Personal Narrative: Sonia Sanchez

Four years ago, on a normal Thursday school night, I was sitting in my room doing my homework and my aunt came bursting into the door saying my brother was kidnapped. I did not want to believe what I heard and kept asking her to repeat herself. I ran outside of the house and screamed because my emotional pain became so hard that my stomach felt like it was tied in strong ropes and I was ripping apart, I was devastated because my only brother was gone, I didn’t know if I would ever see him again, I did not even have a chance to say goodbye. I was angry at myself, at the people that took him. Life seemed impossible to live during the days he was kidnapped. My family finally came up with the ransom the kidnapers were asking for and through a miracle
Her mom died when she was only two years old and she was raised by her grandma along with her sister but the only mother she ever known died when she was only six years old, she wrote her first poem at that age of six for her grandmother and Sonia Sanchez talked about her death in her interview with Rachel Harding “I am forever grateful to her, to her life for her being on this earth because I was a child who, when I was told to go outside and play, I played roughly and came back in. And I was all ragged you know? She let me be ragged. She protected me. And when she died, I was wise enough, at six, to know my protector had died”. She kept on moving between family members and moved in later with her father and step mother. Later on, her brother died of AIDS and in “Does your house have lions” Sonia Sanchez expresses the pain she and her family left. Sonia remembers herself as a shy and private child, she stuttered and as a result was very reticent about verbally expressing herself but instead that pushed her to read even more. It amazes me because Sonia had so much to overcome, she had so much pain to deal with that she could’ve just whined and cried for the rest of her life, but yet she did not only try to survive through all these struggles but instead she conquered them and even fought for the cause of