By Remica Bingham-Risher

Photo © John Mathew Smith, 2001

Editor’s note: Poet, playwright, educator, and activist Sonia Sanchez turns ninety today! To celebrate her momentous solar return, we’re turning to poet Remica Bingham-Risher’s interview with the revolutionary poet in her memoir Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up. As Bingham-Risher discovers upon meeting her, much as we all do when we are blessed to do so, dear Sister Sonia Sanchez is a force!

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I met [Sonia] Sanchez at the second Furious Flower Conference in 2004, where she performed with her band Full Moon of Sonia, and interviewed her a few years later. As we had just begun to get to know each other and I was a young mostly unpublished poet, I was surprised to be invited to a gathering at her house that first evening we sat together. At Sanchez’s party, there was food spread from end to end on a large wooden table; people filled the house and were almost as interesting and varied as the art stationed in every room. There were pieces by Thelma Burke, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jacob Lawrence. There were many African statues and masks, along with signed prints and photographs with artists from every genre. Sanchez smiled with entertainers on one wall and Bearden’s autograph graced a print on another. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o sat in the living room signing his latest epic novel Wizard of the Crow and took pictures with guests. This went on until well after midnight. Sanchez stood in the kitchen, beckoning when she saw me: “Dear sister, here’s a camera. Document everything, make sure you see everyone. Bring it back to me when you’re done.”

Months later, when I saw Sanchez at a conference in Atlanta, she remembered we hadn’t finished our interview, as we were cut short by the gathering at her home. I fumbled when she asked me why I hadn’t tried to reach her, explaining that my grandmother had just passed away and that the last few months had been grim. She cut me short as I tried to beg her forgiveness and said we could finish whenever I was ready.

Before I could thank her, a group of editors came. As she was being swept away, she took my hand. “We’re having a get-together tonight at a local poet’s house. You should come. Here’s the address, here’s the time, bring poems, bring friends.”

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In her book We a BaddDDD People, I was introduced to the Sonia many fell in love with during the civil rights era. When we met more than forty years later, her poems had grown quieter and more mild-mannered in their way. Those in the Black Arts Movement subverted tradition by breaking rules of English grammar and syntax, especially poets like Carolyn Rodgers, Ntozake Shange, and Sonia Sanchez, whose work from that era utilized satiric or phonetic misspellings; slashes for word dismemberment, abbreviation, or fusion; and incorporated one of the most distinguishable features in Black English, using the verb “be” almost exclusively to mark aspect in verb phrases.

Of course, using Black vernacular wasn’t new. It was a medium in the tradition of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. But these artists of the 1960s writing in the language of the people understood how reading and hearing the language of one’s heart might change the reader’s response. Moreover, Black feminist poets were railing against each institution that bound them—racism, sexism, ageism—and were precise in their subjects and audience: they were writing Black poems for and about the common Black citizen, especially the youth they believed would be most adept at listening to and acting on their messages. Sanchez explained her revolutionary craft when I asked about the biting tongue in her earlier work: “[Y]ou must remember, all the death and dying that happened during the time that we were writing, and we had discovered how much we’d been enslaved in this country. No one had taught that in the universities, our parents had not even talked about it. So when we discovered it, we weren’t going to say, ‘Well, by golly, I think this is important.’ We came out hitting and slapping and alerting people to what had happened.”

She went on: “In [my book] Home Coming, you see concentrated bloodletting. We had to alert people who had not been alerted to what was going on. When I got up on the stage and said, ‘I’m Black,’ people booed me, because people wanted to be considered Negroes with a capital N. So, you had to use curse words, because then you engaged people. When I used curse words, I engaged the younger people and they said, ‘Ooh, stop, look at that!’ Then, after I got them engaged, I didn’t have to curse anymore.”

Among the leaders of the civil rights and Black Power movements, Black youth in the 1960s were bodacious in their stand against discrimination and maltreatment. This made them kindred spirits with the artists of the time. By speaking in the voices of those in their communities, Black poets validated those silenced for centuries. During the Black Arts Movement, numerous brave—sometimes irreverent—new voices like Sanchez’s began to sing in poems, on wax, and in politics.*

A cursory glance through We a BaddDDD People is nothing like looking into Morning Haiku, a collection of Sanchez’s formal verse published in 2010. There is little discernible structure for most poems in We a BaddDDD People—words sprawl down the page or bleed into others with forward slashes in between; the spelling is invented and divisive in its raging; expletives, derivatives, repetitions of letters or phrases, and wild capitalizations abound. This is obscenity-slinging, English-breaking, loud-mouthing, Afro wider than the photo filling the back cover, revolutionary Sonia—unapologetic and abrasive, full of fire and righteous love. The documentary [about her life, BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez,] proves that Sanchez has never been afraid to tell people about their mess. Mess as in James Brown’s soul-fire “Papa Don’t Take No Mess!” Mess as in staying down in your own dirt. In the 1960s, this is what Sanchez believes plagues the Black community she holds dear, and in We a BaddDDD People she wills the real, revolutionary work to begin at home. In the poem “blk/rhetoric,” she asks who is going to walk the walk, not just talk the talk about revolution. She wants more than lip service for the new Black Is Beautiful movement. She wants more than simple capitalistic appeasements (“cad / ill / acs” or, if the phrase is drilled down, ill-bred, dishonorable [‘cad’], sick [ill] actions [acs/acts]) by those pushing materialism over substance. She wants more than racial, sexual repression and street mongering, more than artificial highs from drugs and cheap hooch, more than temporary pleasures, pain, or sensationalized fascination with difference. She wants legitimate, continuous change, a real about-face for society.

