"To Be Black Is Political" : The Linguistic Revolution and Political Discourse in Sanchez's Poetry

This paper attempts to demonstrate Sanchez's power in linguistic revolution and her intention to regain the power of political discourse for the black by violating the convention of English language and foregrounding the force of black English. Sanchez associates the power of language with the destructive power of hand grenades. This destructive power of language abounds in her poems, finds its expressions in typographical deviation, phonological deviation, lexical deviation and syntax deviation and by such deviations the poet aims and/or arms to do damage to "the nigger's control center." Sanchez has shown full awareness of the political identity of a black woman poet. She agrees there is a feminine sensibility which differs conspicuously from that of the male and that women are quite different from men in what they feel and think about the world. In her poems about women sufferings, she tries to make greater use of the potentialities of language and free language to greater possibilities in order to re-define and re-contextualize a world that is rhetorically and metaphorically different from the conventionalized world. With a fine combination of form and content, Sanchez forges her poetry into a linguistic and political weapon to explode the myth of the white culture. And in so doing she shocks, awakens and directs the black people, who have been for centuries controlled and manipulated by the invisible hand of white language and ideology, into a new linguistic and political realm.