March 8, 2023 • 46 mins
Author and poet Clint Smith joins Ben and Khalil to talk about his new collection of poetry, “Above Ground.” They also discuss his previous book, “How the Word Is Passed,” a series of essays evaluating how America reckons with and memorializes slavery.
To learn more about Clint Smith and order his books, go to his website: https://www.clintsmithiii.com/
Further reading:
Tyre Nichols Wanted to Capture the Sunset - Clint Smith, The Atlantic
Monuments to the Unthinkable - Clint Smith, The Atlantic
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushing. Oh, I usually bring the dog in so that
I can control his barking. So I'm professional best friends
or dogs. Yeah, that's why he's not making it to
season three. Khalil, you know co host? All Right, I'm back.
(00:38):
Is also my audition. I'm Khalil Jibrad Muhammad. I'm Ben Austin.
We're two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a
historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of
my best friends are some of my best friends are Hey.
(00:58):
On this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the
absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country. Yeah. Man,
talk about deeply divided. I mean today we're talking to
Clint Smith, a poet and a writer. He is helping
us unpack some of the most divisive, nasty stuff in
our collective memory, going to historical sites. He's using poetry
(01:21):
to really unpack the meaning and emotion behind how we
talk about the past. Yeah. Yeah, so Clint Smith. He
has a new collection of poetry out Above Ground. It's
out in March. He's also a staff writer for the Atlantic,
and he also wrote this book of nonfiction called How
the Word Has Passed And You talked about him sort
(01:41):
of you know, grappling with the most divisive stuff. But
he's such a beautiful writer. Like when you read his writing,
it feels moving and even uplifting, like it's it's it's
enjoyable to engage with all of his writing. Yeah. Yeah,
so let's talk to Clint. This is going to be great.
(02:12):
I was just thinking about the first time I met Khalil.
It was on the train from the airport, that's right.
And I remember because you were very serious, you know,
like like well I was, you know, I was like, oh, snap,
that's Khalil Jabrah Muhammed. I was like, you know, I
don't have my book on me because so I was
(02:35):
like I had to. I try to. I was trying
to be too cool for school. So so today we're
talking to Clint Smith, who has a new book out
Above Ground. It's a book of poetry, a wonderful book
of poetry that in so many ways continues your meditation
on how to reconcile sort of the realities of a
(02:57):
of a world that doesn't guarantee a whole lot, and
what that means to think about the stories we pass on, which,
of course, to me, the continuity between your your your
first first book of nonfiction, not your first book of poetry,
but your first book of nonfiction, which precedes Above Ground,
which comes out this month, is how the word has passed.
(03:19):
And I'm just so so excited you know that you're
doing this work. I remember talking to you about your
dissertation and thinking about the many choices and past you
could travel down. Yeah, and maybe Clint, I'll just add
to that. I mean, I think of the three of
us being writers, all of us writing and kind of
grappling with this country and invariably grappling with race in
(03:41):
this country, and doing it in different ways and with
different kinds of writing. And just to throw it on
you like to, let's talk about poetry. Like like Khalil
and I write nonfiction. Also, we don't write poetry. You know,
why do you turn to poetry? You know? How is
that part of your writing? Your writing self? For me,
(04:04):
poetry is the act of paying attention. Forces me to
pay attention to a moment, an idea, a feeling, a sentiment,
a period of time in ways that I might not
otherwise do if it is both the creation of art,
but it is also the mechanism through which I do
(04:27):
my best thinking. It's the sort of excavation of again
a moment in time and allows me to sort of
create a time capsule of how who I was and
how I was thinking about these ideas, these moments. And
it's almost the same way that like a photographer, you know,
(04:48):
might take a photo of a tree. Right. It can
be a tree that you walk by every single day
of your life. But if you stop and you take
a photograph of the tree, or you zoom in on
a specific leaf on that tree, you'll see that it's actually,
you know, several different shades of green. You'll see the
whole that a caterpillar bit through. I'll see the edges,
(05:10):
you know that the us as like you know, summer
turns to fall. It just allows you to to pay
attention to that which you otherwise might encounter every day,
but with a different level of intentionality. Bring it, Clint,
bring it. Yeah, that is some impressive wordsmithing, but really,
(05:31):
I mean all jokes aside. What you're saying is poetry
is your first draft of expressing what you're living. That's
exactly right, Khalil. I mean in your new collection above Ground,
so much of that where you just said that careful observation,
the commemorating of a moment is about your children. And
(05:54):
many of the poems are written in second person to
are you? Who are are your two children? And Khalil
and I are both parents, are both fathers. Our kids
are older than yours now and yeah, and like, you know,
why do that? I mean, you know, what does it
mean that you're doing that as a parent and sort
of you know, taking care. It's not a leaf, it's
(06:15):
your child. And how you read to them at night,
or how you how you see them process a certain moment,
These these fleeting aspects of parenthood. Yeah, for sure. You know,
I think coming out of my last book, How the
Word Has Passed, which is thinking about how different historical
sites across the country reckon with or failed reckon with
(06:35):
their relationship to the history of slavery. Um. You know,
I I spent several years thinking about and researching and
traveling to sites of of enslavement. You know, it was
sites of torture, sites of trauma, sites of of a
sort of inexplicable human suffering. And what happened is that
(07:01):
as I was researching How the Word Has Passed, and
traveling all these different places, my wife and I were
starting our family. So now my son is five going
on six, my daughters three going on four. And when
I was in these places, inevitably, and people who've read
how the words passle know inevitably, so much of how
I was processing these spaces was tied to and animated
(07:24):
by being a father and being like and having that
become a new part of my identity. So when I'm standing,
you know, in a cabin at Whitney Plantation in Louisiana,
and I'm thinking about what it means to stand in
and have my feet on the same wooden planks, within
the same structure that generations of enslaved people slept in themselves.
