A Conversation with Aracelis Girmay

© Yekaterina Gyadu

Aracelis Girmay is the author of four poetry collections, including the newly published Green of All Heads, and was named a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2018. Collaborations include picture books, a chapbook with artist Valentina Améstica, and the anthology So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (2023). Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. She teaches at Stanford University.

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Rachel Richardson: Let’s start with the beginning of Green of All Heads, because it’s a striking beginning. The book begins in the intensity of family grief, and then slowly moves outward, taking in larger parts of the world. But everything is filtered through that experience, which is the sudden and random death of your father and his friend in a car accident. And then we start to put together broader lineages between grandparents and other relations, and your own children. I was curious if the book actually began chronologically with the story of your father. Or did that shape, the concentric circles, happen later as you thought about it?

Aracelis Girmay: I came upon the structure of the book, as it is now, pretty late. There was a while where I thought it was going to be much longer, and in really discrete sections. And then, I don’t know, probably in the winter of last year, I thought, let me pull some of these things out and see what I can make with less scaffolding. And it began to be a whisper of a structure. I think “December” was one of the last poems I wrote. And it turned out to be in the very beginning, the first poem, and then that section that’s explicitly thinking about my dad and [his friend] Solomon and his death. I kept moving that into different places. There was a moment where it was in the middle, and then I thought, this feels like the eye of the book, e-y-e. The second eye—the first being in “December,” which felt kind of like an intention—and then the second being what was axiomatic about the book and what I then saw everything through, which was mourning.

RR: So as the book moves outward from that beginning, you describe the way the machinery of capitalism interacts even with a funeral. It puts a price on things, limits the number of guests who can mourn—you even have to think about the politics of the corporation that runs the funeral home, as you wonder what you’re funding when you pay for it. So I was thinking about that: the family exists in its love and grief and storytelling. But then there’s also the story of power in the way the state intrudes. Can you talk about how those two forces are at play in the poems?

AG: I started taking notes for this book, even though I didn’t know that that’s what was happening, when my son was first born, and then, immediately after, my dad was sick. In that time, I had a second child, and my brother had a child, and so the family was growing and changing. I was—we were—in the middle of these two generations, one aging parent and these babies. My dad was killed in an accident. It had nothing to do with his illness, but he had a massive stroke right after my first child was born. So for him to learn to speak again and walk again and see again, as my child was a baby, and also learning to walk and speak and to see—I felt these kinds of echoes across time. To see the two of them in each other was really humbling and moving. Actually, it felt like a great comfort, even though there was so much grief and ache at the center. It was a great comfort to feel the ways that we go on in each other. It was also very strange to experience all of those private, intimate moments with strangers and doctors in the relative public of the hospital. And so to feel the mountain of these experiences, these wide open vulnerable moments, and to realize the extent to which there’s a hard edge of bills and people’s time or lack of time or interest in you that you are also encountering can be very alienating. And so I was faced with a deep regard for what it means to try to be present in a second, and to feel moved along by these forces where money is the thing that decisions are based on.

I’ve always been interested in these questions of intimacy and pressures of the state and imagination, and the extent to which our imaginations are shaped by the state. These are questions that are important to me that I have thought a lot about across my books, but the births of my kids and then eventually the death of my father—and before that, his illness—brought me into a new dimension with these questions.

RR: You use the language of ownership to talk about the death, like, “we don’t own this death.” We pay for it with the father’s money, and yet, we’re limited in how we can mourn: how long and how many people. It just seems we’re given the wrong terms for the thing at hand, the wrong container for human feeling. But you also offer a powerful counterpoint in language, and in those places where you talk about your father losing language and your own subsequent confusion with language. It feels like a way of being bound to him, being empathetic across these borders. You called it “echoes of bodily things”—the ways that we are in each other. And when things change, when someone passes, it’s just a movement of that balance. 

One thing that interested me was how imagery seems to weave through people’s perceptions, rather than being confined to a single person’s experience of a thing. In one example, you talk about your daughter who can’t understand that when she wakes up from a dream, her brother, who sleeps in the same room, hasn’t also just dreamed it. Your speaker agrees with the brother that the girl’s perception is wrong, but my sense in the book is that you actually kind of agree with her. You have brought us into this kind of shared perceiving. 

