"This thing called playwrighting": an interview with Sonia Sanchez on the art of her drama.

Introduction

Critical and popular emphasis on the poetry of Sonia Sanchez, while clearly merited, has often overshadowed her work in drama and her role in the development of an African American female dramatic voice in America. Yet, as this interview illustrates, Sanchez has always acknowledged and continues to recognize the potency of drama. She uses it as a venue for the artistic expression of social protest and the condemnation of injustice, as well as to explore personal anguish and spiritual transcendence. This brief discussion of some of Sanchez's plays introduces the dramatic work discussed in the interview that follows.

To date, Sanchez has created five plays that have been produced and published: The Bronx Is Next (1968); Sister Son/ji (1969); Dirty Hearts (1971); Malcolm Man Don't Live Here No Mo! (1972); and Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us (1974). Sanchez's latest completed play, I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't, was produced once over 20 years ago in 1982, by Jomandi Productions in Atlanta, Georgia, and again in a much abbreviated form as a thesis project by Karen Turner Ward at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1985. The play is currently being prepared for publication. While she still feels the need to write plays, Sanchez has observed that her poetry has taken precedence over her drama for a number of years. Since March 2003, her dramatic writing has included a play concerning mature black women's retrospective looks at the 1960's militant movement, which is as yet unfinished.

Each of the plays she has written, however, has impacted the genre in its own way, particularly in terms of race and feminist politics. Large and loud in its celebration of life, her drama reflects themes also evident in her poetry: anger against racism and bigotry, as expressed in poems like "Malcolm" (I've Been a Woman, 1978) and "Morning Song and Evening Walk" (Shake Loose My Skin, 1999). Sanchez particularly recognizes the complexities of African American women's struggles against sexism, as in "Song No. 2" (Under a Soprano Sky, 1987). She has written plays about black militant revolution, plays that explore the role of ritual and form in African American drama, plays that engage questions about the dual oppression of African American women. As a result, rather than remaining exclusively recognized for her contributions to African American poetry, Sanchez also merits acclaim as an important influence on black drama, a politically courageous, and artistically innovative playwright.

Sanchez's fiery dramatic voice, which both glorified and chastised the black militant movement, first burst forth in the 1960s. During the Black Power Movement, African American drama developed an aesthetic of black consciousness through Black Revolutionary Theater. This theater's main premise, according to its most famous proponent Leroi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, was to exist as "a theater that actually functions to liberate Black people ... that will commit Black people ... instruct them about what they should do ... [and] involve them emotionally" (Coleman 84). These strategies were developed through strong language and volatile situations, ritual structure, and stereotypical or symbolic characters that addressed, and at times encouraged, often-violent confrontation between black and white cultures. (1) Some of the best-known names of this militant period in African American theater were Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Larry Neal, Loften Mitchell, and Ben Caldwell. (2) Few women are even mentioned as militant playwrights of the period, except for Sonia Sanchez. Already known as a feisty, irreverent, gadfly figure of a poet, Sanchez, as she points out in this interview, was actually invited to join in the development of black consciousness theater. She became one of the few consistently visible female playwrights active in the development of black revolutionary dramatic aesthetic, although it is evident that she was not recognized at the level she deserved, primarily because she was a female in a male-dominated movement. Ironically, her insistence on a self-conscious critique of the Black Power Movement raised numerous issues concerning the black militant community, particularly black sexism, issues never seriously addressed by those men who welcomed her participation in the development of black revolutionary literary aesthetics.

Sanchez's first play, The Bronx Is Next, a provoking commentary on interracial racism and intraracial sexism, was commissioned by Ed Bullins for the 1969 edition of New Plays from the Black Theater; it had premiered in The Drama Review in 1968. (3) In this play, Charles, Roland, and Jimmy are three Black Revolutionaries forcing tenants into the streets as part of their organization's protest plan to burn out the horrible tenements of Harlem. The play typifies Sanchez's bold spirit as it illustrates her early capacity to celebrate the Black Power Movement and, at the same time, to critique it. The play's emphasis on the role of black neighborhood organizations and grassroots activists with their openness to violent revolution (even to the point of completely burning down several New York boroughs) shocked many and emboldened the militant community. This young black female playwright's emphasis on the merits and difficulties of black activism in the face of racism in The Bronx Is Next characterized for many African Americans the rallying impact of revolution upon the varied facets of the black community. Yet, at the same time the play presents male characters who dominate scenes by disrespecting both young and old female members of the community. The black male characters, for example, in a frightening decision to avoid a delay in their political program, manipulate a weak old black woman back into a building that they know will be burned. This action and their belligerent treatment of a young black mother demonstrate a callous and dominating paternalism found in many of the militant plays of the Black Arts period. These violent characters reflect the actuality of sexual politics as Sanchez witnessed them in the movement itself. The patriarchal oppression of women within the Black Power Movement is thus central to the play's impact both in the '60s and now.