(07:47):
You know, I'm thinking now of, you know, the sort
of torture of slavery, not only through the prism of
the spectacle of physical brutality, but also family separation, right
And I remember specifically standing in that place and thinking
about what would it be like if I put my
kids to sleep and I woke up the next day
and my children were gone, and I had no idea
(08:09):
what had happened to them. I had no idea where
they went, I had no idea if I would ever
see them again. And it's a sort of unfathomable sort
of cruelty, a sort of unfathomable sort of emotional terrain
to even have to imagine. And I had those sorts
of moments that all these different types of places all
across the country. And part of what shape the desire
(08:32):
to write Above Ground is that I was thinking so
much about the experience of parenting in the context of
enslavement that I wanted to and in the context of
what it means to be part of a lineage of
enslaved people and the descendants of enslaved people, and how
(08:54):
to what it means that my children are the descendants
of these people who are in these cabins, who are
on this land. But I think all the time about
how the black experience in this country, as much as
it is fundamentally important, as you all know and think
about all the time, it is fun mentally important to
take seriously and engage with and struggle with the history
of violence and oppression that's been enacted on black people.
(09:17):
And the experience of being a black person in this
country is not singularly defined by that trauma, by that violence,
by that oppression. It's far more expansive than that. It's
far more diverse than that. It's far more It stretches
into joy, it stretches into wonder. And I wanted to
make sure that I was writing poems that reflected the
(09:40):
totality of my own thinking. Right, So I do take
seriously and think about this history all the time. And
like I love watching my kids watch a ladybug take
flight for the first time. I love having a dance
party with my kids in the middle of the kitchen,
like I love you know, all of these different parts
of of who I am and how I make sense
(10:03):
of my own experience in the world. And so this
was an attempt to think about how we hold both
the social tumults and historical suffering alongside a sense of wonder,
a sense of awe, a sense of joy. Um, And
what it means to watch your kids, you know, these
(10:24):
tiny little humans here sort of discover the world for
the first time. Yeah, now that's a that's very powerful
and evocative. So could you share, um? Could you could
you read one of the poems from from Above Ground Force.
I'd be happy to given that I was talking about
(10:44):
the sort of writing into a space of joy. Um,
let me just do this this other one. That's all right.
Dance party. Sometimes in the evening, after dinner, after spaghetti
has been slurped and I have bribed the broccoli into
their bellies, I give both of my children the look
(11:05):
when my eyes meet theirs. They know what time it is.
They push in their chairs, they stretched their legs, and
we moved the table to the far end of the
dining room to clear space for what we all know
is coming. Alexa play the post dinner dance party playlist,
and within seconds, Martha WASH's booming voice rolls like thunder
over our bodies. Everybody danced. Now. The electronic keyboard and
(11:29):
the drums meet in the middle of the room like
two dinosaurs ready to claim this kitchen as their own.
Immediately the jumping begins, and my daughter is flinging her
limbs like an offbeat octopus, hands slapping the air behind
her as if she is trying to smack anyone who
enters her sacred space. I turned around and my son
is doing the robot or is being eaten by a robot,
or is trapped in a universe where robots take over
(11:51):
the bodies of little boys and peanut butter pajamas. Nonetheless,
there is a robot somewhere, and my children, bless them,
have not yet learned how to clap on the two
and four, So I laugh but also cringe as their
small bodies make a mockery of the melody around them.
Now halfway through the song, everyone is jumping, and I,
(12:12):
caught up in the ecstasy of this moment, fall to
the ground and convince this no longer young body that
it is a good idea to start doing the worm.
And when my children see me, their eyes become pools
of possibilities, and it is clear that they see this
as a clarion call to climb onto my back. And
now here we are. This strange trifecta is unlikely trio
a robot and an octopus riding the back of a
(12:33):
worm who will certainly need some tylan, all before bed.
And it is in this moment that their mother comes home.
And when she opens the door, everyone is screaming. The
speakers are blasting, and the percussion is shaking every wall
around us. We look up at her, and she looks
down at us, and we have no explanation for this
strange scene. Only an invitation for her to join. Right,
(13:01):
but we're going to take a quick break. We'll be
back with more Clint Smith in a minute. All right,
(13:24):
we are back on Some of my best friends are Clint.
That that poem is is all the things you said
about sort of being immersed in your in the life
of your family and to find the beauty and joy
in these details and how they're I don't know they
but they're expanded. Um. It makes me think too of
a recent essay you wrote for The Atlantic where you
(13:47):
wrote about Tyree Nichols, who was recently murdered. Yeah, you know,
so this this essay you're talking about is about um
for those who might not be familiar, it's it's thinking
about Tyree Nichols um and his love of sunsets, you know,
And he and his life are a reminder of the
plurality and the heterogeneity of the black experience in this country. Right.
