The Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series met at the Wilson Library on Saturday, Aprl 2nd. We discussed Ordinary Light by Tracy K. Smith. This book is actually her memoir, which we chose to read for Poetry Month, rather than a poetry collection. Tracy K. Smith has had four collections of poetry published and one of them, Life on Mars, won the Pulitzer Prize 2011. She was also Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 until 2019. Reading her memoir was like reading poetry, as evidenced by the quoted passages below.
The book, Ordinary Light, chronicles Tracy K. Smith's young life at home with her middle-class family. Her father is in the military and they mostly live on the military base, surrounded by whites. She's especially close to her mother, who gets sick and dies while Smith is in college. The book actually opens with her mother's death with a prologue titled "The Miracle."
p.5 "Then we heard a sound that seemed to carve a tunnel beteen our world and some other. It was an otherworldly breath, a vivid presence that blew past us without stopping, leaving us, the living, clamped in place by the silence that followed. I would come back to the sound and the presence of that breath again and again, thinking how miraculous it was that she had ridden off on that last exhalation, her life instantly whisked away, carried over into a place none of us will ever understand until perhaps we are there ourselves.
It's the kind of miracle we never let ourselves consider, the miracle of death. She followed that last breath wherever it led and left her body behind in the old four-poster Queen Anne bed..."
We hear the phrase "the miracle of birth" all our lives, but I'd never heard the phrase "the miracle of death" ever. This is the most beautiful writing! Smith is not only a poet but she's also a young woman who grew up under the literal religiosity of her mother, who never had any doubt that her soul would live on after the body had died.
Since the book began with such a big event, I felt the rest of the book was flat. I expressed this to the group (there were six of us in the discussion.) Two or three of the women echoed what I thought but Jezrie, the most thoughtful reader in the group had this to say:
"If I were to write a memoir, this is what my memoir would be like. It was normal, all of it rather ordinary. I loved this book. It feels like an American story. For an African American story, it was against "type." If Tracy K. Smith had been a white writer, I'm sure that this would have been assigned in high school. This story, for me, was like looking in a mirror."
Smith's only desire as a child was to please her mother, even if she sometimes felt her mother wasn't critical enough of the people who practiced their faith in non-loving ways.
p.120 I felt uneasy around the Christians who claimed to long for Judgment Day, the ones who professed their faith in God too vehemently... my distrust was reserved for the people who (p.121) made an exaggerated effort to flaunt their godliness. The ones who went out of their way to join hands and pray aloud in busy restaurants, as if doing so would shame others into giving their lives over to God. And, worse, the ones who worried to the point of distraction about the sin going on in other people's houses, the hate-filled men on TV, and the pious, grim-faced people in real life who sowed guilt every chance they got..."
 |
| Tracy K. Smith Photo from poetryfoundation.org |
Smith felt her mother's religion wasn't practiced like those mentioned above, but Smith still felt that her mother's religion would cause her to stifle real communication and even real companionship. Smith describes how uneasy the conversation was between a neighbor who wasn't in their church and Smith's mother. Smith could see that her mother needed a friend like this: someone from outside who could make her mother laugh and smile. There was plenty of laughter in their family but Smith felt that her mother could've used grown-up company while her father was away working.
p.303 "Wouldn't my mother's testimony implicate me in that reality as she understood it? Wasn't her voice still drifting from that pulpit where she'd stood testifying, touching every inch of air on its way toward only it knew where? And when it found me, as one day it must, would it force me to choose between her world and mine? Would it mark me or claim me or simply slow for a moment, staring incredulously?"
The same way Smith felt her mother wouldn't concede that it was necessary to think with nuance when it came to the way some people practiced their Christian faith, she also felt that her parents wouldn't accept that it was also necessary to think with nuance about race. Even as a young child, Smith was able to put into words what her parents wouldn't.
p.133 Over and over, our parents told us the best stand we could take was to be our best, do the best. Nothing was too hard, nothing insurmountable. But was it wrong to wonder if we might also have been turning our backs on something vital in embracing such a task? Were we announcing to the world with our can-do attitude that we were willing to bear the burden of convincing whites not to judge blacks too quickly? Were we buying into the fallacy that racial prejudice is based on logic, reason, anything other than fear and lies? ..."
Barb ended our book discussion by reading us a poem from Tracy K. Smith's latest collection:
Such Color.
"Some Trees"
The lithe branches,
the solid trunks,
the leaves atilt
in summer sun.
What trees know
they know from
what the rains bring,
what’s carried
on the breeze, from
their railroad of roots
under the gridwork
of our streets. Some trees
bear our very scars. High up
On their bark, up
in their crook of arms,
up in the traffic
of leaves: fact cleaves.
The message
is only now arriving
in my city and yours,
and on the far shores
of the nationless sea.
A man was lynched yesterday
is what some trees
seem to say.
October 18, 2021 By Tracy K. Smith
Comments
Post a Comment