The pandemic memoirs began almost immediately, and now comes another kind of offering a searching look at the meaning of the racial catharsis to which the pandemic in some sense gave birth and voice and life. Tracy K. Smith co-edited the stunning book,
There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love: Letters from a Crisis, a collection of 40 pieces that span an array of BIPOC voices from Edwidge Danticat to Reginald Dwayne Betts, from Layli Long Soldier to Ross Gay to Julia Alvarez. Tracy and Michael Kleber-Diggs, who also contributed an essay, join Krista for a conversation that is quiet and fierce and wise. They reflect inward and outward, backwards and forwards, from inside the Black experience of this pivotal time to be alive.
Joy Harjo is the celebrated author of nine books of poetry and the memoir
Crazy Brave. She edited the collection of Native nations poetry,
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. And her most recent album is
I Pray for My Enemies. Joy Harjo was born and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, six generations ago, her ancestors were forcibly relocated from their homelands in Alabama.
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So I actually started reading
Crazy Brave a few months ago, during the pandemic. And I kind of read it like poetry. I read it a little bit at a time and savored it a bit at a time, which was a wonderful way to read it. And in preparing to be with you, I looked at some other interviews you’ve done, and I really want to draw into your sensibility, your gifts of seeing and knowing, which includes vision and dreams and memories that are not contained in this lifetime. And I felt like people don’t really go there with you, although you go there in your writing. For example, yo
Daniel Kahneman’s book
Thinking, Fast and Slow brought his groundbreaking ideas, which he pioneered with his late friend and fellow psychologist Amos Tversky, into mainstream culture and now he’s about to release a new book. He was born in Tel Aviv but spent his childhood in Paris, where he and his family became caught up in Nazi-occupied France. He is a self-described and well-documented constant worrier, and his continuous questioning of himself and others is also a source of his creativity, warmth, and humility. I experienced this when he first sat down a little late for our 2017 interview, with the very reasonable excuse of New York City traffic.
Transcript
Krista Tippett, host: “Remember,” Bryan Doerries likes to say, in both physical and virtual gatherings, “you are not alone in this room, and you are not alone across time.” He is activating an old alchemy for our young century. Ancient stories, and texts that have stood the test of time, can be portals to honest and dignified grappling with present wounds and longings, and callings that we aren’t able to muster in our official places now. Performances of his public health project, Theater of War, have been some of the some of the most generative and repeatedly, surprisingly joyful experiences of my pandemic year. This adventure began in 2008, at first bringing Greek tragedies into mini-modern-amphitheaters where trauma is present military bases and hospitals, prisons, even Guantanamo Bay. It expanded out from there, offering Sophocles and Shakespeare and the Book of Job as crucibles for dwelling, and moving forward, with the particular dramas of our time,
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