(14:10):
I think it will be so easy for somebody maybe
to hear his name and to make a set of
assumptions about who he is, where it comes from, what
his interests are, what he was into, and that largely
for him is not the case. And I think, you know,
one of the things that I was most struck by,
and the sort of aftermath of his death and the
(14:32):
subsequent video was this quote from his mother where she
talked about how much he loved going to the skate
park in the evening at dusk and watching the sunset.
And there was this photo that his brother had started
sharing of Tyree taking a getting out of his car
as the sun was setting just beyond the horizon and
(14:54):
sort of taking a selfie with this sunset in the background.
And I, you know, as I talked about in the essay,
it made me think about this painting by Van Gogh
that I had seen. And van Gogh similarly had this
love of sun sets and tried to capture them in
all sorts of ways. And and I there was a
moment where I had stumbled on it, not because I'm
(15:15):
you know, a well learned art historian or anything. It's
because I was googling sunsets to draw with my with
my kids, and and there was you know, his van
Gogh wrote this letter to his brother where he talked
about attempting to capture the beauty of the sun setting
before it crossed over the horizon, before you know, this
(15:36):
fleeting thing that is both so quotitian and yet so miraculous,
wanting to capture that through his work. And I saw
the same thing in Tyree, and heard the same thing,
and saw it in his photo, and heard it in
his mother's voice when she talked about his love of
going to the skate park to watch the sunset every evening.
(15:57):
And so I think in in these moments, I try
to I try my best to say something that is
less centered on though who murdered this person, and more
on an attempt to remember the person as a person,
(16:22):
remember the person as a human. Yeah, yeah, thank you
for that, Clint, that essay, it is extremely powerful. I
actually want to shift gears a little bit, and I
want to talk about another work of yours, the book
you released in twenty twenty one, a work of nonfiction,
How the Word Is Passed, a reckoning with the history
of slavery across America. You know, it's this series of essays,
(16:46):
like these trips you go on, you go to these
sites of memory, these sites of memorializing. And for me,
you know, as somebody who writes long form features, magazine features,
reading this book, it felt a lot like like eight
reporting trips You know, for a magazine and where you're
(17:07):
there as the the seeing eye of the reporter that
we can do in those kind of pieces, and so
the experiences could be kind of you you're both bringing
back the information of a place, but also this kind
of seeing eye of taking everything and it's immediated through
your own experiences. I wondered how you conceived of the
book in that sense. Did you did you think of it,
you know, related to your magazine work, did you think
(17:29):
of it related to um, you know, how your role
would be and sort of using yourself in this sense,
like like even in a kind of move, a narrative,
a storytelling move. Yeah. No, I really appreciate that question.
And it's interesting because so the book came out in
June twenty twenty one, and it was fascinating when when
all the reviews started coming out, there was this everybody
(17:52):
started saying like poet and journalist Clint Smith goes to
these different historical sites. And I was like, who's a
journalist talked about? Like what? Like it was like like
a magazine, right, I was like, what like it? It's
so interesting because like I I only started working at
the Atlantic in twenty twenty September twenty twenty. And this
(18:13):
was after I turned in the book. And I had
never I hadn't worked in media before, Like I was
a graduate student, uh my PhD at Harvard. Yeah, so
what so what were your models? Like? What then? What
were you what were you thinking about as models for
this trip? Yeah, for these eight trips? I should say,
I think that writing this book taught me how to
(18:35):
be a journalist. It taught me how to be a
writer of narrative nonfiction. It taught me and I think
what I what I tried to do was just I
kind of just looked up, like, what are the best
examples of narrative nonfiction UM that have been published? And
so spent a lot of time, you know, reading the
(18:55):
work of folks like obviously the one of the other
Sons as Bell Wilkinson, sort of stands on its own
at the at the zenith of the genre UM and
and I kind of was learning as I go. And
because originally it wasn't imagined as a narrative nonfiction book,
(19:15):
I thought that it was going to be my second
collection of poetry, the first being Counting Descent, right, the
first being Counting Descent, And I thought that this one
would be my next collection, because the origin story of
the book is that in twenty seventeen, I watched several
Confederate statues come down in my hometown in New Orleans,
statues with PGT. Buregard, Jefferson Davis, Roberty Lee. And as
(19:36):
I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking
about what it meant that I grew up in a
majority of black city in which there were more homages
to enslavers than there were to enslave people, and thinking about, well,
what are the implications that what does it mean that
to get to school I had to go down Robert E.
Lee Boulevard, to get to the grocery store, I had
to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway, that my middle school
was named after a leader of the Confederacy, that my
parents still live on a street today named after someone
(19:57):
who owned over one hundred and fifteen slave people. Because
the thing is, we know that symbols and names and
iconography aren't just symbols. They're reflective of the stories the
people tell, and those stories shaped the narratives that communities
car times. Narratives shape public policy, and public policy is
what shapes the material conditions of people's lives. So it's
you know, and that's not to say that you just
take down a statue of Roberty Lee and sudden, suddenly
(20:18):
you'll raise the racial wealth gap. But I do think
it helps us, helps us recognize the sort of ecosystem
of ideas and narratives that help ground our understanding of
American history and help us understand the way certain communities
have been disproportionately intentionally harmed throughout American history. And a
simple point, I just want to echo this here because
you said it, I just want to say it, say
it slightly differently. These symbols matter, which is why they
(20:40):
went up in the first place. Yes, and if you
engage yeah, and as and as you and so many
others have written about, like if you think about the
context in which they were erected, correct, it is real
to be very clear what the intention behind them were, right.
