October 1, 2023
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet combines memoir and history in a powerful new book. Smith, translator, memoirist, and poet laureate of the U.S. 2017 to 2019, delves into her family's history--a history of subjugation, violence, and enslavement--in order to "endure the intractability of the world I know." In the world of her forebears, and in her own, she asserts, "the Freed are discouraged from confusing themselves with the Free." Freed though they were, her great-grandparents, grandparents, and parents were oppressed and threatened by a world rife with racism. "I descend from a history of daily miracles," she writes, "by which the soul of a people whom institution upon institution has sought to annihilate yet lives on." Smith's search into her past took her to archives, military records, and census forms, where, she notes, "there is no column for Love," but still, the forms reveal "names and traces" that allow her to reconstruct "stories and lives that can liberate us." Those lives were buoyed by a strong sense of spiritual community, where the "ring shout" served as "a shared heartbeat." The shout, Smith explains, is "a cultural practice rooted in praise, song, and the soul-sustaining power of something so unperturbed by logic as to call itself the Holy Ghost." Because of her parents' "titanic effort," Smith and her siblings grew up to transcend many racial barriers--Smith graduated from Harvard, where she now teaches--and, she writes, "were allowed to mistake ourselves for the Free." But as she reflects on her education, career, marriages, and motherhood; and on many recent, recurring incidents of violence against Blacks, she increasingly identifies with the Freed. "What," she asks, "might this nation stand to learn from a people whose soul alone has carried them through centuries of storm and war?" A lyrical memoir conveys an urgent message.
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Starred review from October 15, 2023
Former U.S. poet laureate Smith digs into her personal history to come to terms with our current social and political climate in her elegant new memoir. Through research, personal memories, and examination of spiritual practices, she searches for understanding and guidance through the painful and tumultuous present as the country grapples with persistent and insidious racism against Black Americans. She begins with her father's early years--"my father's experience will assure him that his people are stewards not solely of the known creature that is family, but of a larger animal called History"--and explores this inextricable link throughout the book. The reality of not only surviving America's "centuries-long war" but thriving, exemplified by her family, is told through poetic and engaging turns of phrases. Smith is adept at looking backwards while expressing an urgency that grounds the reader in the present, writing "History arrives? Better to accept that it is never gone despite our insistence to file much of it safely away, out of sight and mind." The juxtaposition of her family's stories with the Black experience in the U.S. feels like a journey toward a greater understanding, one readers are lucky to be invited to take.
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