In addition to The Bronx Is Next, two of Sanchez's other published and produced plays should also be considered as part of the black militant genre, Sister Son/ji (first published in New Plays from the Black Theater, 1969) and Uh, Huh, But How Do It Free Us (first published in The New Lafayette Theatre Presents, 1974). Both plays continue Sanchez's unflinching examination of paradoxical notions of liberation in the Black Power Movement. Sister Son/ji, in part, explores the vital role in the movement of college students whose personal interactions often mimicked confrontational, unhealthy male/female relationships derived from sexist behavior within the larger black (militant) community. The only character in the play, Son/ji describes through a series of dream/memory monologues the pain, frustration, joys, and wisdom she experiences as an African American woman maturing in an environment of black aggression. Descriptions of social and personal divisions among characters in the play emphasize Sanchez's criticisms of black paternalism within the movement.

Uh Huh, But How do It Free Us is by far the boldest of Sanchez's early plays in both language and critical stance. The play hauntingly exposes the deleterious effects of drug use and hedonism upon some movement members. In a series of three groupings that challenge traditional linear plot structures, Sanchez engages three major issues facing the black (militant) community. In Group I, Sanchez looks at polygamy (an influence from Black Muslim thought) through the fraught relationships of a male character and his two wives. Destructive competition occurs between the wives as each attempts to monopolize her--their--husband's admiration and affection, while he in turn makes new love conquests. The characters' actions assert Sanchez's recognition of polygamy as a diversion that supplants rather than enhances black power and encourages the maltreatment of women.

In Group II, Sanchez again looks at the power dynamics within male-female relationships. Four black male characters (Brother Man, First Brother, Second Brother, Third Brother), a White Dude, and a Black Sister and a White Sister confront each other and their own addictions to sexual pleasure and illicit drugs. Although these characters insist that they have dedicated their lives to the Black Power Movement, in reality they demonstrate no redeeming qualities and certainly no productive allegiance to the militant cause.

The characters in Group III are identified as Brother, Sister, and White Woman, and represent the dynamics of romance, politics, and race-crossing that Sanchez implies were other behaviors that obstructed the militant movement. In this instance a black male revolutionary uses his black activist girlfriend to establish a politically correct identity while playing his rich white girlfriend for financial and social support. Brother's arrogance, promiscuity, cruelty, and material selfishness indicate Sanchez's highly critical view of many (militant) black males. And Sister's ready submission to Brother's abuse at the same time reveals Sanchez's anguished awareness of the weaknesses and strengths of African American women of this period as they struggled to salvage personal lives. The playwright thus raises vital questions about the health and rigor of the black militant community while asserting a distinct black female consciousness at a time when women's issues were scarcely being raised in male-dominated (militant) discourse.

Dirty Hearts universalizes issues of oppression. The allegorical characters are presented in a series of conversations and sequences of poetic litanies as a Dirty Hearts card game unfolds. On the one hand, the white male characters First Man, Second Man, and Poet have a presence so well established within the social and political structure (the game) that they need no names to identify their power. Their whiteness creates for them an undeniable selfhood, as do the good hands they deal themselves. On the other hand, political and social identities for the black man Carl and the Hiroshima maiden, Shigeko, are significantly marginal. In this case, disempowered identity in Dirty Hearts is codified ironically by naming a lack. The oppression these characters must face is indicated by Carl's consistent receipt of the Dirty Queen of Hearts. Juxtaposition of the disempowered Carl and Shigeko against unnamed white male figures of domination and the play's indeterminate ending allows Sanchez to interrogate struggles with which her contemporaries contended and the challenges that continue to confront oppressed peoples across American society.

As these brief descriptions of her important published plays suggest, Sanchez emerges as an insightful code-breaker, courageously striking a path in her early drama that has contributed to a literary legacy for today's young, successful African American female playwrights. She has interrogated gender boundaries and opened frontiers in language and structure, while producing themes both divisive and threatening to the dynamics of patriarchal black male militant discourse. She formulated in her early plays ritualistic action and shocking language to shatter the complacency of Eurocentric as well as African American audiences. Sanchez forms a major presence in the development of an African American women's dramatic aesthetic, and her theory and practice concerning African American drama need to be more fully acknowledged and examined.

My telephone conversation with Sanchez took place on April 19, 2001. (4) A small woman in stature, Ms. Sanchez's presence still seemed quite large to me, even over the phone. She spoke with a strong, gracious, and emphatic tenor about her relationship to her writing. As her comments in this interview indicate, Ms. Sanchez's perceptions about drama in particular and writing in general have matured over the past 30 years, and generate insight into the dynamics of racial history, personal growth, and the African American female presence in African American literature and life.

Interview

JW: We can start with your general work ethic. One thing I have found interesting is that there seems to be a hiatus between the plays that you published in the 1960s and '70s and the ones that you are working on now. Is that the case? Did you ever really stop writing plays?

SS: Well, I didn't stop writing plays. It's that you always want to see them published and on stage, and sometimes they're not. So it's not the same kind of emergency, perhaps, as the poetry. I take my time with the plays because I know it might take a minute before they're performed, before they're produced. It's not the same kind of urgency as my poetry. Still, I am working on a play right now, and I feel an urgency to finish it because I promised it to a couple of well-known people, and I want to make sure that they get it and read it.

