Elizabeth Alexander: A Total Small-Scale Warrior

At Lenny Letter, an interview with poet and essayist Elizabeth Alexander about her new memoir, The Light of the World (Grand Central Publishing). "I did struggle to complete the book," says Kimberly Drew. "I'd read twenty or so pages and would cry on and off for a few days. In fact, before I could properly begin our interview, I tearfully explained to Elizabeth that I'd postponed our meeting because I simply couldn't stop weeping. I felt bad betraying her love story, but it was the truth." But she does go on. A excerpt from their conversation:

KD: I had a lot of difficulty finishing The Light of the World because I couldn't stop crying. I was wondering if you could talk more about your process and how you were propelled to write the text.

EA: It was time out of time, it was its own weather. I wouldn't exactly say that it was a fugue state, but it was certainly a state unlike any other. I did not have a lot of my usual self-consciousness and was thinking on a lot of tracks at the same time and placing things where I think they belonged. I was just living, existing, moving, second to second to second to second. It was actually a very powerful state to be in.

One thing that I did know self-consciously was that I would not always be in this time and space. You know, as I've said before, I was writing to know that I was alive. I stayed alive because I will and am a person who does — and also because I had children, so that was what I had to do. I wasn't writing to stay alive, but writing knowing what I was experiencing and moving through.

KD: Could you talk about what role self-care plays in your practice as a poet, now a memoirist, and where you find those moments for interiority? I think about it as this process of multitasking: you have these expectations, you have responsibilities, and then you also have the responsibility to yourself; I am wondering how you navigate through that.

EA: Well, it does my heart good that you understand that, generationally, and that you're coming from that place. The dedication of The Black Interior (2004), my first book of essays, is to Barbara Christian, June Jordan, Sylvia Ardyn Boone, Sherley Anne Williams, Audre Lorde, Toni CadeBambara, and Claudia Tate, a cohort of brilliant black women thinkers, a generation-ish ahead of me, who died too young of mostly cancers and who labored in a way and who were "the first ones" or "the only ones." They had community and they made community. That's what I inherit, but with my closest sister-friends of my generation, we said: "We're not going to go down like that."

So we have a pact with each other and have for decades about always keeping self-care in the conversation because it's crucial, because there are stresses of being the only one or one of a few. I'm not a big-scale warrior, but I'm a total small-scale warrior. I'm always trying to make it better, call out the imbalance, make spaces better, reform institutions, redistribute resources; that's always how I've moved and it's exhausting. Really, also being the one who tries to call out the racism or the sexism or whatever the -ism is of an environment, we saw those brave women do it and do it in their lives and in their writing, and so that is our charge.

I will say also two more things about self-care. One is that — and this is just advice — that you need to have people in your life with whom you laugh from your core...

Read it all at Lenny Letter.