Elizabeth Alexander Hilton Als

Elizabeth Alexander | Hilton Als

June 9, 2015

LIVE from the New York Public Library

www.nypl.org/live

Wachenheim Trustees Room

(applause)

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you, thank you very much, Tony. My name is Paul Holdengräber. As you know, I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library. And I always say that my goal is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and when successful to make it levitate. You’ll also be very happy to hear that today we booked an event with the Moth, a fantastic storytelling group, in late December, early December of next year and the evening will in some way be about roaring lions, and we decided that on that day it will be the last time that I will ever say that the lions are roaring. (laughter) Please applaud that moment. (applause) My wife will be extremely happy when she hears that tonight, because she’s had to live with this for ten years.

This is the penultimate event of the spring LIVE from the New York Public Library season, our tenth anniversary spring season. Next Tuesday we end with Werner Herzog in a conversation about his love for ancient Greek literature, an evening cosponsored and copresented by the Onassis Foundation. The event is sold out but it will be live-streamed, and you can always try your luck by coming on standby. I invited Elizabeth Alexander because I fell in love with her memoir, The Light of the World, and wrote her a fan or rather a love letter. I have done this a few times before, for instance with Edmund de Waal upon reading The Hare with Amber Eyes, and Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Both Edmund de Waal and Patti Smith responded positively to my letter, as did Elizabeth Alexander, and both Patti Smith and Edmund de Waal will be back this fall for more. It is thus my hope that Elizabeth Alexander will also come back sometime soon to the New York Public Library for more.

Hilton Als and I cooked up a plan some years ago for a series of events that has not yet happened. I hope there too we will revisit what we could do together in the years ahead. After the conversation, which will last about as long as a psychoanalytical session if your shrink is generous, Elizabeth Alexander and Hilton Als will sign books. 192 Books, our independent bookstore, is here to help us with this sale.

I would like to say a big thank-you to the Ford Foundation and particularly to Darren Walker for their fantastic support of LIVE from the New York Public Library tenth anniversary as well as the support of many great cultural institutions across New York City. I also want to thank our Spring 2015 season media sponsor, the Financial Times. Thanks to the continuing generosity of Celeste Bartos and Mahnaz and Adam Bartos.

As many of you know, for the last seven years—I’m not going to retire that—I’ve asked my guests to give me a biography of themselves in seven words. A haiku of sorts, or if you’re very modern, a tweet. Elizabeth Alexander submitted these seven words to me: “Mother, poet, teacher, race woman, evolving subject to change.” Hilton Als submitted these seven words, reminiscent to me of the seven words Joan Didion submitted to me some years ago. “Seven words,” she said, “do not yet define me.” Hilton Als’s seven words are: “I do not know so cannot say.” Please welcome them.

(applause)

HILTON ALS: Thank you all for coming. It’s a little warm, and I wanted to read this introduction really as a way of celebrating Elizabeth and the event. Introductions are a strange practice but a necessary one, usually polite at the core, fact-based and essentially essentializing, particularly if the host or audience only has a cursory knowledge of the subject. But in this case, none of that’s even close to the truth. I feel as though I’ve always known Elizabeth or known of her. And in that knowing, which includes her work as a poet, a legendary professor in Yale’s African American Studies department, a best-selling author, and a strong and committed mother of two, there are perforce a multitude of feelings that cannot be contained in an introduction.

So, the project at hand is kind of moot, existentially speaking, but since we are on Earth and there is a task to perform, let’s begin with her birth in 1962 in Harlem, USA, and her heritage, which includes the people of Harlem and her father, Clifford Alexander Jr., former United States secretary and Equal Opportunity Commissioner, and her mother, the very beautiful Adele, a professor who has taught legions about black women’s lives, and her brother Mark, who has been a senior adviser to President Obama during his first campaign, and forgive me if I’m leaving something out. The point is, Elizabeth, a self-described race woman, comes from a house not built on history lost, which is where most black Americans live, but history gained, and your ear had to be in your foot if you didn’t hear that in her poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” which she read so exceptionally well and beautifully at President Obama’s 2009 swearing-in. And there she said, “We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider.” And that’s what tonight will give us, Elizabeth’s words, and some memories, which might include the afternoon she read at President Obama’s first swearing-in, which was the swearing-in of so much more stuff, too, including Elizabeth’s national prominence as a poet, and it was the swearing-in as Elizabeth the playwright, author of Diva Studies, a play her late husband Ficré loved, and it was also the swearing-in of Professor Elizabeth Alexander, author of the two irreplaceable essay collections, 2004’s The Black Interior and 2007’s Power and Possibility.

Now we have Elizabeth the memoirist, the poet working in prose, and her best-selling book The Light of the World, which chronicles her nearly twenty-year love affair and life with Ficré, artist and chef, father and friend, a bespectacled man who brought black difference into Elizabeth’s black America, which is most of our America, and if you listen you know that Elizabeth is its true laureate. Ladies and gentlemen, Elizabeth Alexander.

(applause)

Thank you, I have to say the rather eager young man has taken my questions. (laughter) I need them back. Thank you so much. Well, this is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, only because you have given so much of yourself to other people, and it is a rare person who does that without complaint. I never hear you complain, I only hear you reinforce and support people and societies that you love. That’s going to be something that comes back in the conversation as a theme, but I wanted to start really with words, and to talk about your life as an artist, which you sometimes put to the forefront, sometimes you recede from in order to foster the talents of others, but there’s no stopping you now with this book, so let’s talk a little bit about little Lizzie and how did she come to be herself as an artist?

