10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 27 :: VIVIAN D. NIXON on SONIA SANCHEZ
Week four of this year’s Poetry Month series is curated by Caits Meissner, who writes: “all of the writers featured in our final week are either in, or have served time in, jail and/or prison. But I didn’t choose them with the intention to illuminate the experience of incarceration — though many of the essays do, of course — or to advocate for anything other than the poets who spark up their blood. Quite simply, I invited this roster of writers because what I do with my days is think about, commune with and work with writers who share the condition of incarceration. It is part of my commitment to create space for these voices in the wider literary community.” Read the rest of her curatorial statement here. –EM
In my small hometown only 2 out of 100 people were Black. The 1970’s literary canon wasn’t helpful. My ancestry was hidden from me in Dickinson, Whitman, and Frost. The prose of Alcott, Melville, and Austen were equally rich with white opacity. I love Sonia Sanchez because her creative spirit loved me when I felt most unlovable. When I was introduced to the Black Arts Movement and saw the inside of the Schomburg for the first time, I was a light-skinned Black teenager who sometimes wished I had been born white. Other times, I wanted to be blacker than a blueberry. Sonia’s poem, “For Anita,” made high yellow a beautiful and powerful heritage:
For Anita
high/yellow/black/girl
walken like the sun u be.
move on even higher.
those who
laugh at yo/color
have not moved
to the blackness we be about
cuz as Curtis Mayfield be sayen
we people be darker than blue
and quite a few
of us be yellow
all soul/shades of
blackness.
yeah. high/yellow/black/girl
walk yo/black/song
cuz some of us
be hearen yo/sweet/music.
Ever since that time, Sonia has been one of my grounding wells. I think Sonia Sanchez knows all about my life. Every image she conjures is precise. My ancestry, my right now, my destiny on the pages of the books written by my spiritual doppelganger. She says what people find hard to hear and means what she says. No apologies. When my mind is stuck in toxic thinking, she scolds, gently. It’s not personal. Sonia has earned the right to set me straight. She loves me in my confusion and tells me I must set some people straight, too.
I love Sonia Sanchez because she loves the ancestors, too. They speak to her as she writes Haiku in their honor. To Ella and Toni, Maya, and The Move, her contemporaries, she pays homage.
and i am flesh burnt
red charcoal black gift wrapped in
philadelphia blood.[2]
And eulogizes the ancestors. The words on the page mesmerize the reader’s mind.
Oh, but when Sonia reads out loud, I go to church. I can listen to the words, dance to the beat, hum the melody or do all three. Her tongue, a drum, beats out sound. Her twin bells ring with boundless vibrato truth. When Sonia speaks, high notes, and low ones, signal the deep and troubled waters of pain’s histories. She changes the tempo in the middle passage of a poem, disrupting quarter time. A fermata is thrown above one word and it becomes a howl of infinite measure. With a razor between her teeth, Sonia testifies an inherited story.
It was the raping that was bad,
It was the raping that was bad,
It was the raping that was
baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaadddDD.
At times, I cannot contain the rage. When Sonia Sanchez lifts her pen, her spirit extends down the arm, through sinew and vein into her hand and onto the page. She exposes the reasons people suffer. She has named the invisible crops that grew from the cotton and sugar cane fields. Black bodies labored. Their blood watered the soil and nurtured the seeds of wealth. White men with a jones inject liquid gold in their veins while mother earth is ravaged and raped constantly birthing prosperity, oil-gold, cotton-gold, coal-gold. Sonia’s body of work chronicles the continuum of pain on earth. The complex links between the pains of the ancestor and the pains of the unborn. Sonia calls it all to my remembrance. Studying Sonia taught me that when I remember who I was, I remember who I am, and will be. When I remember, I can love, even when stripped, even when thinking of the mothers and fathers whipped into surrendering their children.
But when I hear Sonia sing her poems, I go on a spirit journey that reminds me that the revolution is not over, and the revolution is not rage. The revolution is love. It is love of those ancestors that guides her. Sonia sees dark history through the eyes of love.
Sonia also writes with love about the unknown sisters. “Poem for some women,” is for no particular woman who birthed a little baby girl. Then the child was seven. The unnamed woman, in a moment of blind crack craving, could not remember her baby’s name, see her baby’s face, or hear her baby scream. She only remembers that virgins are a commodity on the crack exchange. Sonia Sánchez writes that horror as a lullaby and sings it with cutting clarity. Truth, Sonia cuts with love.
On my way to authenticity, Sonia Sanchez is teaching me to put a fermata above love. Make it infinite.
Love between us is
speech and breath. loving you is
a long river running.[3]
Love the con artists who con the good people who give so freely to ease the pain of having too much — or just enough. But free yourself from their spirits, lest you get caught in their trap. Good game will soon be exposed. In the world when all criticism is labeled cancelled culture, I stand with Sonia. She famously told a crowd, “At 81 I have the right to correct you.”
I am 61. If you don’t want to be corrected, do not seek my advice. I learned that, yeah, from Sonia.
But also know: I will speak from a place of love. What I love about Sonia Sanchez is the concept of revolutionary love. The key to being a comrade in a love revolution, for this high yellow woman, is remembering I can only love my neighbor as I love myself.
Vivian D. Nixon is Executive Director of College & Community Fellowship (CCF) an organization that helps women who have been harmed by mass criminalization earn college degrees. Founded in 2000, CCF combines education, civic engagement, and community building to help women and their families thrive. She is also a graduate of CCF’s academic support program. Vivian holds an MFA from Columbia School of the Arts and is a steering committee member of Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Family Movement FICPFM. She is a 2019–2020 PEN America Writing For Justice Fellow.