JW: When you were working on your early plays, did they come to you simultaneously? Or did they derive from one another in terms of theme or idea? How did that work?

SS: One came out of the other. Some came because I was asked, "Are you a playwright?" And I said, "Yes, I am," although at that time, I had not written a play. Well, I had written a children's play, actually, called A Trip to a Backwoods Farm. It was not an adult play. So of course, you know, I said, "Yeah, I write plays." I'm a poet; why not say that? And I was asked then to give a play. So, I had a play available for the anthology Black Fire. (5) I did send it to Larry Neal and Baraka, but it got misplaced. That play was The Bronx is Next. When I went to San Francisco State to help establish the first Black Studies Program, I was asked, by Ed Bullins, "Do you have a play?" (6) He was doing an anthology called New Plays for the Black Theatre. And I said, "Oh sure, I have a new play." He had put The Bronx is Next in the Tulane Drama Review, the TDR, and so I told him, "Oh yeah. I'm just finishing one." Well, I sat right down that night and wrote Sister Son/ji, actually. It was an all-nighter ... and my children cooperated. They were these little babies who slept through the night, and I was so pleased that they did.

JW: You wrote Sister Son/ji in one night?!

SS: Yes, I mean, it was all night. Because, you know with the babies you don't get a lot of time. And they were sleeping straight through; so luckily enough they decided to do that ... they helped me out a great deal.

JW: You said that some plays came out of the others, so the next play would have been ...?

SS: The next play would have been one that I did in Pittsburgh. That was called Malcolm Man Don't Live Here No Mo [a children's play], and also the play Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us? That play came next because some of the young men were almost equating their life styles with the whole idea of changing the world. Or freedom. And so you saw things like, people would get up and announce that they were getting with polygamy. So I asked, "Uh huh, but how does that free us?" How does that lifestyle free us? I can't see any connection here at all. I meant that to be a very mean play, and it is a mean play because of the theme of drugs and the relationships. Some of the men were having two relationships, you know, one with a black woman--one with a white woman, and doing a disservice to both women by causing antagonisms between the women. This reminded me a great deal, my sister, of what happened during our enslavement when the men came down to the cabins. The white male would go and navigate between the black woman in the slave quarters and his wife in the big house. And during the militant period, you had the reversal--black men, not all, but some black men, moving back and forth between a well-to-do white woman and a black woman. Isn't that interesting? And what you see each time is that the men were reaping all the fruits here. The women were antagonistic towards each other, and it was all about a man. So after all that was happening, I thought about it. I said I really have to do a play that talks about how this happened, that the men really reaped great personal harvests. And it wasn't about liberation.

JW: With the idea of relationships in mind, Sister Son/ji also deals with the role of women and the struggle of black women. There seems to be a consistent concern in your plays about the issues of black women in the community.

SS: Well, during that period you saw some really destructive things as far as black women were concerned. In the midst of all of this great flourish and expanse of self-determination, there was still the problem of, I'll put that in quotes, the "problem" of women, you know. Who's taking care of these women? How are these women going to survive with these children? What are these women doing as far as these so-called love relationships are concerned? I mean, how are these women really going to survive? In the midst of all this stuff that's happening, all this talk that's going on about what a new time this was, my play is talking about ... what seems like the same old times as it relates to black women. The same kinds of problems that surfaced with our mothers and fathers were surfacing here even though people had new language, a new way of looking. A new ideology, right? You had the same core; at the base was the same problem.

JW: Do you think that yours should still be labeled as a black militant voice? Some still seem to talk about you that way.

SS: No. That's because they don't continue to read. When they read about you, what's been published about you in the past, that's how people label us. That's how they try to cripple us, that's what frightened people off. Then people wouldn't read you, wouldn't deal with you, and then people wouldn't get the message you were bringing. A clever way of doing it.

JW: And since growth is such an important part of being an effective artist....

SS: Oh yes, I think that the reason why art stays alive is that the artist grows. I mean the body doesn't stay the same; the brain doesn't stay the same. Your art can't stay the same. This is 2001; I can't be writing what I wrote in 1969. I don't look the same; my ideas aren't the same either.

JW: You're from Birmingham, Alabama. Do you consider yourself to be a voice of the South?

SS: Oh, I think so. I'm a voice from the South and from urban cities. I think it's a combination. Since I have come out of the South, I have memories that inform my work a great deal: memories of my grandmother, memories that form me as a human being. So all of those memories I use as I write. (7)

JW: This brings to mind your trilogy, the trilogy with The Bronx is Next as the first part. You've talked about these plays as a reversal of the black migration to the North. There would be a shift from the urban setting back to the South. Could you talk a little now about what the issues might be? Do you see these two settings as conflicting with each other?