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Little Lizzie was a girl, a child, who dreamed at night very vividly and who would come downstairs to her parents—and thank you for calling their names—and say, “I had the most extraordinary dream,” and if my mother, who you know to be elegant and dry, were here telling the story, she would say, “And so we put down whatever other things we were doing, all else would pause, and you would say what you had seen or been visited with the night before,” and so I think that I give that to my parents, and I never knew that other people didn’t dream wildly or remember their dreams all the time, and it always surprised me. Ficré, the most creative person I ever knew, was not someone who very often remembered his dreams, so that’s probably where it began.

And I think also with listening, listening to the way that people spoke, listening to the different ways that people spoke around me, listening to a Jamaican grandfather with one particular inflection, one particular vocabulary, listening to—and I’ve talked about this before—my father’s great, elegant Harlem swearing that was just like nothing else, thrilling, you know, we would pray for traffic so that we could hear him just, you know, carry on and he does that now, my children think it’s the most entertaining thing you’ve ever seen, and my mother’s tremendously elegant way of speaking and understatement and hearing the traces of Alabama in my grandmother’s speech and seeing also the different kinds of words that she used and would credit to her great teacher at Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., Miss Otelia Cromwell, who years later I discovered was one of the first, I believe the fourth African American woman to earn the PhD and that she received her PhD in English from Yale. So I felt that the person my grandmother would correct my English and say, “That is what Miss Cromwell told us.”

And so, you know, clearly it seemed to me that a circle needed to be closed with beginning to research her work and reading her letters about her time finding her way at Yale in the 1920s, and wanting to be write about black people, and saying to her father, “But certainly I didn’t come here to learn how to do that, so I will let these people teach me Shakespeare and I will then do what I have to do,” which she did in 1931 with her first anthology of African American writing for teachers.

And so I think that, you know, there’s all of that and also reading, you know, also reading, and I think that all of us are children who read and read and read and read, and read everything and read what we’re supposed to and read what we’re not supposed to, and read ahead of ourselves.

HILTON ALS: Yes, read under the desk.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Yes, read under the desk, read in secret, tuck things, you know, beneath the mattress and read I think indiscriminately and just put it all in.

HILTON ALS: Now there was something, an extraordinary moment. I met your mother for the first time recently and there’s something very powerful about her presence and one of the things that I would say was so unique about her was that she was a woman who stood square and she looked you in the eye, and it wasn’t about defiance or being annoyed by your presence, it was just that she was looking to see who you were, and one of the things that I love about your writing, is that, you know, if—we’ll get into the individual volumes, but if you go through Elizabeth’s writing, the female character, whether it’s Elizabeth or someone else that you’re dreaming about, i.e., Toni Morrison and so on, they are women that look you square in the eye, and one of the strengths I feel about your poetry and your essays is you’re looking at us square in the eye and at the same time you want us to tell you who we are, so I’m interested in learning a bit more about the kinds of things you were reading that spoke to you about that kind of directness, emotional connection and directness.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: That is such an interesting observation and I think I can, you know, answer it a little bit obliquely, because when I think about looking directly I think actually about literally looking at people and looking at paintings, looking at art, growing up with art around, growing up with paintings on the wall, many of them by my great uncle, who was the painter Charles Alston, many of them which were made by my mother, who was a very, very accomplished artist before she became a mother, before she became a historian, so she had many amazing lives.

So there were always beautiful things to look at, and to look at again, and to regard with care, and the expectation that you would look and see something different each time, there was that kind of full-on, I think, directness, and I don’t know, I mean all I can think of is a certain kind of, you know, as my grandmother would say, “not raising, that is cattle, but rearing,” you know, a kind of expectation that as black people you don’t break eye contact with anybody, ever, you know, so that very, very keen sense that the world is yours, stand squarely in it, and that that was part of kind of race work and race rhetoric and that to break that would be actually the shame.

HILTON ALS: This is fascinating and a wonderful segue to my next question because one of the things that gets very short shrift in terms of the story of blackness are the many different classes, right, that exist within black America, and Darryl Pinckney’s for instance novel High Cotton was about the black middle class in the Midwest and your family being black, middle-class professionals, did that in certain black worlds make you feel outside of those worlds, similarly did you feel outside of certain white worlds at the Sidwell Friends School, for instance. Because—this is—

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: The Sidwell Friends School.

HILTON ALS: Did you feel outside of certain narratives because of that difference?

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, my grandmother always told us, she didn’t teach us, you know, they weren’t these kind of black people who teach you to be superior to others, in fact that was a kind of a verboten ideology, but she did teach us that if someone showed their racism or, you know, she wouldn’t say showed their ass, you know, but if they did, you were to think of them as limited. “Oh, isn’t that a pity, they are so very limited,” (laughter) she would say. You know, those surviving women, they were serious and cold like that, you know, and then you moved on to the next thing.

HILTON ALS: You help me with that too when I’m going crazy, you just look at me and say—

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Limited. Limited. (laughter) That’s all you need to know and you can’t expend too much energy on it, she would sometimes, she would just put a finger on my forehead, “Limited.” So that’s to say, “Don’t use that brain on figuring this out, because you won’t, because racism has infinite energy and fuel and irrationality, so don’t give it—