Two things about me as a kid: I don’t remember being overly enthusiastic about learning history, and although I was an avid reader (I read a crazy combination of things like Stephen King and Sweet Valley High, for example) I almost never read anything that reflected me, my identity, or people who looked like me, mainly because that literature did not exist or was not readily accessible to me. Certainly those teen romances I read never talked about romance between black teens nor did they not exult the beauty of black guys.
Weird start for a blog post, I know. But as I work through the process of getting ready to publish my second poetry book, both of these things about me are important because this collection largely reflects those two character traits. As a kid, I don’t really remember enjoying history that much…but as an adult, I enjoy it. In particular, I am fascinated by African American history and black history, mainly because it was expressly something that we didn’t learn about in school. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties and was studying abroad (in France, of all places) that I met an older American black woman (we were both studying French) who sat me down and explained to me the particulars of African American history in ways that I had not imagined or even understood before. It was a revelation.
As my second collection of poems gets ready to be published, it finds its voice among the history of Black people. I use my narrative voice to tell just the tiniest fraction of the stories of the struggles that black people have gone through—and “struggles” is an easy word, a light word, a non-combative word to talk about some of those experiences, because we all know that those experiences went far beyond “struggle”.
But in ugliness, one can still always find beauty. In darkness, one can always still find light. In The Bones in the Garden, when we move past horror, there are other things. There is triumph and vindication, and of course, there is love. Always love. Sometimes subtle, sometimes explicit, but there is nothing like the love of a good (black) man. I don’t think they always get enough credit.
Which brings me back to where we started. As I kid, I read a lot of stuff as a kid, but nothing that reflected me or my history as a woman of color. This wasn’t a bad thing per se, because I loved to read and those reading experiences helped expand my imagination and creativity….to the point that I can now write and share stories that reflect me.
Elizabeth Michaud 