SS: I think what happens, you know--and I don't want to talk about it too much because I am still working on it--but just in general, you would now have what I call urban people who might have wrenched a lot of the South out of their loins trying to resettle on northern ground, with the difficulties that happened when southern people tried to settle on northern ground. How difficult it was dealing with all that concrete. If you live in concrete a long time, there are possible difficulties with people who are urban, people who are accustomed to speaking their minds, saying what they want to say, doing what they want to do, going back to a South that is moving towards a certain way of looking at itself and its inhabitants. But I would say still--watching what recently was going on in Mississippi with the Confederate flag, in Atlanta and the problem there with its flag, and in South Carolina--there are still vestiges of that. And I think that black people who have lived in the North for a long time might have to watch what it is that they're doing.

JW: So, place is essential to your work, then?

SS: Yes. But I'll talk about it later when I'm finished.

JW: Okay. You have so many poetry anthologies that are accessible. Did you find it difficult to publish and produce your plays? Your early drama?

SS: Oh, yes. Because the early drama--oh, that's interesting now--the early drama actually got produced a lot, in New York City, in the Village, at Joe Papp's, you know. They did a production, Gloria Foster's Sister Son/ji at his theater, which was very well done. Novella Nelson directed Gloria Foster, so it was very well done. Papp did four one-act plays; mine was one of them. There were a lot of theater houses in the Village. The Bronx is Next and Sister Son/ji got done in those places. And also in the universities. Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us was done in places like Michigan, California, at the universities. A lot of that very strong activity towards the black theater was taking place. I would show up at a place, up in Buffalo, maybe, and someone would be doing Sister Son/ji. It just was very beautiful. I have gotten letters from people who say, "I got a scholarship to a university because I performed a section of your play Sister Son/ji, and they knew that I could act because it was a very hard play to act." And I felt very good about it.

JW: I know that one play, I'm Black When I'm Singin', I'm Blue When I Ain't, was produced relatively recently in Atlanta.

SS: Jomandi Productions. Also, before then, it was produced at the University of Virginia as a thesis. One of the students [Karen Turner Ward] called me, and in getting her MA had to direct a play, and she asked me if I had a new play. I sent it to her, and she directed it and starred in it. And it was a magnificent performance. But that's a very creative play.

JW: You mentioned influence of early black women playwrights of the Harlem Renaissance on your work. I wondered who particularly affected you?

SS: I didn't realize that they had written because you don't see them in those major anthologies. I had to stumble upon black women playwrights like Angelina Weld Grimke. You may see them only as poets, and, usually, as poets only in a plaintive, romantic kind of voice. And I came across some of these plays about lynching, about miscegenation, about abortion--in the sense of deciding not to have children [as in Grimke's Rachel]--because you don't want your child to be raised in a racist country. (8) And I was stricken, and I kept saying what I'm doing is not outside the milieu of black literature. It's within that same tradition that's gone on before me. And that's what was so wonderful to understand, that actually you're part of a tradition. But no one ever published them, so you think that you are coming maybe with something new.

JW: And they were concerned with women's issues, too. So you see later writers like you as actually continuing to carry the torch?

SS: Oh yes.

JW: You seem really open to experimentation particularly in terms of form in your plays. Can you talk about how this developed?

SS: Well, I think what happened is that I just began to look at this thing called playwriting, and because I thought if I'm going to bring something that is different--I mean that's different from just what we were seeing at that time in the American theater--that I should experiment with not only the language, but experiment with the form. When I did Sister Son/ji, I had nothing to go on. I just decided, when I thought it out and wrote out what I wanted to do; I kept saying I don't want a lot of scenery or props on that stage. I wanted it bare because this is a bare woman talking about her life. And she's been stripped down only to the necessities. You know? Should I bring a curtain down for her changes? And I said no, let that all happen on stage. Let her go from the old woman to a young woman in college via a rack with the clothes and the wigs and so on: the natural wig and something to wrap around her, bracelets and a long chain, big earrings that would show that she's now young. And there she is within that time, the use of music and the use of [costume]. Then the audience participates in her birth, going back in time. And without hesitation. That's why it's a hard play because the actress never has a chance to take a breath off-stage.

JW: Speaking of your experimentation with form, can you talk about the role that ritual plays in black drama?

SS: We saw that happening a lot with Ed Bullins and with Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theater in New York. I used to go and see so many actors and actresses on the stage and the whole idea of bringing the community and the audience into our ideas in a very formal way of looking at the world and the earth and problems and issues and people. And so it's within this ritual of life, this ritual of living, or the ritual of interrupted living.

JW: But when you use the term ritual, how do you define it? What does it really describe in black drama to you?

SS: Barbara Ann Teer does a long article on this. And I think some of these ideas are also expressed in Kuntu Drama and The Drama of Nommo.

JW: By Paul Carter Harrison?

SS: Right. Teer was one of the first people I saw who began to deal with ritual and how the National Black Theater saw it. Then we as playwrights chose either to use it or not use it. (9)

JW: So you as a playwright pulled from this communal version of ritual what you found valuable to your own drama?

SS: Yes.

JW: Are there any contemporary playwrights who catch your attention?

