Reflection: The Light of the World

In a quest to read the books I missed last year, I prepared a list. On that list Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World is listed third and next to it in parentheses, “First Lady.” I unabashedly took note of her favorite book of the year and upon reading its first paragraph, felt the familiar excitement of knowing there is so much left to read. “Poetry logic is my logic,” the author explains, and the book is as close to poetry as prose can be. Here is the first paragraph:

“The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.”

The Light of the World is a moving portrait of the author’s husband——an impressive man named Ficre Ghebreyesus——their love story, and how she copes with his sudden death. She discusses Africa, art, flowers, and food (there are recipes); she annotates poems on death; she recalls dreams; she introduces an endless stream of family and friends; she shares the most intimate details of marriage (“We shared days I can only call divine,” she writes).

As I neared the book’s end, I prolonged the inevitable by flipping back through the pages, revisiting scenes and scanning for marks I made. “Memories are what you no longer want to remember,” Joan Didion writes in Blue Nights, her own memoir of loss. But perhaps in their very ability to awaken the past, memories alone are redemptive. Within his wife’s prose, there is still Ficre, his presence strong.

Reflections on death, especially ones written so beautifully, can be tricky to process. As a reader it can be tempting to romanticize heartache, to become lost in its reverie. But there is no such luxury in The Light of the World. Love and loss sit side-by-side only to emphasize each other, to draw out each other’s extremes. “Ficre everywhere, Ficre nowhere,” she writes, and the magnitude of that is felt on every page.

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The Light of the World
By Elizabeth Alexander
Published 2015 by Grand Central Publishing

Currently Reading: Between the World and Me

I encountered Ta-Nehisi Coates on two separate occasions before picking up his book. The first encounter was in San Francisco; I was in my friend’s bedroom with nothing to do but run my eyes over her bookshelf, up and down, left and right, and I noticed a copy of The Atlantic with its infamous cover story, “The Case for Reparations.” The second encounter was in the August issue of Rolling Stone (what do our magazine subscriptions say about us?) that features a Q&A with Coates, and this recollection stuck with me:

“I remember sitting in a library at Howard University and reading The Fire Next Time in one session. It was such a pleasurable experience, to be lost in a work of art. And in this age, where the Internet is ubiquitous, it’s very hard to have that experience. I had this vision of some 19-year-old kid in a library somewhere, picking this book up and disappearing for a while. That was all I wanted.”

Coates’ Between the World and Me is divided into three parts, each styled as a letter to his son. The book is a historical and personal study of race in America: “Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world,” and the outgrowth of this belief is racism (p. 7). He continuously contrasts his upbringing to “the Dream,” which involves “perfect houses with nice lawns,” “treehouses and Cub Scouts,” and in general a profound detachment from racial injustice. When describing a friend he meets at Howard University, Coates seems to also describe the mission of his book:

“He was, like me, from one of those cities where everyday life was so different than the Dream that it demanded an explanation. He came, like me, to [Howard University] in search of the nature and origin of the breach” (p. 49).

I read to expand my experiences, to learn and to feel. Between the World and Me offers all of those things and also reads beautifully, each word carefully chosen, each sentence carefully woven. I’ve just finished the first part, and I have a feeling there is far to go.