AG: I love that. It feels connected to the poem that records this thing that happened to me after my dad’s stroke, which is that I kept mixing up pronouns and who what happened to. The surprise of what a major experience can do to one’s language. I hadn’t experienced anything like that ever before. In the poem that you’re talking about, with one child asking the brother if he remembers the dream, I do feel I know what she means. More than anything, it’s like rooting for the belief that what is happening in our proximity is far stranger than what we imagine. And, I think about a thinker like Hélène Cixous, whose work I love: she begins one of her essays talking about a fairy tale. It’s the fairy tale of the daughters whose shoes are worn out every night, as if they had been dancing. Cixous is very interested in the significance of there being a doorway under one of the daughter’s beds. In the text Cixous is thinking about dreams and connecting dreaming to there being a doorway under the bed. And I am also interested in this question, What is a dream? We know so little about dreams. But also: Child, what do you think a dream is? And, if you imagine that we’re all there for it, what does it mean to co-make a dream, to remember what happened in another person’s sleep? Like, the hue of the question, when we take her seriously. It feels like there’s poetry there.

RR: There’s another poem where the speaker leaves her mother, and then the mother breaks a bone, and you say, “Never mind whose bone it was.” So, it’s like an argument that we become each other and that barriers between family members are all permeable. The way that you did that in pronoun use, how slippery that was in the story of your father, felt really organic: “Sometimes, instead of dad, I said I” and “now so many of him are gone.” That felt like an accurate way to share the emotional confusion as you went through it, in the sense that there are no clear borders between things. Or people.

AG: I’m right now reading Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds. McKittrick is a Black feminist geographer who is, among other things, thinking about the importance of language in placemaking. Reading McKittrick has helped me to think more deeply and capaciously about my mother and her family’s practices. My great grandfather died when I was six. For many years, he had worked on the Santa Fe train. After his death, my grandmother happened to live near the train tracks, and sometimes a Santa Fe train would pass by. This was after he had passed, and they would call us all to the window to wave to him. They’d be like, It’s Granddaddy! And we’d all run and wave. I’ve been thinking about this, maybe for the last seven years or so, because I was driving somewhere and I was like, Oh, Granddaddy. On the one hand, I know he—in his human form—is not there. And on the other hand, It’s Granddaddy, hello!, and the feeling that he’s suddenly present, is also real. I think my mom cultivated this in us. Somewhere along the way, culturally, this is a practice that she inherited, and I’m just now beginning to recognize some of those traces in what I value. I’m beginning to take it all seriously as a set of spiritual beliefs and imaginative strategies that have to do with being in conversation with people across thresholds in a way that I didn’t understand for a long time and had dismissed. I have a different sense now of what they all made possible and who they made it possible for us to know.

RR: How about in a literary sense? You say something beautiful at the end of the book: “I was a body thrummed by the languages of others,” and you cite some of your influences. Throughout the book there’s great openness to influence. Can you talk about a couple of the strongest influences in the book in terms of poets or formal approaches?

AG: I think about Kamau Brathwaite—the porousness that he makes possible, the way that his scale feels, poem to poem, sometimes line to line, like it’s dilating, like it can get so tiny and then so wide open. A stone from one place, you might reach it and throw it into another place. His porousness and possibility I learn a lot from. I think about Jean Valentine, whose voice—or voices—I feel led by more than ever in the new work that I’m making. I don’t think anybody would recognize it, but there’s something structurally happening in my new book: an interest in spokenness, but also in making a text that is written language and silence. Something I learned from Jean is that these currents that run beneath the couplets, or the stanzas, might then poke their heads out later. I’m thinking about her Lucy cycle. I’ve loosened up a lot, listening to Jean, and become more interested in how to leave a trace of something at the top of a poem and then pull that thread through later, but not show the stitching all the way through. 

RR: The silences are not mute in this book—they’re doing as much as the language in piecing things together and telling this experience or this way of being.  

One thing I have thought about myself as a writer since the 2016 election—and this book springs from that time too—is that my sense of collective experience has ruptured. It was very hard for me to write for a long time after that because I had felt so alienated from my country that I wondered how I could speak at all. I’ve thought a lot about the power of using a “we” in poetry, and how it can make a claim that we do still share the world. I wonder how you think about your poetics in relation to that sort of broader community, and whether it’s changed for you in the years of this book.

AG: When I was in June Jordan’s archives, over a decade ago now, I found several loose sheets of paper where she was working on a revision. And I remember her working with the word “we” very deliberately—when it was going to come in, how she was going to use it—which is so interesting to me because her work so often involves thinking about the collective and what we can imagine together.

RR: It can become a big political claim, the act of taking back power.