And so I think watching the monuments come down for
me was a catalyst to a sort of personal reckoning,
(21:04):
right and me being like, man, like I grew up
in this city. I'm the descendant of enslaved people, right,
Like my grandfather's grandfather was enslaved and yet my own
understanding of the history of slavery in New Orleans, in
Louisiana and really across this country is not actually commensurate
with the impact and residue that it has had on
(21:25):
this country today. And so at first I was like, Okay,
well this book. I'm going to write a book of
poetry that's about all of these different statues in New Orleans.
And so I started with poems, and then it was like, okay, well,
you know, I think I need more space. And so
then I started writing these sort of extended lyrical, sort
of meditative essays, and then I was like, I think
(21:46):
I need additional voice, Like if I'm trying to think
about how different parts of this country think about this history,
then I need more voices beyond my own. So then
I started incorporating other people. And then I was like, well,
I have to bring in the sort of historiography that shapes,
you know, the things that I'm wrestling with. And so
then you bring in the archive, then you bring in
(22:07):
all of these scholars and so you know what's true.
And I tell this to young writers all the time,
like what you the fully formed book that you see,
Like I spent probably like a year and a half
writing over and over again what I thought would be
the first chapter of that book, right, and I probably
wrote like four versions of it. Yeah. Man, the beginnings,
the beginnings of those kinds of books are always the
(22:29):
hardest because you're like trying to figure out the mode
of storytelling. I mean absolutely, yeah. My last book, same thing,
six months just on that first chapter and many many
efforts that are failed, complete wrong approaching. And the thing
that I always try to tell people is that, like,
the way I think about it is it's like you
can think of it as failure in some way or
(22:51):
like a sort of necessary failure process I think about it. Yeah,
it's and and let's not say that's how you were saying,
but like I think of it as practice, right, Like
because I played sports my whole life. You know, I
played soccer. You all played tennis, I and you know
you know that you don't just show up to the
game right and like and play and like are good? Right,
(23:12):
You have to put in hours and hours years of
work that people never see, so that when you show
up to the court or the field, people are seeing
the manifestation of the work that you put in previously
and I think of writing the same way. It's like,
you know, I spent a year writing, you know, fifty
thousand words that will never leave my computer. That's right.
(23:35):
So Claion, let's talk. Let's talk a little bit more
about what's in the book, because Ben and I are
both fascinated by some of the places you visited for
personal reasons, and and I'll start. Obviously, you're reporting on
the Whitney Plantation, which is an extension of your hometown.
(23:56):
It is today the only museum dedicated to the history
of enslaved people at a plantation, in this case, a
plantation about sugar. It's surrounded by plantations that are often
sites of museums and tours. So in the country there's
(24:16):
no other museum dedicated to the history of slavery or
enslaved people sugar, slavery for sugar. And there are other
sites that tell the history of slavery and even have
our artifacts. But as a plantation, best I know, this
is the only one that is centering the experience of
the enslaved. And so wrote it. You wrote about this
(24:37):
for sixteen nineteen. Yeah, yeah, I wrote about it for
sixteen nineteen. In any case, I was fascinated to read
your own experience on it. I really appreciate it the
more expansive treatment that you gave it, and I just
wanted to hear you talk, you know, at least a
little bit about something that you took away from the surprise.
(25:00):
I guess the question, you know, for me to you is,
you know what surprised you about the Whitney Plantation as
opposed to what you expected? Yeah, you know, I had.
I had previous to that. I went to the Whitney
in the first time I went would have been late
two thy eighteen, and I had never been to a
(25:24):
plantation that centered, as you kind of as you mentioned,
that centered the lives and experiences of enslaved people, And
so it went to this place. I had heard a
lot about it, obviously, given um some of the fanfare
that it had opened to, given its unique role in
the sort of landscape of American museums, I had. What
(25:46):
I will say is that part of the issue I
recognized later was that the only first person accounts that
I had encountered of enslaved people were like Frederick Douglas
and and you know, sort of secondhand versions of like
Harriet Tubman you know, the sort of the kind of
superstars of slavery, you know, in the way that we
(26:06):
think about them and talk about them. And what happened
that the Whitney is that it gave me insight into
a set of experiences and voices from ordinary enslave people.
You know, enslave people who did not escape, enslave people
who did not teach themselves how to read or write,
enslave people who did not rescue. You know, dozens and
(26:30):
dozens of people coming back and forth. And I understand
why the stories of Frederick Douglas and Harry Tummen are
told because they are remarkable. I mean, like they are
not just remarkable enslave people. The universe doesn't make many
people like a Frederick Douglas, like a Harria Tummin. I mean,
these are remarkable people in human history. And what the
Whitney House makes clear is that the experiences of folks
(26:53):
like that are not reflective of the experiences of the
vast majority of enslave people, many of whom were simply
trying to make create a meaningful life amid the unfathomable
conditions that they lived in. Ye can I can I
interrupt you? On that point, because I think that's that's
such a powerful connection to your choices as a writer.
