Educational Media Reviews Online

“Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest. When she writes, she roars. And, when she sleeps, other creatures walk gingerly.” – Maya Angelou

Filmmakers Attie, Goldwater, and Schmidt Gordon have presented here an outstanding feature length documentary about Sonia Sanchez, a 20th and 21st century prolific activist, spoken word artist, mother, teacher, and womanist. Born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama, she is a kaleidoscope of beauty, offering angles and facets of raw history from the past and present to reach out to today’s youth. This diminutive woman is truly a giant in an ocean of reaffirmation of the black woman’s voice, the eternal struggle for civil and human rights, and above all, peace.

Growing up in Jim Crow Alabama during the 1930s-40s, Sanchez’s exposure to black artists, creators, and writers is severely limited. She soon migrates to New York to attend Hunter College where she soon discovers the Schomburg Center [for Research in Black Culture]. The Center exposes her to the knowledge and works by, for, and about Black people. She thirstily embraces that knowledge which reaffirms positive blackness, and a continuity within the African and African American culture and history. It is also during this exploratory phase of enlightenment that she reads Zora Neale Hurston, thus empowering Sanchez to write poems in both the English black vernacular and Yoruba languages.

The film opens with Sanchez reading her poem, “Middle Passage." It is the perfect introduction to help the viewer understand her philosophy, and how she evolves to live, love, and teach within that historical context. “Middle Passage” documents the rape and thieving of Africans, land, history, culture, language. Yet, in all that darkness, Sanchez emerges with the metaphorical phoenix, “I Am.” This viewer almost wants to shout Maya Angelou’s “I Rise!” I digress. Sanchez’s “I Am” becomes a revolutionary statement defying, resisting, and revolting against extinction and erasure of the memory of the black race, while re-imagining a positive African/Black culture and identity under a system of white supremacy and oppression.

The film demonstrates that the opening poem, along with Sanchez's continual expansive body of work, maintains a connection with one’s collective ancestry, personal experiences, and hope for the future. The collective “I Am” passionately expresses itself in Sanchez’s spoken word, use of music in performance, dance, art, and filmmaking. This is the footprint of the African and African American "I Am," and this “I Am” is love.

Throughout the film, real life-events serve as the outline and summary of the film. It makes connections between the atrocities of rape and robbery -- stolen from Africa, history, language, voice -- to the loss of Sanchez’s mother and grandmother (both of whom die when Sanchez is very young), the loss of a her brother (who suffers from abandonment issues, and dies from AIDS), to the loss of her sister’s stolen/raped virginity at a young age (by an “uncle” to the family). There appears to be this circuitous sheaf of violence and loss which permeates African history in the Americas. However, in spite of the whip, the lash, the systematic subjugation and oppression, she encourages the dispossessed and underrepresented to always protest, challenge, and speak out against injustices across the globe.

Subsequently, Sanchez uses the “I Am” in her poetry and teaching to “scrape the veneer that was on America, on Harlem, to revel the truth permeating America during the Civil Rights Movement.” She protects this message when she travels to California to become a leading advocate to implement a Black Studies Department at San Francisco State University. Her initiative opens the floodgate for other area studies to be integrated into the curriculum, such as Women’s Studies, Asian, and Latino Studies. She consistently instills the message of “I Am” in her private and professional life during her years as an activist with CORE/Civil Rights, Black Arts Repertoire Theatre Movement (with Amiri Baraka), Nation of Islam, Women’s Rights movement and the Granny protests -- all of which seek to bring about economic and social change, a resistance to annihilation and silence, and instill a love of self and humanity. In essence, spread peace.

In closing, Sanchez’s greatest tool is her voice against injustice. A woman without a voice is a disservice to society. As the film suggests, her collective “I”—autobiography, history, poetry, African and African American art, politics of resistance—are all benchmarks for African and African Americans to continue to re-imagine themselves in America under oppression. [Lest we forget.] Her ideological and philosophical tentacles continue to connect the past, present, and future (as the film demonstrates with her work with youth, and as a professor) with a collective history and current reality, to personal and professional lives, to lives as women and mothers, wins and losses.

Voice is important in this film for Sanchez and valid whether that voice is angry sassy, aggressive, raw, cutting -- like razor blades between teeth --- or sensual, playful, loving and sad. The voice that compliments is as valid as the voice that criticizes transgressions against humanity. That voice, that “I Am,” must always be a reaffirmation, nurtured, natured, maintained, and increase its space, hold it, and validate itself and speak for those who don't have a voice or are not heard, and to support those who raise, are raising, their voices and speaking out.

The film contains archival photographs and footage. Includes readings by Nikki Giovanni, Ruby Dee, and other noted scholars and performance artists. This highly recommended film can be used for students in high school as well as the general public. In colleges and universities, and in public forums, this film will inspire discourse about civil rights, women’s studies, and women’s empowerment.