http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/2015/06/15/poet-elizabeth-alexander?qt-the_most_=1&mini=2015-05
Poet Elizabeth Alexander
Natalie Valdes | June 15, 2015 12:00 pm
The Light of the World is poet and professor Elizabeth Alexander's
memoir about her life with her husband, artist Ficre Ghebreyesus, and
dealing with his untimely death. It's about dealing with her profound
grief while also healing and moving forward with her teenage sons.
Phil Ponce talks to her about the book.
Read an excerpt.
The Light of the World
A Memoir
By Elizabeth Alexander
I
"Last Night on Earth"
Eight
Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last
breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas
Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore. It is on display at the
Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit, like Galileo’s finger in the church
of Santa Croce, but Edison’s last breath is an invisible relic.
Ficre breathed his last breath into me when I opened his mouth and
breathed everything I had into him. He felt like a living person then.
I am certain his soul was there. And then in the ambulance, riding the
long ride down to the hospital, even as they worked and worked, the
first icy- wind blew into me: he was going, or gone.
“I need to call somebody don’t I?” I asked the ambulance driver, a woman.
“Yes you do,” she said.
II
Honeycomb
Ten
We had fifteen Christmases together. Almost fifteen years of marriage,
sixteen years together, 1996 to 2012. We always said it felt like
longer than it was. I would estimate at the end that we had a twenty-
five- year marriage, and Ficre would agree. That long, that much
struggle, that much jubilee. In our extended family, and family of
friends, two cancers, two heart surgeries, one drug addiction, two
mental hospitalizations, marriages, babies, funerals. Easters and
Thanksgivings. Our friends’ parents and one friend’s son died;
together we went bearing food and hot coffee. Together we went to the
various places of worship in our best black clothes. Three houses, two
cities. One job change, two closed businesses, one started business.
Money went, money came. Several bad boyfriends of nieces, several
good, three lovely husbands of nieces, one lovely wife of a nephew,
six lovely babies. Four homes owned, three sold. Hemorrhoid surgery,
dental surgery. No broken limbs. One political regime change, the end
of one war, the start of another. An East African American U.S.
president. Several refugees. Two U.S. naturalization swearings-in: two
new citizenships.
Together we chose two day- cares, two nannies, fired one nanny in six
days because at one and a half Solo said NO, stayed with the other for
three years and wept when it was time for her to leave us, one nursery
school, two elementary schools, one middle school, one high school. We
planned fifteen Thanksgiving dinners, fifteen Easters, and at last,
one Feast of the Seven Fishes. One Easter Ficre found a sheep farmer
in Cheshire, Connecticut, and had a lamb slaughtered for his sister
Tadu, for her tsebhe— the rich and spicy Eritrean meat stew— and her
roast. We found where we could buy Italian Easter bread shaped in a
cross with hardboiled eggs baked in. Buon Pascua, he’d say, and so
would I.
Three trips to Italy, where we had family and which was our ironic
colonial demi- motherland, each time to different places: Rome,
Venice, Florence, Amalfi, yes, but also Bari, Ceglie, Ferrarra, to see
in-laws and friends. London, Scotland, Spain, Oakland, the diaspora of
our family. Milan awaited, and bella Toscana, and Naples, once the
crime settled down, and Sicilia; he wanted to smell the mint crushed
underfoot. The Alhambra awaited, and the orange blossoms in Southern
Spain in very early springtime.
In the years we were together I wrote four books of poems, two books
of essays, two edited collections, and countless essays and talks. I
taught hundreds of young people African American literature and
poetry, directed a poetry center, and chaired an African American
studies department. He made over eight hundred paintings, countless
photographs and photo collages, and ran two restaurants. Of the plans
that did not come through we wrote menus for other restaurants, plans
for a downtown New Haven arts center, a school for the arts in
Eritrea, a bed- and- breakfast on the Hudson River, a play based on
the life of the magician Black Herman. Each of us made it possible for
the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other
unsurpassingly.
In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that
regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said,
There you are, my love.
IV
Ghost of All Bookstores
Nine
Last night I went into a bookstore for the first time since Ficre
died. Ah, I thought, I have been avoiding this, for he is the ghost of
all bookstores. He is in the history section or the art section or the
gardening section, reading books and piling them up. He would gather
books for the children’s library, more books than they could ever
read, more books than I thought would interest them, and we would fuss
about it. I’d suggest taking a few off the pile. He’d say, That makes
the whole design fall apart. I’d say, where will we put them? He’d
say, we’ll get a bigger house, and then we’d laugh.
My darling you are not in this bookstore. Carrying home a bag of books
I think of all the books I will never know about because you will not
show them to me. I think of the loss of knowledge, all the things I
will never know because you are not here to tell me. I cannot ask
questions, I cannot be reminded. I can no longer say—though I still
do—to the children, “That’s a Daddy question,” when they ask about the
Peloponnesian War, or the Khmer Rouge, or Latin declension, or the
quadratic formula, or how sinkholes are formed on limestone beds. You
of all knowledge, you of all curiosity, god of books and deep
knowledge, enemy of facile pronouncements, Ficre Ghebreyesus, ghost of
all bookstores.
>From the book THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD by Elizabeth Alexander. Copyright
© 2015 by Elizabeth Alexander. Reprinted by permission of Grand
Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
Received on Mon Jun 15 2015 - 12:05:21 EDT