You Gotta be Awake! Get Ready, Stay Ready!

On black consciousness, loving a country that does not love you back ; and staying woke with one of the great poets, Dr Elizabeth Alexander.

A while ago I was listening to an episode of Glennon Doyle’s podcast, We can do Hard Things, and when introducing her guest, Tracee Ellis Ross, Glennon says of Tracee  “She is the kind of woman that makes me want to say ‘I will have what she is having.’” Dr Elizabeth Alexander is one of the mightiest poets, writers, teachers and currently she is the President of the Mellon Foundation. She is the kind of woman who makes me want to say ‘I will have whatever she is having.’ Her poem ‘Praise Song for the Day’ praises ordinary people as the true nation builder and their work as the foundation and soul of a country .Her memoir, A Light of the World, is my favourite book of all time. When I knew I would be editing this edition of Folios, it was Dr Alexander’s words from her memoir, that was foundational to my thinking –

‘Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave.’

Here is my interview with the great Dr Elizabeth Alexander, the poet and writer of my life.

Lwando Xaso – You came into my life in 2008 when you delivered your poem, Praise Song for the Day, in that red coat at President Barack Obama’s inauguration. That was my introduction to your poetry and I have since discovered more of it. In 2008, love was not part of mainstream discourse, certainly love beyond the romantic was not on my mind at that time. But today more and more people are invoking the need for love beyond the romantic in very unconventional spaces as you did at the inauguration. “What if love is the mightiest question?” is a question from Praise Song for the Day that has been ringing over and over in my head. Is there a line from Praise Song that is currently on repeat in your mind or that has taken on a new meaning or a line you find yourself going back to?

Elizabeth Alexander – That’s a really good question. I think in my later living and writing, the resonance of love beyond marital , filial, national, has only become more important to me. I am not at all anti-romance and I am not at all anti-coupledom but I do think and believe fervently that if we remain in the unit of the diad or the nuclear family, or the blood family or the home or even the small community, we will be doing a couple of things that are not so good for all of us. One is we will be hoarding our resources. Human beings both in their love writ large and in every way have a lot to give to each other. So its not like all I can do is love my partner and our two children. We have so much more than that. We can practice so much more than that. We are connected to so much more than that. So, for us to remember that is really important and not threatening to the power of the smaller unit.

Also moving to The Light of the World’ one of the things I have believed all my life but really came into practice when my beloved husband unexpectedly passed is that I had to articulate for my children that we belonged to what my friends and I call, a village. Otherwise how these 11 and 12 year old supposed to carry on if they think they have lost half of everything they have. They lost their father in a stroke of a moment, which feels like losing half of everything they have but they belong to more. More people love them. That’s a very important way for us to be living. We saw also in the years that followed 2008, the eight years of the Obama presidency, and then we had the four years of the Trump presidency which starting with the Muslim ban, his first official act. So as an American, for that to be his first official act which says “stay out”, it was a violent othering, that is not my country. I refuse that as my country. To that line, ‘love beyond national,’ what does it mean for us to understand ourselves as belonging to more even as we talk about the very wonderful particularities of culture and the ways we express ourselves as communities and nations. To me what the  Muslim ban said was very much against the very great things Americaness historically meant, at least as an idea, that we are made of many and that that is what I like even as I struggle with the challenges. It is a place made of many and we are connected by who we are as Americans to the rest of the world. So I think that that just one phrase, the one you mention from Praise Song, ‘what if love is the mightiest word’ resonates deeply today.

 

LX – A new line that is now resonating with me almost rhythmically,  is “walking forward in that light’ because there is an action to it, an invocation of movement that I like and which I think is needed as so many people feel stuck. It’s a gift to me right now.

EA- I am so glad.

LX- Are you able to share where you wrote ‘Praise Song for the Day’?

EA- Yes sure. These things kind of happen in one spot. I was living in Cambridge Massachusetts at the time with my family, and I wrote the poem at our kitchen table. I also had a work desk but I like the kitchen table. And the kitchen table is in the poem. I think of the kitchen table as literally and as metaphor, a place where people are nourished, a place where people come together and deal with hard things, a place where people commune. And also, the kitchen table is a place where after hours work is done. And my poetry has always been central to my work but after hours because there was always a teaching job, always another kind of day job. So that wonderful kitchen table with lots of light, after the kids were asleep before they got up in the morning, that’s when it was written.

LX – You and your husband loved good food so I can totally see the centrality of the kitchen table. But I had had in my mind an image of you writing it while sitting on a staircase with your husband behind you.

