By combining the roles of political activist, scholar and witness, from her participation in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements to her involvement in the political and cultural domains, Sonia Sanchez expresses the continuities and discontinuities of history and liberates an experience which is activated through connections and relations of knowledge and desire across borders and boundaries. As Paul Ricoeur defines the event as what is given evidence of and is emblematic of past occurrences, then Sonia Sanchez's words and works speak, in the forcefulness of their often omitted testimonies, to the singular modes of being in the world as well as to the communal aspects and links upon which is based the history of political societies. By testifying to the particular and the collective, she creates a language that opens up a new sphere with its emotions, understandings and imagery, the possibility of an historical event with its own temporality enunciated in unpredictable places and times, to be discovered in the violent, disjunctive or metaphorical outbursts of reality. During the question-answer session, Sonia Sanchez insisted on giving students a detailed and personal account of historical or sociological facts to show their intensity and impact in the construction of history. Then the reading of her poems illustrated and enlightened life forms that existed in and for themselves as well as in the greater design of cultural and political reality and desired infinity.

The relationship to oneself and the other is a common feature of all the articles presented in Tours in honor to Sonia Sanchez. Given her involvement in the events of the 1960s, the topic of the conference had been defined with the purpose of drawing links and connections between art and politics in order to analyze the place and the role of the artist in the public sphere and the critical space of poetics in politics. At times of major and global transformations in modern societies, it is highly relevant to question the authority of literary forms and the future of their practices in the negotiation and translation of a political aesthetics. In an interview to the magazine Terrain in June of 2003, Edouard Glissant, asked to define the relationship between poetry and politics, suggests that poetry is not political, that is to say the two elements of the relationship cannot be engaged in mutual conditions of dependency or freedom since they constitute an inclusive and intimate wholeness : "…il n'y avait pas de poésie qui ne soit politique et qu'il n'existe pas de poésie politique en soi."[1] He considers that the noblest referent in poetry is the world figured in the varieties of its temporality, and as a place of encounters, conflicts and transformations: "…l'objet le plus haut de la poésie était le monde : le monde en devenir, le monde tel qu'il nous bouscule, le monde tel que nous voulons y entrer." The definition of poetics as the understanding and creation of human beings in their relationships to themselves and others provides a valuable and critical starting point to qualify the work of Sonia Sanchez as it was expressed by herself and researched by the authors of the essays in this number. Participants speak from multiple perspectives when analyzing Sanchez's poetry (Paola Boi, Françoise Clary, Ugo Rubeo and Arlette Frund) or theatre (Geneviève Fabre). Their collaborative visions oversee the production of a space dedicated to the celebration of life in the poetical writings of Sonia Sanchez.

Arlette Frund

Guest Editor, BMa, 9.2 Spring 2004

University of Tours

NOTES

[1] Artières, Philippe. "'Solitaire et solidaire'. Entretien avec Edouard Glissant." Terrain 41 (Septembre 2003): 9-14, 10.

►ARLETTE FRUND is Assistant Professor of American literature at the University of Tours, France. She organizes conferences and symposiums for the Center for African American Studies (CEAA) in Paris. She works closely with geography, architecture and space in African American literature and cinema. She has written on Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones and Edwidge Danticat, as well as gangster movies. She has co-edited a special issue of The Annals of the Anglophone World on "The Writings of African American History" (2003).