My Love Letter To Sonia Sanchez, Who Gives Us Permission To Be Unabashed In Our Love For Ourselves 

Dear Ms. Sonia Sanchez,

By the time I sat in a crowded room in Philadelphia and heard you recite one of your majestic poems, your magic had already pulled me in. 

Your poetry taught me early that poems are strong enough to hold our humanity, our fears, and our hope, carried in a cadence flexible enough that we can break it and then rebuild it. It’s a rhythm I’d reach for when I started writing poetry.

As a teenager tumbling through the foster care system in California, I had embraced poetry as my favorite form of written expression. Dr. Thema Bryant once said that one of the great powers of poetry is that it enables you to write in code and share as much or as little as you want and still give voice to the unspeakable. She nailed why I chose poetry over any other form of writing. 

Writing poetry let me start stepping into my own voice while I was still too young to understand or tell my whole story. I didn’t have the language yet for what I had lived through, only my observations and the sense that there was power in landing those feelings on a page. 

One of my poems from that time, “Eyes Like Mine,” came out of interacting with other foster kids and recognizing something in their eyes that matched what I felt in mine, long before any of us had the maturity or words to capture the horrors we’d survived.

My years in Philly as a student at Penn overlapped with the end of your run in the late 90s as a professor at Temple University. I was across town, studying Afro-American studies, bolstering my understanding of who we are as a people. Deeply entrenched in learning about our history, language, and culture, I was aiming myself professionally towards a career in journalism. 

Once again, your work and your example figured prominently in my ongoing education and also in my approach to writing. The fearlessness of your words and your dedication to paying tribute to Harriet Tubman show up in how you reimagined her as a force moving through the world, pulling her out of the past and painting her as the magical heroine she was.  

Picture a woman riding thunder on the legs of slavery….. Picture her kissing our spines saying no to the yes of slavery… picture her rotating the earth into a shape of lives becoming…..

Students who sat in your classrooms carry you with them into rooms you have never entered. I’m proud to say you provided a second classroom to me. Your words and a core part of your ethos have traveled with me into the many rooms I have entered, and have been instructive in helping me determine which ones were worth fighting to stay in. 

We can be anything we want… for we are the young ones… walken without footprints… woven our bodies in tune to songs.. Hi echoen us. The beautiful black ones…. 

 WE WILL BE ALL that we want.. For we are the young ones… bringen the world to a Black Beginnen…. 

Your contributions in shaping the Black Arts Movement will continue to resonate for generations to come. It is because of your dedication to insisting that Black studies be incorporated into the curricula of colleges and universities that I was able to choose Afro-American Studies as my major. 

You have taught me that for true creatives, activism and art naturally go hand in hand. They are forms of resistance and ways for us to process our world, advocate for a better one, and do so without abandoning hope, all while taking time to remind ourselves of our blessed humanity. 

Part of our culture is our audacity to love with all our hearts. Another part is found in our struggle, be that the ongoing struggle for justice and equality, or the ways racism and lack of opportunity settle into how we show up and how we view our slice of the world. 

I see you blackboy… bent toward destruction watching… for death with tight eyes…

Somewhere along the way, as I pivoted into the “if it bleeds, it leads” style of breaking news journalism, I fell out of love with poetry. As a young journalist, I was convinced that breaking news demanded a language built on speaking truth to power through precision instead of metaphor, on writing, explaining, and reporting with a level of specificity that demanded the opposite of the expansiveness and fluidity and other elements that defined what made a great poem a great poem. 

Of all things, it was Def Poetry Jam on Broadway that brought me back to poetry, and then later, your work. I easily saw Def Poetry Jam on Broadway at least a half dozen times. Each time, finding myself falling in love with poetry and once again enlightened by the performance of it. 

I understood over time that my favorite journalists, the ones I was fashioning my writing around, all were brilliant writers who understood how evocative language and the right turn of phrase could be. 

After all, it’s our job as journalists, or should be, to report on the best and worst of humanity in ways that tell the story plainly enough that the truth, even when filled with unimaginable atrocities, does the heavy lifting of compelling on its own. 

That revelation and sobering understanding sent me back to the language I’d left behind so beautifully executed in your work. I found a place for that language and approach in my reporting, using it to put people’s humanity in front of their circumstances, and to build empathy, spark action, and stir curiosity about how much of ourselves lives in each other. 

So when I sat down to write this, it made all the sense in the world that a love letter was the right form. You spent decades writing love letters to us in your poems and in your performances of them, and so now it feels only right to write one back to you. This is a love note, plain and long overdue. 

Every generation of Black writers and poets who have sprouted after you has inherited something from you: your words and your devotion. You’ve given all of us permission to write in our own cadence, to be unabashed in our love for language, ourselves and one another, faults and all. You’ve given us permission to bend language and allow words to float, pause, and be-bop on the page.
It is with pride that I carry that inheritance into my own work and life every time I sit down to write about us, for us, in my own unique way, surfacing harsh truths without asking for permission but always leaving room for hope, love, and a brighter future. 

We gon be some beautiful/black/women… gon move like the queens we be…. We gon be some badddDDD people… just you wait and see…. 

With love and gratitude,

Nicky

SEE ALSO:

Revolutionary Poet Sonia Sanchez To Be Honored

Black Woman Poets Who Changed The World