EA- Actually that’s so uncanny you should mention the staircase because after the poem was drafted there was quite a long process of what my husband and I used to do together, me for his painting and him with my poetry. We had a ritual, I would read him the poem and he would read the poem back to me because you can hear editorial things and bumps when it’s not in your voice. He was an astute and intuitive reader of poetry. He would not say anything technical, he would just put his finger on a part of the poem that he would say ‘this is the soft part.’ The poem had to be written in a short period of time. And there was a moment where he was sitting on the stairs and I was sitting on the chair, we were doing our back and forth and he was like ‘no baby its not there yet,’ And I was furious cause I really needed for this poem to be done. But of course, what we really needed was for the poem to be right.

LX – You write so much about love and was wondering whether you could share your definition of love. And what do you think it means to love a country?

EA- There is a couple of ways of answering that. I think practicing love, I think involves both acceptance and rigorous challenge and questioning. If its love of ones children, you are teaching them please and thank you and how to do so many things like ‘no no hot stove.’ You are always doing that even as you completely accept your children. I think in the love of romantic partnership or in deep friendship, again I think there is the cheerleading and the challenge. I want the people who love me, just like the example I gave you of my husband and the poem, do not gas me up, do not let me go out there with my slip showing. So the rigorous challenge and being not only African American but actively and consciously from great African American traditions, what has it meant for us, many writers, thinkers and politicians, to love a country that does not always love us.  African Americans have throughout history have been some of the greatest of citizens because we figured out that love is also about question and challenge. And I think that black people have helped the country tow the line against authoritarian tendencies because if you came to this country classified as three fifths of a human being, if you come to this country as chattel slaves but you understand your personhood, you are always articulating your humanity and thus giving your oppressors the chance to find theirs rather than succumb to violence, authoritarianism and so on. Black people have done that. So, loving a country means all of it but certainly it means, and I will say it in the black sense of things, it means being woke, not in the way its been misused not but woke as awake. You gotta be awake. Great philosophers, like Muhammad Ali say ‘don’t go for the okey doke’ you gotta be awake!

LX – I love that because it goes right into what I wanted to ask you next. Black Consciousness. In South Africa Black Consciousness emerged alongside the emergence of Black Power in the United States. Black Consciousness was about loving ourselves and being conscious of how apartheid was making us feel inferior. I wanted to know if you think this kind of Black consciousness is what we need today or is there something more.  Is there another consciousness or wokeness we need to develop in light of today’s challenges?

EA- I think we multiple consciousnesses. So yes, we need the kind of black consciousness you have described because we are still dehumanised. For a very long time I have been writing about racialised violence, trauma and spectacle. It is Tyre Nichols today, but it will be another story next week where we have been unjustly violated because of being black and people’s ability to look at us as not fully human and not feeling people. We have just found out a few weeks ago that the police officers who killed Tyre Nichols, one of them took photographs of him and shared those photos. This is what happened in that era of lynching when white people came with their children and picnicked while this happened, and pictures were taken and made into postcards.

If that’s how people can treat you then yes you need a black consciousness that says I am powerful, I am worthy and I come from traditions. If you think also of aspects of our lineage that we are cut off from, some of us go back a couple of generations into our history and we are able to find something out about the Europeans in our lineage from the slavery era and we can maybe trace that lineage further. But that’s not the line we want. Its like you just come right up against the shore of the continent and the line is done, its over. And that’s not so many generations back if you take into account the long line of history.

And then when you just look at what are aesthetic and societal values , all of the things so beautifully expressed in our creativity as well when you think of our features like our hair, our behinds, our colour, these are all still interestingly both fetishised and despised.

Right now, we are in a pitched battle that will only get harder. The culture wars that we are seeing playing out in Florida right now with what that particular governor is doing with banning teaching of African American history. There was just a walk out of high school students in Alabama because their history teachers were trying to teach them about slavery and the civil rights movement and one administrator at the school said that makes me uncomfortable, so they took all of it out. This is about keeping people really stupid. You cannot understand this country if you do not start with wars against Native American people, peonage, enslaving not only black people but also keeping a whole class of white people in an oppressed class position and so forth and so on and the history of immigration. It is really profound when you go into the history of immigration in this country and look at why this huge number of people can come from Ireland and no one came from an African country that year and so on. Do we need to assert our history and look at mighty warriors and thinkers in our history? We sure do. We need them and we need them against forces that are really pushing us in the direction of ignorance and subsequent control.

LX- Just to go back to the question “What is the mightiest word is love?” I know that you write in the tradition of asking difficult questions that do not need to be answered but perhaps need to be meditated upon. A question I have right now is from a poem by one of your teachers, the great Derek Walcott, from his poem A Far Cry from Africa, and at the end he says “how can I turn my back from Africa?” Which is a very pertinent question considering the state of my country and with so many people wondering if they should leave or stay. And I wanted to know if you have a question from a poem by another poet that you are meditating on right now or find yourself invoking?

