscribed:

To Sister Mabel Jessup -
As-Salaam-Alaikum
I hope you enjoy this my
sister -
Black Love,
Sis Sonia Sanchez
1975

I felt very emotional as I passed the opened book to Kathy. When she read the inscription to her grandmother, she smiled and said, "well, then, this is the one to take." It was amazing to find this book which had been honored by Sanchez's pen over 25 years ago and passed on to Kathy by her grandmother, a former teacher, actor, poet, community activist, and metaphysical minister who passed fourteen months before this conversation. I thought of Kathy's grandmother who was nearly sixty at the time of this signing, meeting and seeking an autograph from Sonia Sanchez. I thought of how Sanchez has effected lives of generations of women, and of how she would, amazingly, continue to do so.

The next morning, Sanchez talked about learning from our elders, about connecting with our ancestors, and about remembering who we are and where we come from. She talked about the significance of understanding our connections to other women and to the struggles of those before us. She talked of her own experiences, both past and present, and of the relationship these experiences have to each other.

Sonia Sanchez, the poet, activist, womanist, radical writer is as radical today as she was during the black arts movement of the sixties and the seventies. Sanchez was one of those poets in the sixties whose writing demanded social change, whose writing called out to challenge her people as well as those whom she identified as oppressors. Sanchez has made considerable contribution to the canon of literature, to the genre of African American women's literature, to the understanding of poetry for black women, and to the credibility of black radical poetry as a whole. Sanchez, who was born in 1934 and who began publishing in the sixties is still writing strongly and reading to audiences who understand her place in history as a writer. Her work is part of a continuum of black writers, and it has played a significant role in laying the foundation for many black writers today. Her poetry speaks to all of us, making a connection between the educated, middle class women of the new millennium and the chained women on slave ships from Africa,and between those of us in her audiences today to our mothers and grandmothers who were in her audiences twenty- five years to forty years ago. It's amazing to find this prolific writer who has been on the circuit for forty years, still having an impact on audiences of all backgrounds and ages. What I love about Sanchez is that she maintains at the core of her writing that the perspective from which she speaks is that of a black woman.