AG: I guess I feel different ways about “we,” but especially the years of this book where I was wondering about my relationship to family, what it means to belong to a family, and what it means not to belong to a family. I’m already distrustful of the idea of a nation. I’m distrustful, and at the same time, I am the daughter of people who worked towards Eritrean liberation and independence, who saw the value of the dream of independence, which had to do with the right to one’s cultural and linguistic expression, the right to one’s ancestral lands, and it takes vigilance for the vision of freedom and self determination, especially when one is in struggle and under threat, not to become nationalism. When I was making this book, I felt smothered by Trump’s vision and his version of nationalist language, which, during his first term, still felt shocking. I felt like I had to work on the discipline of not being absorbed in brutality and terror and what that was doing to my imagination, which was particularly open because of the birth of my children and my father’s illness. And I asked, How do I turn toward the details? How do I turn toward the beauty of a single flower? How do I write a love poem that’s trying to turn away from these reprehensible views towards what I love? Still today, I’m trying to work on this, to remember so that my eye is not filled entirely with what there is to fight against. But also, what there is to work toward and for and beside.

RR: I felt that strongly rendered in “You Are Who I Love.” That poem felt like a demand for love, clear seeing, and not being consumed by rhetorical bombardment. But, it’s through looking at these boys having a life, looking at all these things that are worth loving, and your attention to the world around you and people that you know. That poem is really beautiful.

AG: Thank you. That poem happened outside of the making of the poem. Usually in language, I will happen upon a question that makes me ask, Do I believe that? Or actually, What is the complexity, or even the story that I think that I know? What don’t I know? There are these questions that I usually work out in language. But with that poem, everything I wanted to say, in the way that a poem can help you observe your tendencies, was giving my energy and force towards something I did not want to give my energy and force toward. So then I was like, How, outside of the poem, do I enter? Where do I want to enter? Is it a thing I want to enter or exit? The beginning point was the changing of the mind, and then language happened after, which is very, very unusual for me.

RR: It has that force of the anaphora “you” that’s repeated so many times as a way to let language fuel it, but that’s so interesting that it came from the other side.

This book feels very continuous in its movements, but I noticed that across its poems and sections, you actually have many different approaches. You have a prose-poem-type line, you have the single-stanza left-justified long poem. You have poems that have a lot of white space and interesting punctuation. You have a sort of conversation between characters that reads like a play. I’m wondering about the diversity of your approach here. Where are these forms coming from? Tell us about figuring out the shape of these things. 

AG: I read so much and list, in the book, my different influences. I am interested in getting to know a poem by moving it across shapes. I’m thinking of Denise Levertov and her essay on organic form. Based on—in the beginning—intuition, I’ll start making. Sometimes, things will come to me as lines, like, I know that this is the line, and this is the break. But most of the time, I’ll hear inside of myself a phrase. There will be some music that I’m interested in or a turn of phrase, and then I’ll put it down and play with it. I think what I’m interested in are these sounds. But what am I actually trying to say? What happens when I break this line here, versus here? Once I have some drafts that are built like that, I’ll pull it through different forms, and I’ll notice, This feels like there’s a pattern underneath here that I was not aware of. And then I’ll try to push it more towards a received form and then back out of it. It’s almost like stretching, like doing different stretches. And then as I do that, I start to realize, Oh, I think the break here is desire or longing. So where do I want those longings to live in the sentence? Or how do I make this phrase feel alive and charged as an utterance, even though it’s part of another phrase? Sometimes white space will be the thing that helps that to happen. 

Gwendolyn Brooks is somebody who I learn from. I don’t think it’s obvious, but there’s something about her tautness that I’m interested in. Especially for compression, I’ll go to “The Anniad” to see how she was working and sometimes that will help me to understand what is possible and what I might be after. 

I try to pay attention to my own intuition and sound and the logic of the structure. Sometimes, I want the lines to be prayers, or assertions, but I don’t imagine that somebody else would know that. And then other times, it’s just, I’m after a kind of orality and tumble.

RR: I was going to end by asking you about an exercise that you do, although I feel like you’ve sort of just given it to me—this idea of taking a poem through different shapes. Is there any other exercise that you do to open yourself to language?

AG: One of my favorite experiments that I love to do with students, and I write alongside them, is about associative play. I can’t now remember the name of the Mahmoud Darwish poem that works like a nesting doll. I give a list prompt: write down a household object, then something shiny you find outside. Five prompts like that, and then take three minutes and let each one be your starting point. Inside of that is what? The idea is that you might find anything inside of another thing. It could be something bigger than that thing: a whale inside of a tambourine. It could be something seeable, or invisible. A memory, a scent. It could be a question. It could be a material object. And you write without censoring yourself.

I think that this can help us to wonder about the distinct and personal threads of associations we each move with, the threads between things. I always feel surprised by what comes up.