SS: Well, of course, August Wilson. He is indeed doing a lot, most especially for males right now in drama. Bringing that cycle, bringing men out of the First World War up through the twentieth century. And we're seeing them progress. We're seeing what it meant to come from the South and to form relationships in places like Pittsburgh, and the interaction between men and women. The plays are very much male-oriented, very much looking at the way black males have survived some of these urban cities, how they have come through. And it certainly needs to be said. It's done very well. And I'm glad that it's being said.

JW: In addition to issues specifically relevant to women or men, what would you say are the most important issues that need to be addressed in black drama? Or black literature in general?

SS: I don't think there is a way to see only one issue. As black dramatists, we need to deal with all the issues that face us, all the way from AIDS--as I did with Does Your House Have Lions? to male-female relationships, to environmental issues. (10) Even the idea of how we are going to stay alive on this earth. I think there are many issues that are facing us. To get specific, there's a young woman in our workshop who is doing a play on Broadway with Ruby Dee, and one of the issues is abortion. She shows how one of the old women in the community did abortions in the past, before women started going to hospitals for them. That has always been a part of the culture of women. Whether you were black or white, Latina, or Asian, or Native American, women have always known how to do that because there have been times in their lives when they could not deal with another child, or they were ill and they had to. I mean, those issues have always been issues.... We really need to have a play, a very well written play on something like this, you know. Not something that coldly takes just one side, saying, "I'm just for the family," you see? I mean every woman I know who ever had an abortion was not antifamily, was not anti-child, was not anti-husband, was not anti-baby. What they were at the time that it happened, they were trying to save themselves. It wasn't just some casual, "Let me just go and abort this child, this fetus." And they never forget it. It's something they'll always remember that they had to do at a time in their lives, that their lives were so convoluted, that their lives were just so ... they were so sick. But they always remember the child that they almost had. And I think that when we put it in the hands of people who have an ulterior motive, or program, we never see the humanity of the woman, the husband, the doctor. We only see people so easily spouting slogans. So it's not the time ... we're past the whole idea of spouting slogans. We need to look very carefully at the issues that surround women at the time when they have to decide, "I can't do this. I can't have another child, or I'll go crazy." And so it's not by chance that in my childhood I heard the whisperings when some woman died. The whispers had something to do with something she had done; she had gone someplace and gotten sick, trying to do this. If abortions had been safe, there would not have been the whispering. So we lost women, who had to go places that were dirty, dirty.

JW: Yes, They That Sit in Darkness addresses this issue of too many children as early as the Harlem Renaissance period. (11)

SS: Oh yes, it's a beautiful play.

JW: Speaking of beautiful plays, your Dirty Hearts has ritualistic language that is particularly fascinating, almost lyrical. Can you talk about it a little?

SS: I love Dirty Hearts. It's a play that looks at how men and women deal with each other in the midst of destructive attitudes towards them. The character Shigeko is a Hiroshima maiden.... I had met a Hiroshima "maiden." (12) A number of them had come to America, and some people brought them to my house. I had a little reception for them, and one wore a heavy veil, to veil the scars. Some of them didn't. I wrote something about her afterwards. Of course, there's the character Carl, who wanted to be included always with whites because he saw himself always in relation to whites. That part is about him thinking, "I'm here, I've arrived," and then he gets slapped down again.

JW: The white characters have no names.

SS: Yes, the Poet and the Man. I did that because there were so many of them, and so few of the Carls and Shigekos that they stand out when they come in the midst of so many. When their name is called--when they are either rescued or wiped out--they need to be remembered. The Poet and the Business Man, we know them; they have substance already, identity already. They're not concerned about their names per se because they know who they are. They exist; they're part of the society; they have order. Carl and Shigeko, however, have only been identified through tragedy--through slavery or through a bomb. So they need a name to hold onto, to, in a sense, help them see themselves as identified. And they also need a name, too, so that when they are wiped out or thrown out or kicked out or paternalized, they will be noted.

JW: Yes, this idea of being noted or remembered prompts me to ask you more about I'm Black When I'm Singing.

SS: The play opens in an insane asylum. The chorus consists of the attendants in the hospital. And there's a woman sitting on a toilet. She is very obviously, you know, on the toilet ... on a sparse stage. You see the attendants on the side, the three of them, dressed in white. She looks at the audience and says some thing to the effect of, "Yeah that's right, I'm who you think I am." She's a famous singer. And she finishes and gets up and collects the feces and begins to eat it. And the audience gasps, of course. And they realize they are brought into her insanity. Or is it really an insanity? Has she just decided to take leave from the world for a while? The doctor comes in, and the chorus becomes a refrain talking about what is going to happen next or what has happened, depending upon how dramatic it is, and it's all in poetry. She's not a friendly patient, and the doctor says, "I just want to know.... " She's a multiple personality; there are three people "in" her. And that's how we get the different blues singers. And she says something like, "Yeah, yeah, you want to know about ... " say, Bessie. "She's okay. She thinks she can sing. But she'll get her come-uppance. They're gonna find her on a road someplace, and they're not gonna take her to that hospital, and she'll die." And then "Miss Bessie" comes out, let's say, and I had to write lyrics for the first time. And people composed the music for them.