For Sanchez as for [Alice] Walker, revolution is both a verb and noun, an action and event. In the documentary, Sanchez fights with and for the people in great or small things. She does what Walker posits she must do as a revolutionary artist. Sometimes poets must help move students from one reading level to another, fill out government forms for assistance, help people eat. Revolutionaries must do the regular work to get folks from day to day, be in the trenches, not just pontificate about art and adornment without helping to beautify the lives on the ground. Sanchez teaches and fights for Black studies to be recognized by campus administrators; she is arrested as a grandmother against war. In our interview, I was especially tickled when Sanchez talked about bickering with a manager for fresh produce at her inner-city grocery store. She is fighting against disparities, food deserts, and neighborhood deprivation. In her community, she is in the midst of revolution.

We talked about Sanchez’s fight to establish Black studies as a field and how real the work got for her before most of the knowledge had a chance to trickle into a groundswell. She said: “It’s amazing how long it has taken people to catch up. Now, it’s normal, it’s commonplace, the things we talked about, things that people should have been doing in the early 1970s. Now, in the twenty-first century, it’s normal to have a Du Bois House, but when I talked about Du Bois and taught Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk at San Francisco State, the FBI came to my house. They knocked on my door and told my landlord he should put me out, because I was one of those—they didn’t call us radicals, they called us militants. He said because I was teaching Du Bois—but he pronounced it wrong—Hughes, and Robeson. Well, you can’t very well do the first semester of African American Lit without including them.”

She continued: “I must admit that I was naïve about the process of teaching them, as I told Ms. Jean Hutson, who was the curator of the Schomburg. When I finally called her after the FBI had left, I said, ‘You know, I’ve just been visited by the FBI!’ I had tears in my eyes, and she said, ‘Dear, dear Sonia. I thought you understood that if you taught some of those people, you might have a little difficulty,’ which was the understatement of the year [laughing].” But being a revolutionary often means troubling the water for good.

In his introduction to We a BaddDDD People, published by his own Broadside Press, Dudley Randall opens with a delineation of the true revolutionary spirit: “Some people think of revolutionaries as troublesome, but I have found the ones I know to be kind, gentle, generous . . . Those who are revolutionaries, however, want to make this a better world.”

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In Sanchez’s America in We a BaddDDD People, instead of whips and chains, most are tormented by greed, drugs, impossible gains. Black families are torn apart in poems like “—answer to yo/question / of am i not yo/woman / even if u went on shit again” where a Black woman watches her Black man disappear and return as someone else under the haze of drugs, though there is enduring, home-growing, proliferate love. She calls out the seedy, underhanded politics of capitalism, sexism, and pay-for-play sexual encounters in “Indianapolis/summer/1969/poem,” where she admonishes families for not teaching their children that the revolution isn’t about getting “coin.” Sanchez speaks plainly and combs the streets for what she believes people need to hear, her candidness another tenet of the Black revolutionary artist. Sanchez shocks the stoic, prudish, and unaware with the hope of teaching some to know better or, perhaps, with the intention of moving some beyond indifference.

Sanchez’s revolution is sometimes angry, sometimes celebratory; she chastises and idolizes in equal measure. She’s a shape-shifter, a courier of love and hate. In short, she is all kinds of human. The work of the revolutionary artist/woman, on top of dealing with culture, is often most intentioned and piercing when motherhood is the topic. Layer upon layer of experience (caregiving, care-needing, assumed inadequacies, laborious conflicted histories, etc.) abound. In “summer words of a sistuh addict,” a woman shoots dope on Sunday, making it her temple and God after church. The woman in the poem is not simply negligent or shooting up for recreation; she turns to drugs and explains she is self-medicating against the trauma from her mother. Her casual escape becomes a spiraling addiction, and only the women in her community know how to try to salvage her. The women are a sounding board and communal conscience, voices of reason and restraint. Their final query puts the onus on the daughter, on her part in this undoing. Their inquiry—an intervention, perhaps a saving grace—is followed by the chorus of women mingled with her own tears as she is broken and reborn.

*I asked Sanchez about when, during this convergence of folks, she met Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti (who was Don L. Lee then), and Etheridge Knight, who would make up the Broadside Quartet, and she made sure to get my history straight. She said, “Well, turn it around—and I’m just saying it for accuracy—Nikki was younger than us, so she was with us. The great thing about us was, what we did is, we opened up to everybody. She certainly came along with us for Broadside. When you talk about the Black Arts Movement, the people who started that were an interesting bunch of people. You had [Amiri] Baraka, Askia [Touré], Larry Neal, Bobb Hamilton, myself, and then the musicians who came and the painters who came. All those people who came into that facility, BART/S, the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, to begin this thing called Black Arts.”

About the Author 

Remica Bingham-Risher is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Writer’s Chronicle, New Letters, Callaloo, and Essence, among other journals. She is the author of 3 volumes of her own poetry: Conversion, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; What We Ask of Flesh, shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Award; and Starlight & Error, winner of the Diode Editions Book Award. She lives in Norfolk, VA with her husband and children. Follow her online at remicabinghamrisher.com, on Twitter (@remicawriter), and on Instagram (@remicawriter).