Sonia Sanchez: Poem Analysis

Sonia Sanchez is an African American poet activist, scholar, and mother. She was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama.

In her poetry, Sonia Sanchez stresses the importance of black unity and action against white oppression. She also writes about violence in the black community, social problems, family ties, and the relationship between African American women and men. She is a notable poet who uses urban Black English in written format. She also endorsed the addition of African American research applications in schools and other institutions of higher learning. At the University of Pittsburgh, she was the first professor to offer a convention on written works by other African American women. Many of her peers

She first believed in integration but later based her identity on her racial heritage when she heard Malcolm X say that blacks would never become part of America's mainstream. Her poems focus on the African American struggle for liberation from racial and economic oppression. She uses the language of the streets instead of the language of the academe. She became one of the first poets to combine ghetto impressions with lower-case characters, dashes, hyphenated collections, slashes, non-traditional punctuation and spelling, abbreviations, and further untried uses of terminology and framework to reinterpret what a poetry is, does, and for whom it is written. She has also composed poems in ballad form, letters, and haikus. In 1969, Sanchez published her first adult book of poems entitled “Homecoming” where she uniquely addresses racial oppression in angry voices taken from street conversations. Haki Madhubuti mentioned in “Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation” that she appreciated Sanchez’s potential of urban street talk and was accountable more than any other poet for "legitimizing the use of urban Black English in written form." William Pitt Root was inspired by her work and also wrote about her early poems in poetry, "Her poems are raps, good ones, aimed like guns at whatever obstacles she detects standing in the way of Black progress .... Her praises are as generous as her criticisms are severe, both coming from loyalties that are fierce, invulnerable, and knowing. Whether she's addressing her praises to Gwendolyn Brooks or to the late Malcolm X, to her husband or to a stranger's child, always they emerge from and feed back into the shared experience of being