Edward Helmore
Her mother is a famous photographer and her father, a former Black Panther, was a convicted murderer. She’s precociously bright, unfailingly sensitive … and nine years old.
Sahara Sunday Spain is the United States publishing industry’s latest sensation. As her first book of poems went on sale last week, the New York Times said Spain could be “the answer to the book industry’s multicultural dreams”.
Already she is working on her next project, a book of short stories that could develop into a novel. If There Would Be No Light: Poems From My Heart was subject to a bidding war that won her an advance said to be more than the sum paid to Ted Hughes for his Birthday Letters. It has already received glowing praise. Feminist writer Gloria Steinem has written the foreword. The New York Times called the work “charming, alert and unfettered”. It quotes approvingly one of the 400 poems Spain has written: “You give me wings, / like a butterfly, / dancing with you, / upon two hearts, / together.”
Although her publisher, HarperSanFrancisco, is not expecting its young poet to be slugging it out with Seamus Heaney on bookstore shelves, it is hoping it will become an inspirational tome, a latter day Jonathan Livingston Seagull, that taps into the feminist-spiritual world view. “She’s the voice of a new generation,” says her editor Liz Perle, “and she’s representative of the multi-racial world this generation is going to inherit. “When her book was brought to me I looked at it with scepticism. But it became clear this was not the average work of an average child. It slayed me. It was way out of line for what a child should know at that age.” Perle cautions against excessive expectations: “It’s not the work of the Bard, it’s the work of an extremely bright [child].”
It’s hard to untangle Spain’s uplifting appeal from her own story. She was brought up in the burnt-out urban desolation of Dogtown in downtown Oakland, which lies on the east shore of San Fransisco Bay. Her father, Johnny Spain, is a former Black Panther. Her mother, Elisabeth Sunday, is a photographer who has made a career of photographing African tribes and what she calls “mystics and healers”.
Spain has found special backing in the West. Alice Walker, Bill Cosby and Quincy Jones America’s pan-cultural elite are helping push her book.
Steinem, whom Spain calls her “honorary grandmother”, says: “She’s always been encouraged to be creative, to say what she is thinking, to draw, to talk about her dreams. Many kids could be this creative if they were given the chance. I hope she inspires other children to have their own voices, too.”
One clue to Spain’s unusual literary talent is that her mother has denied her access to popular culture no TV, no toys, no junk food. A brief infatuation with the Spice Girls would end up with a lesson deconstructing their message. “Tell me about the relationship between these girls,” her mother asked. “Is this a good role model for you?” When Spain wanted a Barbie doll, she underwent similar quizzing. Spain’s development was swift. She began speaking in complete sentences at 14 months. The first poem she remembers physically writing she was five at the time is called Mother’s Milk, which reads, in its entirety: “When I drink mother’s milk / my heart sweats with love.”
Spain’s mother and publisher insist she won’t be commodified by the publishing process. “This is not something that’s going to take over her life,” Sunday says. “It’s not about ego. It’s about offering, as an artist, to the world.”
But given Spain’s website (www.sahara sundayspain.com), her promotional video and the planned readings and interviews, the process is under way.