(27:17):
And what I know we've been talking a lot about
is like how do we choose to explain things and
the enormity of the crimes against humanity? And what I'm
hearing you say is that part of the inspiration and
the surprise of being at Whitney is that people who
live through this had the first words themselves. And that's
(27:41):
such a powerful reminder for you know, for writers in general,
is that we often discount that the people we're writing
about do have a voice and can speak and do
speak for themselves U and even sometimes get it wrong,
you know, like a interesting unexpected ways, which you you know,
you also write about in this book, particularly in your
(28:03):
trip to Gorrie Island. Yeah, I actually wanted to I
wanted to talk about that for a minute, Khalil, because
I also took that trip. The last chapter of Clint
of your book, you go to Gorey Island off the
coast of Senegal, and I took a trip there as well.
And actually my father is an African historian, he's now emeritus,
(28:23):
and I had tagged along as a young adult with
a group of African historians and africanists. There was like
a conference in the Gambia, and I was like, this
seems like a really interesting way to explore the world.
I remember that it was nineteen ninety eight because the
Bulls just won their second three pet and we watched
it in a bar and the Gambia. Um. Oh man,
never forget. It was like one of the greatest nights
(28:45):
of my life of my dad and I in this
bar watching it and then swimming at night in the
Atlantic Ocean together. It was beautiful. I heard that story
if I was if I was Clint, I would turn
it into a poem because it was really it was
like um. But then so then you know, you we
we traveled to Senegal to Dakar, and we get on
this boat just like you did, and you go to
this island and we went to uh the the Maison
(29:10):
des Esclaves, the House of Slaves, this this memorial to
the slave trade. And there you know, there's the it's
called the Door of No Return, is that right? And
the little door and you look out into the Atlantic
Ocean and this place tells this story of you know
that millions of enslaved people of Africans were taken here
from from the continent and taken to the United States
(29:31):
and taken to the Americas. And as you write in
the book, you know, I'm there with all these historians
who were like, you know, listening and also assessing. And
my dad I remember saying to me, he was like,
there's nowhere to dock a ship out this window. It
was like there was there was you know, this wasn't
a spot where where where where human beings where Like
thousands and thousands, if not millions of human beings were
(29:53):
taken out this door. Um, you know, was like it's
physically impossible. It was physically power there's nowhere. There was
nowhere to like dock a ship. And like you're still
looking out at the ocean and you're thinking about this
and as you write, like, you know, some of that
memorial sites facts were inaccurate. You know, maybe there were
tens of thousands of people taken from Gray Island. They
(30:14):
were sort of stored there before been on this journey.
And I got to say that neither from my dad
nor the other historians there, they weren't dismissive. This was
still loaded with meaning. But they also were pointing out
the inaccuracies they actual like the impossibility of this actual
site being this this major transportation hub, because that's also
(30:38):
what they do. They're like telling history and and in
your book, I mean, it's so striking to talk about
these memorials and what memory is and what what symbolism
is too, because you know, you're deep inside of that
at the end of this book, like what do we
really want? What do we even need from our these
memorial sites? I think, Um, I'm so glad, I thank
(31:01):
you for sharing that story. Um it sounds like a
really um special inform of experience. Amazing. Yeah, it truly was.
You know, I think about what I think about with
Gorey and Gave. I kind of put it in conversation
with the chapter that starts the book, Monicello, because part
(31:26):
of what Monticello reveals to me is that these sites
of history and of memory are not static, and the
way they tell the story, the way they once told
the story, is not how they necessarily have to always
tell the story. And I think Manicello is a place
(31:46):
that I think really is a reflection of the abilities
for places and sites of memory to evolve in how
they tell the story of themselves, because how Manicello told
the story of itself ten twenty, thirty, forty fifty years
ago is fundamentally different than five years ago. Right, It's
like very different than how it tells the story of itself.
(32:08):
This is the Thomas Jefferson, Yeah, Thomas Jefferson's plantation. And
and you know, it's because of the work of scholars
like a. Net Gordon read. It's because of the descendants
of people who were enslaved there and insisting that those
stories of their ancestors be told, right, Because part of
what we have to remember is that like that Senegal
(32:29):
was colonized until the sixties, right, and so many of
the documents, so many of the archives, so many of
the histories, so many of the stories that would inform
how that place is able to tell the story of
itself were taken away or we're dismissed, right, And so
it's a place that I think is still learning how
to tell the story of itself while while at the
same time honoring the tradition of the histories that have
(32:54):
been passed down in that space. Yeah, we are going
to take another break, and when we come back, we're
going to talk about how we write through analogies, historical
analogies to make sense of the different choices that Americans
have made to talk about their past and Germans have
made to talk about their past. We'll be right back
(33:15):
after the break. Recently, Clint you published a cover story
in Atlantic, and I was so eager to read it
because I saw this as the ninth trip of how
(33:38):
the word has passed, but this time not just leaving
the United States. I mean, obviously we just talked about Senegal,
but leaving the black white story, leaving the story of
what happened to black people, And it's such a powerful
way to reveal the water we swim in the United States,
the way in which we are trapped in a debate
(34:01):
about how we should remember a past which has mostly
been soaked through with white supremacy and Confederate monument men,
and the erasier and the ongoing right now erasier of
black history and black studies, whether it's anti CRT bills
or whether it's the now meddling with and altering of
an ap African American studies class. And so share a
(34:25):
little bit about the insights you gleaned when you walked
to the streets of Berlin and saw up close to
witness and to write about what happened during the Holocaust
in that country. Yeah, I mean, there's, man, there's so
much to say. But you know, one of the reason
that I went to Germany is because as I was
(34:46):
on book tour for How the Words Passed, people would
often say, you know, well, you talk about America sort
of largely failing to reckon with this relationship to the
history of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide, and well, what's
the place that's doing it well? And I would always
be like, oh, you know, Germany is doing this, Germany
is doing that. Germany has this memorial, Germany has that monument.