JW: And did you find that writing lyrics and creating multiple personalities was a different kind of challenge?

SS: Oh, it was. Oh, that's massive right there. I mean just the whole idea of assuming a Bessie Smith type persona. ... The person speaking is maybe a Nina Simone type, a strong woman and, sometimes, off kilter for a minute. And there's a Bessie type and a Billie Holiday type. And there's the one who is going to replace Nina, a Diane Reeves kind of persona or Abbey Lincoln type, who is much more settled. And so the battle is set. The doctor comes back and forth, and she releases these characters. The one that she doesn't ever want to release is this Diane Reeves type, the type that she knows will consume her. It's a very involved, hard play with a lot of characters. They did a fine production in Jomandi. And the woman in Virginia [Karen Turner Ward], the chairperson at Hampton, and the Hampton Players. They have a history. They mounted a big production when she got there because she had done it for her Master's Thesis. (13) They ran it for Black History Month, and I went down for the opening. And I'm telling you it was an amazing production. She wrote me that they ran it for one month on the campus, and every night it was packed.

JW: In closing, I wanted to talk a little about The Bronx is Next. It's clearly a black militant play, coming out of that period. How much of it is yours, and how much of it was the Movement's?

SS: I think it's a play like back in the 1920s or '30s, rather, when they were coming out with plays that were considered militant and left. And it's on the level of the Harlem Renaissance, where you're doing plays that speak to issues that need to be spoken to. That whole idea of recapturing the spirit of black people who were broken down by urban experiences. Rescuing them ... but I also wanted to show the contradictions. On the one hand, you have these men--on purpose you see only the men doing the work--that was on purpose, okay? People don't understand that. They just think, "Well, why didn't you include some women?" Well, yeah, the women were the people in the community But the reason why the men could take that old woman back inside the house and give her something to sleep and then burn her is that the men were the ones involved. The men took that woman back inside and left her there. That was a very male way of dealing with that old woman. I don't think women--I know--most women would not have dealt with her that way. And that's what I'm saying. I had only males in charge of that neighborhood, only males in charge of staying in there for a year, organizing the blocks, you know, each one in a block And then at the given time, when they got the order to burn down Harlem, they had organized people in such a way that they were then going to be literally trekking on home. I mean they were not going to be in cars; and that walk South is the beginning of the second play of the trilogy. You have the trucks; you have all of the things that they would need. But the point is what has happened to these people. There's a long walk home similar to the Native Americans' trek. Except they will not be lost along the way. They will make this trek during the summer, with protection, with food, places set up along the way where they can sleep. But it will be a trek back south.

JW: But what fascinates me is that The Bronx is Next is clearly a militant play. It's your first play published, right? In 19687 And yet, at the same time that you are supporting the militant platform, you had the courage in the '60s, in this play, to criticize the movement from within.

SS: Yes, that's the difference. I think that's how you grow. I mean, you have got to be able to look critically at what is going on, what went on as you lived it. As we lived some of this, I saw exactly what was wrong. And it's incumbent upon you as a human being to talk about that, to express it, to write about it. You know, to start a dialogue about it.

JW: But there were male authors then who were writing militant plays but did not address divisive issues within the movement.

SS: Well, you know, because I think that people just thought it was not necessary. But the point is that it was necessary to do it. You won't grow if you don't.

JW: But even beyond those who felt that self-evaluation was "not necessary," weren't they [male militants, in particular] actually against anything they saw as internal division, for example, the women's movement?

SS: But you see, women began to talk about everything: the sexism, the problems with children. There was no help at home quite often. Men were too busy with the movement. Women who were doing work for the movement also had to figure out a way to get these things done, too. There were a lot of issues that women began to raise. Certainly, sexism was a big one. But also the idea, sometimes, of men leaving the women, women who were highly political, just as bright as the men. But sometimes the men would leave them for a younger woman, a woman who didn't know anything, so they were going to have to teach that new woman, instead of keeping the wives that they had who also understood what was going on in the country and the world. What I'm saying is that many women began to leave behind the issues of the movement and began to include everything--life--children, love, desertion.

JW: In Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us? these same questions about male-female relationships are raised. I find this play so interesting. It deals with these themes through ritual.

SS: That's why I have the dancers. They observe everything. And comment on it. As a kind of mouthpiece for the people in the audience.

JW: There's a real openness about sexual perversion, about drugs, and sexuality in Uh Huh, But How Do It Free Us? I'm referring to the middle piece with its emphasis on Horse [heroin] and prostitutes.

SS: Well, that was about ... some of what happened then. Be you black, white, green, purple, or blue, when you're involved in that drug culture, the women that you might have in there with you are not going to be housewives. We had people who were thinking that they were still part of the movement, yet they were involved with something that was even anti-woman. In the midst of all of this, you've got these men, you know, and they really looked down on these women. The section where the white male is walking with the black woman, he felt free enough to crush her right in the midst of the black men. But all the men, white and black, were together on how they treated this black woman, on how they treat women. That was important to say. Of course, you get a little flack for saying it.

