Black History Month

homegirls & handgrenades

Sonia Sanchez

Poetry, 1984

The winner of the 1985 American Book Award, Sonia Sanchez's homegirls & handgrenades examines the pain and alienation of the modern African American experience. In describing a bleak world in which intelligent young women drop out of college and young men suffer from drug addiction, she expresses her sympathy for those who struggle to find love in the midst of suffering. "I am here because I shall not give the / earth up to non-dreamers and earth molesters," she writes, emphasizing her commitment to peace and her condemnation for self-destructive behavior. In "After Saturday Night Comes Sunday," she examines the spiritual and economic suffering a man's drug addiction brings to his children and his wife, whose love cannot save him. Such a tragedy serves as a symptom of what her poetry suggests is a more pervasive problem in black America: the absence of self-esteem in a white-dominated society. This theme is also illustrated in the poem "MIAs," which links the detainment of blacks without bail by the South African police, the persecution of villagers by El Salvador's repressive government, and the kidnapping and murder of black children in Atlanta, Georgia. Claiming solidarity with these victims, Sanchez, according to many critics, stands as a compassionate witness to the struggle of oppressed people around the world, offering both a voice of determined resistance to terrorism and the hope for freedom.