(35:07):
And there came a point where I was like, I
keep talking about the memorials in Germany, and I've never
been to the memorials in Germany, right, And so it
felt disingenuous to me to continue to talk about this
thing that I hadn't encountered myself. And so went over
to Germany initially spent a week there and traveled to
all these different sites of memory, the train stations from
(35:30):
which Jewish people were deported and sent to death camps,
the memorial to the murder Jews of Europe, this massive
two hundred thousand square foot monument in the middle of
downtown Berlin. You know. Then there's the Stolperstein or the
Stumbling Stones, the largest decentralized memorial in the world, the
seventy thousand brass stones across thirty different European countries that
(35:52):
are placed in front of the homes where Jewish people
and others who were persecuted by the Nazis were taken
from before they were sent to these death camps. I
wanted to understand how Germany tells the story of its past,
and part of what it was revealed is that there
is a level of complexity and nuance in the sense
(36:14):
that many Jewish people in Germany have very different ideas
about the efficacy and the texture of these different memorials.
There are some who really love the Stumbling Stones and
who think it's so meaningful to place these intimate objects
that sort of symbolize individual Jewish people on the ground
(36:37):
in front of the places where they once lived. Other
people think it's fundamentally disrespectful to place the names of
Jewish people on the ground. Some people think that the
memorial to the murder Jews of Europe is the size
and scale of it conveys the horror of mity, worse
genocide in modern history, and the enormity of it. Other
(37:00):
people think it's too abstract and too passive, and this
was really important for me because obviously no group of
people is homogeneous in their sensibilities and their thinking. But
it was just important to be reminded there like, oh,
even there is no consensus, so to speak, on what
these monuments are, how they work. And the other thing too,
(37:20):
that I hadn't fully considered until I was there, was
that one of the primary differences between how Germany grapples
with his past and how the United States grapples with
his past is that there just aren't a lot of
Jewish people left in Germany. Yeah. You use this great
example of Angola Prison, which was a former plantation, and
you're like, it'd be like if there was a prison
(37:42):
built on top of concentration camp and the two thirds
of the population of the people in carcer there were Jewish.
But yeah, but you know, that's that's Louisiana. But in
in Germany, they're just aren't that many Jews around. It's
an abstraction, as you said, yeah, yeah, I mean there's
there's I think Jewish people are less than a quarter
(38:03):
of a percent of the population, right Like, there are
more Jewish people in the city of Boston than there
are in all of Germany. And I don't think I
fully understood that. And so the thing is, you know,
one of the women I was talking to that I
talk about in the piece, she was like, it's easy
for Germans to build monuments and memorials to Jewish people
and to the Holocaust because we're more of a historical
(38:24):
abstraction than we are actual people, right Like, most Germans
don't know a Jewish person. And as this woman put it,
this Jewish historian, she was saying, you know, Judaism is
almost an empty canvas upon which Germans can paint their contrition. Right.
(38:45):
And then in the United States that's very different. There's
tens of millions of us who are the descendants of
enslaved people. So you can't simply lay down a wreath
or build a memorial, or build a monument and say,
oh man, this was really terrible, We're so sorry that
this happened. If you're not going to also engage in
material interventions that make amends for the harm that has
(39:07):
been done because those people are still year and so
that creates a lack of willingness with which to even
begin to engage that history. And I think it's fundamentally
tied to so much of what we see um happening
in our sort of in the landscape of education around
these That's right, that's right man. I will say Clint,
that that reading that piece and and wrestling with myself
(39:31):
exactly what you're saying, like the absurdity that in the
United States that we don't we don't grapple with our
with our past of chattel slavery, of indigenous genocide. That
it's it's you know, it is that it is our
past and we should be wrestling with it. And at
the same time it shows like that it's whatever ways
(39:51):
we do, it's going to be complicated. Um. Also, in
this conversation with you two guys, both of whom have
gotten to these memorial sites, like I'm the one person
who is not only Jewish, but whose father was born
in Nazi Germany and escaped as a child at three
year old with his parents, Like I gotta go, I
can't be out here like this, like I can't have
YouTube guys like like like I'm feeling like how you felt, Clint,
(40:14):
Like I'm talking about this, but I've never been to Germany. Yeah,
and you know, one of one of the ways. Even
but even that, like that's that's so interesting to me
because I met so many people who are like that,
and not because they haven't thought about it, because they
were like, no, none, like we don't go to Jaman
like their parents had instilled in them. And I don't
(40:34):
know if this is the case for you, but it
just makes me think of all the people I talked
to who are like, why would I ever go back
to that place? Yea. And so it's just interesting the
way that those sort of messages, either explicitly or more subtly,
sort of get passed down across generations. Yeah, man, Clint,
I am so glad that we got to do this,
that we got to sit down and have this conversation.