JW: Yes, what about the response you got at the time that Uh Huh was produced in the early '70s?

SS: You got some silences. But the point is, you had to say it. And I wanted those plays to be looked at by younger women, for them to understand what was going on because there was silence about the personal relationships, sometimes.

JW: Didn't you work toward a certain dignity in the whore characters in this play?

SS: Definitely. Oh, I certainly hope that came through. The same with the Black Bitch character in The Bronx is Next. She says something like, "Look I'm just trying to take care of my kids, here. This white guy comes in here once a week, and I'm not the first person who's done this, right? Or the last." I've had white women tell me, "That could be me or my mother if circumstances were different." The point is that she was saying, "I am who I am. Do you know who you are? The way you treat me? Who are you? In the long run, after you do all this liberation stuff, you're still gonna treat me one kind of way. And it's not gonna be well."

Afterword 

Sanchez leaves us in a strikingly honest place. As demonstrated in this interview, she redefines what it meant and means to be militant. For Sanchez, militancy reached beyond the "hate whitey" mentality of black revolution; she insisted that militancy also include a rejection of misogyny, of oppression against the old and the weak--all limiting attitudes inscribed in the black militant male's search for ascendancy within a racist, patriarchal white world. Her plays express her passion to emphasize not only the African American family and personal relationships, but, above all, the larger question of survival for a community that must summarily depend on sexual and social equality from within as well as upon an effort toward American racial justice. This emphasis has been the searing theme of all of her writing-poetry, prose poems, fiction, and drama--to delve into both the personal and the political without hesitation, without reticence. In a preface to her essay "Ruminations/Reflections," Sanchez insists: "I see myself helping to bring forth truth about the world.... The more I learn, the clearer my view of the world becomes. To gain that clarity ... I had to wash my ego in the needs/aspirations of my people" (Evans 415).

Thus, as we trace her work in drama, we can see in Sanchez's writing of "truth" an endeavor boldly different from her male contemporaries'. She demonstrates a goal very much the same in writing plays as in creating poetry or prose: "to tell the truth about the Black condition as I see it ... to offer a Black woman's view of the world. How I tell the truth is part of the truth itself" (Evans 415). This "Black woman's view" allowed her to name issues in the community unnoticed by her male counterparts during the militant period. She illustrates in her comments in this interview, for example, an awareness of the shifting needs of the black urban masses. Her vision of urban African Americans fleeing the North and returning to their southern roots anticipates a current resurgent African American interest in the presence and values of the black South. She thus anticipates the confounding challenges of African Americans maneuvering within the contradictions of New South images and the reality of immanent southern racism. (14)

"Truth" for Sanchez is perhaps best identified, however, through the character Son/ji in Sister Son/ji, as an answer to the disempowerment of African American women in the 1960s and '70s and beyond. With this character, the playwright insists on a feminist trajectory toward visibility of the African American woman--her rights, her value, and her influence on the development of African American political, cultural, and social awareness and on a broader American culture. Much of Sanchez's dramatic work has boldly illustrated the kind of horror and female degradation that is so evident in Uh Huh; But How Do It Free Us? and, at the same time, it has illustrated the beautiful strength and ultimate wisdom of the endearing title character.

As she declares in this interview, Sanchez's purpose is that the African American community may learn from the past and turn to new ways of healthy self-criticism as it faces a persistently racist environment. For her, a productive response to oppression recognizes that "we must at some point understand our history and herstory and our ancestors. We must open our eyes to the ancestors to help us live and stay alive" (Asim 27). Certainly this comment and those Sanchez provides in this interview can be applied to Sanchez's own role as a valued ancestor in African American literature, particularly in the African American dramatic tradition, through her poetry and plays, old and new.

Works Cited

Asim, Jabari. "A Revival with Sonia Sanchez." American Visions Feb/Mar (1988): 27-28.

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-reading Booker 7: Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Bullins, Ed, ed. New Plays from the Black Theater. New York: Bantam, 1969.

Burrill, Mary P. They That Sit in Darkness. 1919. Hatch and Shine 182-87.

Coleman, Mike. "What is Black Theater?" Conversations with Amiri Baraka. Ed. Charlie Reilly. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.84-88.

Gabbin, Joanne. "The Southern Imagination of Sonia Sanchez." Southern Women Writers: The New Generation. Ed. Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1990. 180-203.

Grimke, Angelina Weld. Rachel. 1916. Hatch and Shine 133-68.

Hatch, James V., and Ted Shine, eds. Black Theatre U.S.A: Plays By African Americans, The Early Period 1847-1938. New York: Free P, 1974.

Hay, Samuel L. African American Theatre: An Historical and Critical Analysis. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Herron, Carolivia, ed. Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimke. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. 123-209.

Hill, Errol, ed. The Theatre of Black Americans. New York: Applause Theatre Book P, 1987.

Jones, Leroi, and Larry Neal, eds. Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. New York: Morrow, 1968.

