Sonia Sanchez: Blog 11

My blog is about Sonia Sanchez and some of her works. Sonia was born in Birmingham, Alabama. She attended Hunter College. At the beginning she was an integrationist poet, until she heard a speech from Malcolm X and her views became more geared towards vernacular poetry. In the late sixties she helped forward the movement for black studies at San Francisco State College. In 1972 she formally entered into the nation of Islam. Her book homegirls & handgrenades won the American Book Award in 1985. In her poem Homecoming I think she is talking about the difference of how things are when she was there before and how they are now that she has come home. She talks about the Niggers are killing themselves with drugs and how the females looked like they lost all aspirations for their dreams. Then she finishes by saying “ain’t like they say in the newspapers”. With that statement I’m guessing that the newspapers are saying that everything is well, it’s not reporting the bad things going on. In her poem “for our lady” she is addressing Billie Holiday, a jazz vocalist frequently referred to as Lady Day. She is talking about how much better Billie Holiday’s music could have been. For the first half she talks about if someone would have loved Billie from her younger days that her music would have been that much better. The second half she talks about is a man would have been in her life and treated her right; her music would have been that much better. I think Sanchez made this because she feels like maybe Billie Holiday was dealt a rough life. And she feels like with different situations that Billie Holiday could have been that much better of a Musician.