(40:56):
You are doing amazing work and it's just, uh, it's
making me think of all kinds of things and it's
inspiring my own work. So thank you. Yeah. Yeah, same
here man, And the power of your work and the
stories you're telling and the way you're reaching from the
youngest who can hear and learn something in your poetry,
to the oldest who's reading the Atlantic or reading your books,
(41:19):
is in reminding us that we all have choices and
we can change those choices too, And so that's the
hope in all of this, that we can choose differently,
and I am hopeful that as people encounter your work
they will make different choices in the future. I appreciate that.
It's very generous of you. It's been a real pleasure. Wow,
(41:46):
what a powerful conversation, and what an amazing speaker and writer.
Just really lovely person, lovely person and just very moving
and something I was really struck by when he talked
about the fact that so much of what he has
seen in Germany turns on the fact that there are
(42:08):
just very few Jews there, and you know, you talked
about not having been there yourself, and I just I
wanted to know, like, you know, is this something that
you've struggled with. I mean, have you had a conversation
with your parents, have you have you thought about this
beyond just this conversation. Yeah. Yeah, Clint had said that
there he ran into a lot of Jewish people who
are like I'll never go back to Germany. For me,
(42:29):
it's mostly like I just have money for the plane ticket.
Oh yeah, right, No, no, you visited South Africa, you
can't get to Germany. Come on. So, So the truth
is my grandparents who fled Nazi Germany with my father
when he was a little boy. They moved to the
United States. When I was a kid, they decided to
leave America and moved back to Europe, and so they
(42:52):
they ended up living in Switzerland and visited Germany many times.
And my father also has visited Germany more than once,
many times. I just haven't been. I'm actually curious. I
want to go. So it's not a choice that I
feel like, you know, this is a place like its
verboden to use a German word, that I shouldn't go there. Yeah, well,
(43:13):
I mean, just to to extend this one one minute further, like,
I mean, given that your grandparents moved back to Europe
and your father's been multiple times, so like, what is
the story for that's passed on? How How has the
word been passed on to you about that history? Man?
That's really interesting. I mean, in a way, it's there,
(43:36):
it's not spoken in some ways, and it's when it
is there are sort of these gaps. I think as well.
You know my dad who was very little, and he
fills in some of these stories. He doesn't talk about
it in a way that that this is something we
should avoid. And I don't think there's anything in my
family like this is off limits. Um, but it's still
(43:57):
you know, there is this. It's part of being Jewish,
is that this is you know, Jewish in the twentieth
and twenty first century, that this is this is part
of this immense experience that that we have, that this
is this is this trauma, this genocide is there. Yeah, yeah,
ooh well, um, I'm gonna look forward to either being
(44:21):
there with you when you go or being the first
to hear about it. No. I was when you were
telling me about your trip, I again thought I needed
to go, and I will. I mean, I think Pushkin's
gonna pay for it. They're willing to send us. Let's go.
All right, all right, man, all right, love you, love
you too. Some of My Best Friends Are is a
(44:47):
production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted
by me Khalil Gibran Mohammed and my best friend Ben Austin.
This show is produced by Lucy Sullivan. It's edited by
Sarah Knicks with help from Kishe Williams. Our engineer is
Amanda Kwan, and our managing producer is Constanza Gallardo. At
(45:08):
Pushkin thanks to Leta Mulad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori,
John Schnars, Rettakone, and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily,
is by fellow chicagoan the Brilliant Avery R. Young, from
his album Tubman. You definitely want to check out his
music at his website, Avery R. Young dot com. You
(45:30):
can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
And if you like our show, please give us a
five star rating and a review and listen even if
you don't like it, give it a five star rating
(45:51):
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it. Thank you, Change said
Pushing. Oh, I usually bring the dog in so that
I can control his barking. So I'm professional best friends
or dogs. Yeah, that's why he's not making it to
season three. Khalil, you know co host? All Right, I'm back.
(00:38):
Is also my audition. I'm Khalil Jibrad Muhammad. I'm Ben Austin.
We're two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a
historian and I'm a journalist. And this is some of
my best friends are some of my best friends are Hey.
(00:58):
On this show, we wrestle with the challenges and the
absurdities of a deeply divided and unequal country. Yeah. Man,
talk about deeply divided. I mean today we're talking to
Clint Smith, a poet and a writer. He is helping
us unpack some of the most divisive, nasty stuff in
our collective memory, going to historical sites. He's using poetry
(01:21):
to really unpack the meaning and emotion behind how we
talk about the past. Yeah. Yeah, so Clint Smith. He
has a new collection of poetry out Above Ground. It's
out in March. He's also a staff writer for the Atlantic,
and he also wrote this book of nonfiction called How
the Word Has Passed And You talked about him sort
(01:41):
of you know, grappling with the most divisive stuff. But
he's such a beautiful writer. Like when you read his writing,
it feels moving and even uplifting, like it's it's it's
enjoyable to engage with all of his writing. Yeah. Yeah,
so let's talk to Clint. This is going to be great.
(02:12):
I was just thinking about the first time I met Khalil.
It was on the train from the airport, that's right.
And I remember because you were very serious, you know,
like like well I was, you know, I was like, oh, snap,
that's Khalil Jabrah Muhammed. I was like, you know, I
don't have my book on me because so I was
(02:35):
like I had to. I try to. I was trying
to be too cool for school. So so today we're
talking to Clint Smith, who has a new book out
Above Ground. It's a book of poetry, a wonderful book
of poetry that in so many ways continues your meditation
on how to reconcile sort of the realities of a
(02:57):
of a world that doesn't guarantee a whole lot, and
what that means to think about the stories we pass on, which,
of course, to me, the continuity between your your your
first first book of nonfiction, not your first book of poetry,
but your first book of nonfiction, which precedes Above Ground,
which comes out this month, is how the word has passed.