Kaufman, Michael W. "The Delicate World of Reprobation: A Note on the Black Revolutionary Theatre." Hill 192-209.

Meier, August, Elliott Rudwick, and Francis L. Borderick, eds. Black Protest Thought in The Twentieth Century. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan P, 1971.

Sanchez, Sonia. The Bronx is Next. 1968. Cavalcade: Negro American Writing from 1760-to the Present. Eds. Arthur P. Davis and J. Saunders Redding. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. 811-19.

--. "Malcolm Man Don't Live Here No Mo!" Black Theatre 6 (1972): 24-27.

--. Dirty Hearts. Break Out!: In Search of New Theatrical Environments. Ed. James Shevilol. Chicago: Swallow P, 1973.

--. Uh Huh; But How Do It Free Us? The New Lafayette Theatre Presents. Ed. Ed Bullins. Garden City, NY: Anchor P, 1974. 161-215.

--. "Ruminations/Reflections." Black Women Writers 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Marl Evans. New York: Doubleday, 1984.415-18.

--. Sister Son/ji. Wines in the Wilderness. Ed. Elizabeth Brown-Guillory. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990. 151-62.

Steele, Shelby. "Notes on Ritual in the New Black Theatre." Hill 30-44.

Thomas, Lundeana Marie. Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theatre: Transformational Forces in Harlem. New York: Garland P, 1997.

Vance-Watkins, Lequita, and Aratani Mariko, eds. White Flash-Black Rain: Women of Japan Relive the Bomb. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 1995.

Ward, Karen Turner. "Creating Four Distinct Characters by Using Historical Models in a Production of Sonia Sanchez' [sic] I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't." Master's Thesis. Virginia Commonwealth U, 1985.

Williams, Mance. Black Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s: A Historical-Critical Analysis of the Movement. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985.

Notes

(1.) For an analysis of elements of Black Revolutionary Theatre, see Williams; see also Steele.

(2.) An informative discussion of prominent figures in Revolutionary Black Theater can be found in Kaufman and in Hay.

(3.) The Bronx is Next was first published in Drama Review 12 (1968): 78-84.

(4.) This extensive interview followed a brief introductory, personal interview with Ms. Sanchez on November 11, 2000, in Birmingham, Alabama. Since this conversation, Sanchez has continued to write and publish poetry. She recently reiterated (in a phone conversation in November 2004) her continued interest in drama and her current dramatic project. She does express as a deterrent to dramatic writing her ongoing awareness of the limited possibilities for getting her plays produced in contrast to the facility of getting her poetry to the reading public. However, her persistent interest in performance as a major element of her work is quite evident in her recent artistic accomplishment, Full Moon of Sonia, a CD of her own renderings of her poetry through spoken word in collaboration with talented performers in African American musical forms. See Sonia Sanchez, Full Moon of Sonia, Compact Disc (Via International Artists, Inc., 2004).

(5.) Black Fire was one of the first anthologies to attempt to create a Black Arts aesthetic in drama as well as in other literary forms.

(6.) In the late 1960s, San Francisco State College (now University) publicly exposed demands by black students across the nation for black studies programs as a way of developing a black consciousness and a separatist presence on American college campuses. Sanchez, who was actively involved in this movement, refers here to the black studies program that resulted from protests by the Black Students Union and the Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State. See Meier, Rudwick, and Borderick, eds., 528-35.

(7.) See Gabbin on Sanchez's southern heritage.

(8.) Angelina Weld Grimke's ground breaking feminist play Rachel is the first extant full-length play by an African American woman. Cornhill Company first published it in 1920. See Hatch and Herron.

(9.) Teer's concept of ritual conjoins traditions of the Black Pentecostal church with the ceremonial practices of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. According to Teer, her theatre recognizes and embraces Yoruban "elements of ritual--preaching rhythms, dance, music, chants" (qtd. in Thomas 60). Her goal is to achieve "communion, or the absorption of the self into a larger community through the suppression of reason and the stimulation of deeper centers of awareness and attention" (Thomas 62).

(10.) One of Sanchez's later anthologies of poetry (1997), this collection of poems is concerned with the effects of AIDS on black individuals, family, and community.

(11.) By Mary P. Burrill in Birth Control Review, September 1919. Rpt. in Hatch and Shine.

(12.) Sanchez refers to the influx of a number of physically maimed women who came to the U.S. after the bombing of Hiroshima. For related information on the effects of the bombing on women, see Vance-Watkins and Mariko.

(13.) See Ward.

(14.) For one discussion of "returning" to the South, see Baker's argument that "re-vision and revisitation" of the South form an approach that "facilitates our engagement with inescapable revisionary scholarly labors" while "privileging a southern frame of black being"(15, 89, 25). As Sanchez indicates in this interview, as early as 1968 and The Bronx is Next, she anticipated a renewed interest in the impact of the South on black lives, from both Northerners and returning Southerners.

Jacqueline Wood teaches African American literature at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has published articles on African American women dramatists and has recently edited a collection of the plays of Sonia Sanchez.