EA- I love that question. Well so even doing this work now with the Mellon Foundation and being far away from the classroom and from being a day-to-day writer, I have always have questions from poems. One of the things I used to say when teaching poetry to my students is “this is the real question.’ It is real, it is not just rhetorical. Great poems are the ones that have real questions that you can meditate on. So, one question I have written about and hear all the time is by Amiri Baraka he asks ‘what will be the sacred words?’ Thinking about all the challenges that we face, he asks what is the wisdom and where do we look for the wisdom. Baraka is asking this question outside of religious tradition which sometimes will give you words that are deemed sacred, but he is saying you have to look for them.  And actually, in that poem called Ka’ba, he says “we are African people” talking about African Americans but he says and I am paraphrasing, ‘we are living in the cold concrete, we are estranged from ourselves and so we have to rise up and in order to rise up, we need to find those sacred words.’ So I think about that a lot.

LX- I connect that to your phrase “words that shimmer” and I suppose that words that shimmer are also sacred. Is there are particular word that is sacred to you right and that you also feel maybe its misunderstood or corrupted somehow?

EA- I find that there are sometimes words that are really meditation words that I keep thinking, thinking through or hear myself using a lot. One of the words I use a lot these days is nourish. I like the kind of moisture of that word. That word is also a way of thinking about, in the grant making work that I do, of what it mean to nourish visionaries with great ideas with more than just money. It is nourishing, to say ‘ beautiful beautiful plant, here is some water because we believe in what you are trying to push up beyond the soil.’ If I were still teaching, nourishing, would be what you would do with your students, nourishing their ideas and their sharp sharp thinking. And nourishing relationships. In the COVID era we were challenged with ok how do we nourish our humans when we cant be together in the way we were used to being together and when it takes more effort and mindfulness. I like that word a lot.

LX- even saying the word is ‘nourishing’.

EA- Right! Its watery!

LX- Earlier you said some of the questions you encounter in poetry inform your work in grant making as the President of the Mellon Foundation. I wanted to know if there any other connection between you as a poet and you as the President of the Mellon Foundation where you feel like those two parts converge?

EA- Totally. Hugely! I think we are who we are on a continuum. I was always a poet. What are the characteristics we have and develop that are some of our essential characteristics that allows us to do what we do as much as we can?  I do think from poetry there is a real precision and precise thinking. And I think that doing social justice grant making in a way that is sharp and meaningful requires really specific language and great intentionality to be always to tell a large enough story about how grants, together, are moving forward progressive social values, communities and work. I think that one of the things that good poetry does is contradiction. There is always contradiction in a poem. I think of poems as the quintessential space where more than one thing can be true at the same time. And I think that the ability to understand that complexity, to hold it and not push to false resolution is very useful to getting through the problems we are always encountering in our work, because our work is problem solving work. I think also from poetry I do have a fervent belief in the word and in the human exchange through art. I really believe experientially, and I know that poetry and words go places we cannot see and changes people’s lives. I know this to be a fact. Therefore, that enables me to carry that faith with me when I say for example ‘ok I know Constitution Hill is helping people learn, think and imagine a better society.’ I know that with everything we resource, because I already believe. And so, let’s just never lose that faith. That’s what I have to offer.

LX- on the word nourishment and hearing you speak about how you approach your work as the President of the Mellon Foundation, are you able to share one or two examples of this nourishment in grant making that has fed you.

EA- I feel not just fortunate but that I am in the right place doing the right thing, literally every single day. In the hundreds of grants that we make, there are things that nourish and inspire me and make me believe in human possibility. Every every day! And I could talk about hundreds of grants. One that I have always been excited about is Freedom Reads. The great poet, Reginald Dwayne Bates, started this project with a simple and beautiful premise to put 500 book libraries in each and every prison in the United States in beautifully designed bookshelves. Even if there is no room designated as a library (which most prisons do not have) these bookshelves have a beautiful and inviting curvature to them and hold the 500 carefully chosen books, many with beautiful new introductions and new definitions of what the classics are. Bates, had he himself a long incarceration from the age of 16, including periods of solitary confinement when he was a child and that was where someone slid a book of poems under his cell door. He read that book of poems and became a poet, imagined other worlds, imagined freedoms and was able to experience other people and other realities. Freedom Reads is big because it’s a systemic approach. We are not just doing this in some places, this will be done in every prison which is important in a country that has the most incarcerated. This projected is also big because it is also is very connected to a very visionary and gifted human being who is wired not just to make his art but to use what he has to change the lives of others and walks in that generosity everyday because he is also bringing thinkers, writers into prisons as well. Bates also has a one person show that he performs in prisons. On one level of this project, there is the human contact and then on the other, there is the infiniteness of the books.

