To Free the Captives - by Tracy K. Smith

To catch a poet dipping their toe in the world of prose is a risky business, the verbosity alone could sink you like a stone . And so I came to the curious memoir of US poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, by way of an introduction to her poetry and what I found was a perfectly blended text - part prose, part poetry - that reveals Smith to be a master of both forms.

Smith maps the landscape of her life and world, which is familiar to readers of her poetry, but in the form of a book, she has the time and space to dive into the stories of the past, into the lives of those who came before her. ‘To Free the Captives’ gives her imagination full reign, the space to follow metaphor wherever it leads, to chase logic and ask questions, free from the strictures of poetic meter. Smith picks at the fabric of her history and pulls the threads gently, coiling the stings in her patient hands, feeling the heft of their weight, remaking their lives in her own words. She tells us, there is a difference between the free and the freed. She considers, ‘The framing of the past serves to shore up and justify existing hierarchies of worth, power, and belonging’. 

And so it is that she wanders through the past, introducing us to her ancestors and kin, searching for who she is. She tells us of a nightmare she once had. Waking, ‘I remain afraid of something elemental as my safety and the sanctity of my family. And that this fear extends from history’. In this way Smith explains that is haunted by the collective memory of her ancestors, her people. ‘We repeat’, she tells us. ‘Our voices, our features, our names’. When meditating, they come to her:

     ‘They rise as if from the ground… They grow tall and draw near… One by one they climb down into             me … reclining there like a low boat before them. They flood in.’

Still, in some ways, this book feels like a poem. There is a wisdom in almost every line, echoes that you at once recognise from your own life but which are uniquely part of an American life experience, and especially an African-American life experience.  Through her use of rich imagery, Smith is able to grapple with such metaphysical concerns that another autobiographer might baulk at. But she leads the reader down a path that is fearless, brutal and blindingly truthful, in her search for who she is, and who we all are. 

Similarly, the antithesis of the book’s title, ‘To Free the Captives’, captures something of the poet’s sensibility, constantly balancing, swaying, to an innate rhythm of ebb and flow, that pulls a poem to its ultimate conclusion. Here Smith considers the present and the past, the free and the freed, love won, love lost, despair and hope, endings and beginnings. 

‘Where is the past?’, she asks us. ‘Behind us or up ahead?  It is here. Beside us and within.’ Lines like this, poetic in their shape and form, cannot help but echo in our imagination, lingering for days, as only lines of verse can do.

And in the end, she makes the plea, as if to ask a question that is answered in the book’s title, ‘Oh, My country!… Is there yet a chance that certain words, uttered in the right ways , will land? And detonate?’ For me, this is the key concept in this book. She writes to explore self identity, yes, but also to remake, renew; to reimagine a new America, where change is possible. But first, the past must be dealt with, realities faced. ‘What would you do if I were to tell you that we are, all of us… the Free and the Freed - equally captive in our collective enterprise?’ 

She gives what she seeks a name, calling it ‘hope’. ‘What will save us?’, she asks and then answers, ‘We will save us. We must.’ Smith use of the inclusive ‘we’ unites America in all its diversity, with an imperative energy that is captured in the breathless repetition of ‘w’s and the certainty of sibilance. And when she says it, we believe her. She is a poet, after all, and she knows which way truth blows. 

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

I came to George Saunders’ novel ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ fresh from a few weeks re-reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and while the latter presents death as essentially a lonely, personal experience, Saunders creates an afterlife that is populated with the numberless, riotous dead. Angry, bitter, regretful, people inhabit the Bardo, lingering, for various reasons, in limbo, seemingly with unfinished business tying them to the place.   

His story is concerned generally with the early death of young Willie Lincoln, son of the Civil War President, but it is really the story of Everyman. Like the central character of the medieval play, who is suddenly faced with the character of death calling time on his life, Willie Lincoln too is not ready to leave his life behind. The collection of souls, or beings who the president’s young son meets on the other side, try to convince him that he should move on, but he delays. This is only one part of the problem, the other is how reluctant his father, President Lincoln, is to let him go.

The real genius of this story is how Saunders manages to dazzle us with many truths and realities of life, while presenting the story in a fantastical reality, which is, let’s face it, bizzare and unknowable. Yet, it is because the story is so surreal, that we can focus on the struggles of the characters, as they tell their stories and jostle for position in the cruel life that is the afterlife. In this way, the book reminded me of Samuel Beckett, with a multitude of Didi and Gogos, all waiting for something to happen. And like Beckett, Sauders’s novel feels very like a drama, consisting mostly of conversations, and monologues - it would not be out of place on the stage - although with a cast of thousands - the actors looking like extras straight from the set of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video.

Towards the end of the book Roger Bevins III says:

‘None of it was real; nothing was real.

Everything was real. Inconceivably real, infinitely dear.’

This line, when all is said and done, is everything you need to know about ‘Lincoln and the Bardo’, and everything we need to know about life, if you think about it - and THAT is the power and magic of this book. It will make you want to hug your kids, hold your partner’s hand, and wake up in the morning and feel like you have a million more mornings to wake up to, and also like this is your very last day. The emotion is startling.

Emily Dickinson wrote feverishly during the American Civil War, especially during 1962-3, and so it is no wonder that her poems deal with death, when the war took so many. The character of Miss Isabelle Perkins, who writes letters to her brother about the dead souls that she sees wandering in the cemetery - ‘angels of various shapes and sizes’ - reminds me of Emily Dickinson. Like the poet, she is immobilised in her bedroom, and watches the world go by from her window. I like to think that Saunders was inspired by the reclusive poet, and endowed her with the ability to see those lingering in the Bardo, ‘comfortable having these Dead for company’. And by the book’s end, we feel the same way too. 

If the zombie apocalypse is your thing, you won’t find it in ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’, but you will find a boy and man by the name of Lincoln, struggling to make sense of death in life, and life after death - just like the rest of us really.