ALLISON BOLAH

I believe that my poems work best when violence simmers just under the surface. It’s more frightening, more threatening, to feel it is right beneath this polite, contained exterior, ready to burst. Take the poem “Meditation at Fifty Yards, Moving Target.” It’s a poem about guns and the eerie pleasure of target shooting, the power and the danger. Since gun control is a very bristly topic in this country – everyone has an opinion – our defense go up immediately. I wanted to circumvent all that by backing into the issue.

The personal story behind all this begins with the house fire, too. My husband and I took up target practice when a neighbor approached us after the fire and offered to teach us how to shoot. He said we should at least know something about self-defense. He was a retire high-ranking army officer. He started out from the standpoint of safety – here’s what you have to do to keep from shooting off your own toe; this is what you need to know in order not to hurt anyone. I didn’t want anything to do with the whole thing –  forget it, I don’t want to hold the gun, this is horrible. But as I began firing, I felt something very interesting happening – an immense, unsettling pleasure, a strange sense of power and possibility. Now, I could have sat at my desk and denied those feelings, said no, this is wrong. But that doesn’t mean the sensation doesn’t exist, nonetheless. I think it’s important to acknowledge these kinds of feelings if we’re going to understand anything at all about controlling them.

I’m curious: do you feel like you have an authority over your writing? Or maybe I should ask, do you think that you are a good reader of your own writing? At what point do you let go of something you’ve written, and allow it to make its way in the world?

I think I’m a good reader of my own work. My right hand does know what my left hand is doing. But I wouldn’t imagine that I’m the best reader of my work. I think an intelligent and sympathetic critic can do as well as I can with the text. Some have done better. In response to questions at readings, I sometimes say to the audience member, “Your interpretation is as good as mine,” and I mean this sincerely. The text should have some openness, some volatility, some space for interpretations beyond your own. You send it out, and it’s no longer yours alone. And in writing, the dear wish is always to write something by which you outdistance your ordinary reach. The text is a telescope, or a spacecraft.

Venture out to the vanishing point where art recedes into reality: no “words or things” exist on that horizon, only the visceral stuffs. Reality collapses back onto itself in a mirror image reflecting its own receding into the realm of “art.” Confronting this divide is like tumbling into a vacuum—no language, no images, and the only ‘feeling’ is vertigo. The threat of being pitched to one side or the other is real. At the horizon where art and life blur into a hellish sort of mist, the artist is forced to make some decision about which comes first, the art or the life. There is no correct handling of this dilemma, of course; and the realization of that just confuses matters further. It is a question of primacy, then: do our conceptual and aesthetic decisions prescribe the actions we perform as living humans, or does the life we lead predict the decisions made in the workshop or studio? Of course it’s never as absolute as this; then, it’s a battle of intensities. It’s a question of the degree to which we encourage or allow for the slippage of art into life (or vice versa). And then, maybe it’s just a matter of semantics here, but “allow for” and “encourage” suggest a whole other layer of complexity with which to address this relationship.

I have argued (in previous essays) that in order to truly analyze an artistic practice, the focus must remain on the generative dialogue surrounding and the codependent relationship developed between the artist, the object and the viewership. There, it was a matter of assessing the tension between cultivating desire for discourse and cultivating desire for additional objects. (this was discussed in terms of Foucault’s visibilities and articulabilities, and that finding the limits of each gave way to something like “truth.”) One process begets the next—not through the objects or discourse themselves directly, but the anxiety produced by the interrelationship. Here, I will propose that it is as crucial to examine the interrelationship between the artist’s life and their formal work. If one is to develop a decent analysis of any artist, one must first understand the balance they’ve formed between their system of ethics (as a social entity) and the work that they create for society. And maybe it was just a matter of semantics, but it really calls for an analysis of their particular attitude towards maintaining a balance between aesthetic and ethical values—or more specifically, whether the slippage between art and life is allowed for or if it is encouraged, and to what degree, and also which direction the flow goes for whatever their intentions (and then also, we must examine their intentions for allowing that slippage). It’s quite a daunting task and is rarely successfully undertaken.

When did you figure out that art—with a big “A”—was an option for a lifestyle, versus, say, working for ups?

You know, it took a long time to figure that out, because there wasn’t any precedent in my family for being an artist. Although, ironically, when my mother was younger, she wanted to be a singer, which I found odd because I never thought she had a good voice. [both laugh] But at some point she must have had a good voice. I remember seeing pictures of her from the ’40s, when she’d just gotten married. She was very glamorous, very stylish, and being a singer once must have been a possibility for her. When I started showing artistic talent at a very young age, she was encouraging.

What was your artistic talent?

Drawing, mostly. But I also had a deep interest in literature, which became a big part of what my work is about. But back then I was just filling up notebooks with sketches and drawings. So my mother sent me to pottery classes after school. At this point she had separated from my father. My brother and I were going to private school on scholarship. There wasn’t a lot of extra money, but there was an attitude that money could be spent for anything that bettered us—in that black, working-class, striving kind of way. Culture was betterment. Anything we wanted to read was fine. Pottery classes or trips to the Met were fine. Hundred-dollar sneakers? No.

