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    A Study Guide for Sonia Sanchez's "I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't"
    A Study Guide for Sonia Sanchez's "I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't"
    A Study Guide for Sonia Sanchez's "I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't"
    Ebook43 pages1 hour

    A Study Guide for Sonia Sanchez's "I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    A Study Guide for Sonia Sanchez's "I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781410393913
    A Study Guide for Sonia Sanchez's "I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Sonia Sanchez's "I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't" - Gale

      15

      I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't

      Sonia Sanchez

      1982

      Introduction

      Sonia Sanchez's I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't (1982) tells the story, in slightly veiled form, of the most famous blues singers of the twentieth century, such as Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. It protests against the racist oppression of the African American community by demonstrating how the lives of these artists were marginalized and ultimately destroyed by the exploitative control exercised by white society. In the play, each character is presented as the alternate personality or past life of a black woman committed to a mental hospital, underlining the role of the legal and medical establishments in the control and oppression of African Americans. It also uses the ancient connection between madness and artistic inspiration to create a profound mythological framework for the story. It depicts the most disturbing aspects of physical human existence in a way that is deliberately shocking in order to destabilize the aesthetic expectations of the audience or reader and prepare them to accept its revolutionary social message. The play is available in I'm Black When I'm Singing, I'm Blue When I Ain't, and Other Plays, published in 2010.

      Author Biography

      Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. Her parents never married and she lived with her mother, who died when Sanchez was a year old. Sanchez then lived with her paternal grandmother until 1943, when she moved to live with her father, the jazz drummer Wilson Driver, in Harlem. Through her father she met Billie Holiday, a figure she would frequently celebrate in her work. She earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Hunter College in 1955 and eventually a master of fine arts (MFA) in writing from New York University. While in graduate school, she enthusiastically embraced the political and aesthetic ideals of the black arts movement and began to publish and publicly perform her poetry. She created her professional name Sonia Sanchez by shortening her given name and using the surname of her first husband, Albert Sanchez, to whom she was briefly married in the 1960s. She had another brief marriage to the poet Etheridge Knight (for whom she helped secure a release from prison on parole after he published Poems from Prison in 1968), which ended in 1970.

      Sanchez joined the Nation of Islam in 1972. Dissatisfied by the secondary role of women in

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