LX- I have heard you before describe grant making as redistribution of wealth and wanted to hear more on that on what that means other than nourishment.

EA- I think that pretty much excessive wealth that is amassed, is amassed on the backs of people who do benefit from that wealth. If you look at people with billions of wealth, its too much for one person or one family. There are people who work hard and live well, but here I am talking about excessive wealth. So, when you look at wealth earned back in the day particularly, you know that it was earned in conditions of extreme societal inequality perhaps it was derivative of slave ownership, that’s just the American story. So for us being a social justice philanthropy simply means if you look at resourced and under resourced institutions and projects and ideas, a wonderful way to think responsibly of this excess of wealth, which I am, at the moment with my staff, a steward of, is what does it mean to move it to more places and places that have not had the resources to do what they could most fruitfully do. It’s a very simple principle and it is just correct.

LX- I was watching a lecture that you gave where you said you are interested in spaces that lift voices that give an ongoing sense of what it means to struggle well.  I love the term “struggle well” and wanted to know what it means to you to “struggle well”.

EA- Thank you for calling out that phrase. Thinking about poems, there is a poem by Marge Piercy, that I love called ‘To be of Use,’  and she talks about how the people she loves most put their shoulder to the wheel. These are people who jump in, work hard and are helpful. And where the struggle part comes in is that there are so many obstacles that get in the way. As we know the country is not a strict meritocracy. There are illusions that everyone is on a level playing field, when people actually start from very different places vis a vis privilege or generational wealth or the institutions they are affiliated with. So the struggle part is the tough part but the good part, to struggle well, is the nobility of work and nobility of trying to build something that is not singular but collective. I would never wish hardship for anybody but what I know of people who have come out on the other side of hardship, is that they have a practicality and nobility and a realistic-ness about them which I think is a thing I revere.

LX- That reminds of Ta-Nehisi Coates ’phrase ‘a beautiful struggle.’ he says he would not change being black for anything because his blackness has given him a sense of vigour. And loving a country that does not always love one back and challenging that country is a source of that vigour. You both are careful not to romanticise struggle but recognise there can be virtue in it if done well.

EA- It is true. And now you just have me thinking about all the poems that live in my head. There is that great Langston Hughes poem ‘Mother to Son’, the first line is ‘son’ and that’s where he famously writes that ‘life for me aint be no crystal stair’. So the poem expresses both the sort of reality where you have to prepare yourself but there is also so much hope. As they say ‘get ready, stay ready.’ To be unprepared is not a feeling I would wish on anybody. 

LX- This conversation is adream come true as I get to ask you all the questions that emerge within me when I read your poetry and listen to you speak. Have you heard the John F Kennedy speech on Power and Poetry?

EA- oh, what are the words? I do not actually, off hand, know it.

LX- Its an amazing speech he gave at a university, I think a month before he was assassinated and he talks about poetry as a means of saving power from itself and that where power corrupts, poetry cleanses. And I wanted to ask you as a poet how you see the relationship between poetry and institutional power. This goes back to you at President Obama’s inauguration, an event that is so institutional and traditional and also now you being at the helm of this very being institution that has so many resources and therefore power and what wanted to know how you reconcile that kind of power with poetry?

EA- You have opened up a great zone. Poetry is like a stealth art form because it has no money attached to it. A fiction writer will dream of their book becoming a best seller which will enable them to take time and really write. That never happens for a poet. you always have to support yourself in some other way. And in that is tremendous freedom. There is no economic motive, you do it because you really have to and the only thing you are writing against is yourself, your deities and all time. You are trying to write, with precision, your best that will last for all time. When you feel you have gotten that right and, again where there is no remuneration, that is an unbelievably powerful feeling. Finishing a poem does something. I know of no other exhilaration like it. Feeling like it can really communicate beyond you. And I think that not only being a poet but also being in the world of ideas and in the academy, there is, and that’s why the attacks on free speech are so alarming right now, potentially a tremendous freedom, if you keep on believing on the enduring power of the transformative idea or transformative words. When you carry that with you, I think you can do a lot of things. I chair departments and build poetry organisations and have done a lot of things that enable me to do my day to day job but I think always carrying that belief in the power of poetry and words and being a free black woman helps me do this work as best I can.  

LX – What is the light at the end for you? What was the light at the end of yesterday?

EA- Yesterday my grown kids were both home along with some of their friends who are also like my kids. And I fed them, we talked, we laughed, we listened to music and they played cards while I went to the other room where I could hear their laughter. I needed no more than that.

LX-  This time with you has been the light for me at the end of this day.