What year are we talking about?

We’re talking about the late ’60s and early ’70s in New York. But, as I said, my mother really didn’t come from artists. Her famous quote to me was, “The only artists I’ve ever heard of are dead.” The pottery classes were meant to be a part of my overall uplift. I knew what it meant to be sent to art classes, but I still didn’t know anything about being an artist. I graduated from Wesleyan University with a [BA] in art. I was really headed toward an architecture degree, but when I did the requirements for the major, I realized I was more interested in how people live in buildings than in making buildings. I was more interested in the interactions that happened inside the structures. So I got an art degree as a default position. When I got out of school, I went to work proofreading for a law firm. That became the thing that I told my mother I was doing—proofreading—because that was understandable. I had a job.

After college you lived in the city?

Yeah, I lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, painting on the weekends and at night, and working at the law firm during the day. Then I switched up so that I could work 12-hour shifts at the firm on the weekends so I could have days free to paint. But it was almost like I had a secret life, because I wasn’t showing any of my work. It was just in my house. In ’89, I got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. That’s when I started to get into group shows. Suddenly I sort of “came out” as an artist [laughs] . . . I said to myself, “If the government thinks I’m an artist, I must be one.”

That was when they still gave individual grants.

Yes. And they learned their lesson. [both laugh] They don’t trust artists anymore. Now the money has to go through arts organizations. But, yeah, back then you could get a grant, and I got $5,000—a huge amount of money. It was a turning point for me because I could either keep working at the law firm or I could cut back and think about how to become an artist rather than just make art, you know?

I used a distinctive methodology in preparing this manuscript which illustrates how thought and action can work together in generating theory. Much of my formal academic training has been designed to show me that I must alienate myself from my communities, my family, and even my own self in order to produce credible intellectual work. Instead of viewing the everyday as a negative influence on my theorizing, I tried to see how the everyday actions and ideas of the Black women in my life reflected the theoretical issues I claimed were so important to them. Lacking grants, fellowships, release time, or other benefits that allow scholars to remove themselves from everyday life and contemplate its contours and meaning, I wrote this book while fully immersed in ordinary activities that brought me into contact with a variety of African-American women. Through caring for my daughter, mentoring Black women undergraduates, assisting a Brownie troop, and engaging in other “unscholarly” activities, I reassessed my relationships with a range of African-American women and their relationships with one another. Theory allowed me to see all of these associations with fresh eyes, while concrete experiences challenged the worldviews offered by theory. During this period of self-reflection, work on this manuscript inched along, and I produced little “theory.” But without this involvement in the everyday, the theory in this volume would have been greatly impoverished.

It could be by my own unconscious design, but I am incredibly isolated from all of the people, places, things, and ideas that I think of as being relevant to me (well, except for the moods and needs of the people around me, the sea, the atmosphere of this place, and the celestial rotations – that, by themselves, aren’t enough to build a life; I know that now).

Regardless, when we do talk about community, I think we think only about proximity and not the constant, conscious negotiation of our relationships with one another – and not just negotiations to neutralize conflict, either.

I think of myself as Black – and not just because that’s how the world thinks of me; my Blackness is a cultural inheritance, an in-group experience. Yet, paradoxically, because the world treats me like I’m Black, my connection to African culture is reinforced – that culture is how I respond not only to my community, but to outsiders as well: my approach to nature, to people, to learning, to loving, to community, has an underlying voice that says, “this is what WE do: WE don’t exploit, WE don’t oppress. If WE do those things, either WE have taken a wrong turn somewhere and forgotten OURSELVES, or WE have been left no other choice…”

I don’t know much in the way of specifics about the roots of my ties to nature, my acceptance of people, my approach to learning, the elasticity of my love, my sense of community. For me, these things are never about ownership or dominance or mastery, they’re never about control – or, if they are, then I’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere, forgotten myself, or I’ve been left no other choice.

Yet, I have a sense that, with each generation, our connection to those roots weaken if they’re not actively tended. First, my family tended my roots. Then they were tended at Howard and in DC. Now, they’re tended in my every interaction with my students.

Each February, I pay closer attention to where Blackness is in my life, how it’s moving, what it’s saying.

In 2014, in the middle of writing my Thesis, I posted something by a Black American artist or writer on my website every day that February. At first, I didn’t think I could come up with 28 different individuals, but I found way more than 28 and I was heartened. However, I had to search to gather artists and writers and their work.

Last year, I watched what others around me did, and I realized that any project of the quality I needed, I’d have to do myself.

This year, I decided to focus on living Black American artists and writers and how they approach the work of making art and writing. I selected artists and writers whose work is connected formally, conceptually, or emotionally to my own. Again, I’ve found way more than 28¹ such people. The only people I repeated were Glenn Ligon and Patricia Hill Collins… I can’t explain why, though².

Anyway, the whole thing has shaped up to be a pretty amazing compendium that I think any Black artist or writer might find helpful if they’re looking for the types of models Alice Walker thinks are necessary for artists to grow.