Walking it

Sonia Sanchez sings out

by Johnette Rodriguez

You may have heard her voice on Sweet Honey In the Rock's Sacred Ground, reading her poem "Stay On the Battlefield"; on rapper D Knowledge's All That and a Bag of Words; or you may have been one of the lucky ones in the audience at Brown University that snowy night in the early '70s, when Sonia Sanchez first "sang" one of her poems.

The reading was delayed almost two hours while her plane tried to land, and in her gratitude to the audience who had gone out to grab food and re-grouped to hear her, she read for more than 90 minutes. Along about 11:45, someone raised a hand and asked her to read her poem about John Coltrane.

"I said, `No, I've never read that poem out loud,' " she recalled in a phone conversation from her home in Philadelphia, where she teaches at Temple University. "I wrote it out loud, I sang it out loud, in order to write it, because it was visual and oral and full of imagery. I had never done it because, as I said, `I don't sing.' "

But the young man who'd made the request persisted, and she decided to read it. The experience showed her that "it was time for me to deal with the reality that I had moved to another point in my poetry." Today her performances always combine singing, chanting and movement. In her words, she "walks" her poetry.

"Most especially when I'm involved with younger people," Sanchez notes, "you need to walk it. You need to engage their eyes as you move across the stage and therefore engage them in the whole production of this thing called poetry. I talk it out loud; I emphasize it with the hands and the feet. Since this younger generation is very much involved with images made from the television and movies, sometimes we as writers have to compete with those images."

She points out that the poetry of rap is very much tied up with movement and with telling stories. Her 1998 book of love poems, Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums, is dedicated to Tupac Amaru Shakur, with two poems written specifically for him.

"I love the imaging, the writing of the young people," remarked Sanchez, a founder of the Black Arts Movement in the '60s and winner of the 1985 American Book Award for Homegirls and Handgrenades. "Many of the young rappers are the ones who are constructive and positive, the ones that speak to real issues for young people that are going on."

As for the current spate of "poetry slams," Sanchez had a suggestion: "More emphasis should be on the participation, truly listening to what someone is doing, what's new about his or her work, what's exciting about it. The kind of energy that builds up to win a slam could be turned to the kind of energy that comes from being a jazz musician. When you hear someone play a set, then you come behind with your set and someone else comes behind with their set. They were playing theirs just to enjoy each other and to learn their craft more. Because in the long run, it is about craft."

As a leader in the feminist/womanist movement, Sanchez attended the 1998 conference at Seneca Falls, New York, as well as a convening of the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom in Cuba last spring. At both she witnessed women from all over the world coming together to talk about "where we are going to go to next and how we are going to get there."

"For a while there it was easy being a woman and a feminist," she reflected. "Everything was going right. The point is, `Do you stay a womanist and a feminist when things aren't going so well?' That's always a test of what is. If you are truly committed to this whole idea."

If you have any doubts about Sanchez's commitment, listen to her read from her newest book, Shake Loose My Skin, a selection of new and previously published poems, this Sunday (January 24) at the Providence Public Library. Ask for the Coltrane poem!