(03:19):
And I'm just so so excited you know that you're
doing this work. I remember talking to you about your
dissertation and thinking about the many choices and past you
could travel down. Yeah, and maybe Clint, I'll just add
to that. I mean, I think of the three of
us being writers, all of us writing and kind of
grappling with this country and invariably grappling with race in
(03:41):
this country, and doing it in different ways and with
different kinds of writing. And just to throw it on
you like to, let's talk about poetry. Like like Khalil
and I write nonfiction. Also, we don't write poetry. You know,
why do you turn to poetry? You know? How is
that part of your writing? Your writing self? For me,
(04:04):
poetry is the act of paying attention. Forces me to
pay attention to a moment, an idea, a feeling, a sentiment,
a period of time in ways that I might not
otherwise do if it is both the creation of art,
but it is also the mechanism through which I do
(04:27):
my best thinking. It's the sort of excavation of again
a moment in time and allows me to sort of
create a time capsule of how who I was and
how I was thinking about these ideas, these moments. And
it's almost the same way that like a photographer, you know,
(04:48):
might take a photo of a tree. Right. It can
be a tree that you walk by every single day
of your life. But if you stop and you take
a photograph of the tree, or you zoom in on
a specific leaf on that tree, you'll see that it's actually,
you know, several different shades of green. You'll see the
whole that a caterpillar bit through. I'll see the edges,
(05:10):
you know that the us as like you know, summer
turns to fall. It just allows you to to pay
attention to that which you otherwise might encounter every day,
but with a different level of intentionality. Bring it, Clint,
bring it. Yeah, that is some impressive wordsmithing, but really,
(05:31):
I mean all jokes aside. What you're saying is poetry
is your first draft of expressing what you're living. That's
exactly right, Khalil. I mean in your new collection above Ground,
so much of that where you just said that careful observation,
the commemorating of a moment is about your children. And
(05:54):
many of the poems are written in second person to
are you? Who are are your two children? And Khalil
and I are both parents, are both fathers. Our kids
are older than yours now and yeah, and like, you know,
why do that? I mean, you know, what does it
mean that you're doing that as a parent and sort
of you know, taking care. It's not a leaf, it's
(06:15):
your child. And how you read to them at night,
or how you how you see them process a certain moment,
These these fleeting aspects of parenthood. Yeah, for sure. You know,
I think coming out of my last book, How the
Word Has Passed, which is thinking about how different historical
sites across the country reckon with or failed reckon with
(06:35):
their relationship to the history of slavery. Um. You know,
I I spent several years thinking about and researching and
traveling to sites of of enslavement. You know, it was
sites of torture, sites of trauma, sites of of a
sort of inexplicable human suffering. And what happened is that
(07:01):
as I was researching How the Word Has Passed, and
traveling all these different places, my wife and I were
starting our family. So now my son is five going
on six, my daughters three going on four. And when
I was in these places, inevitably, and people who've read
how the words passle know inevitably, so much of how
I was processing these spaces was tied to and animated
(07:24):
by being a father and being like and having that
become a new part of my identity. So when I'm standing,
you know, in a cabin at Whitney Plantation in Louisiana,
and I'm thinking about what it means to stand in
and have my feet on the same wooden planks, within
the same structure that generations of enslaved people slept in themselves.
(07:47):
You know, I'm thinking now of, you know, the sort
of torture of slavery, not only through the prism of
the spectacle of physical brutality, but also family separation, right
And I remember specifically standing in that place and thinking
about what would it be like if I put my
kids to sleep and I woke up the next day
and my children were gone, and I had no idea
(08:09):
what had happened to them. I had no idea where
they went, I had no idea if I would ever
see them again. And it's a sort of unfathomable sort
of cruelty, a sort of unfathomable sort of emotional terrain
to even have to imagine. And I had those sorts
of moments that all these different types of places all
across the country. And part of what shape the desire
(08:32):
to write Above Ground is that I was thinking so
much about the experience of parenting in the context of
enslavement that I wanted to and in the context of
what it means to be part of a lineage of
enslaved people and the descendants of enslaved people, and how
(08:54):
to what it means that my children are the descendants
of these people who are in these cabins, who are
on this land. But I think all the time about
how the black experience in this country, as much as
it is fundamentally important, as you all know and think
about all the time, it is fun mentally important to
take seriously and engage with and struggle with the history
of violence and oppression that's been enacted on black people.
(09:17):
And the experience of being a black person in this
country is not singularly defined by that trauma, by that violence,
by that oppression. It's far more expansive than that. It's
far more diverse than that. It's far more It stretches
into joy, it stretches into wonder. And I wanted to
make sure that I was writing poems that reflected the
(09:40):
totality of my own thinking. Right, So I do take
seriously and think about this history all the time. And
like I love watching my kids watch a ladybug take
flight for the first time. I love having a dance
party with my kids in the middle of the kitchen,
like I love you know, all of these different parts
of of who I am and how I make sense
(10:03):
of my own experience in the world. And so this
was an attempt to think about how we hold both
the social tumults and historical suffering alongside a sense of wonder,
a sense of awe, a sense of joy. Um, And
what it means to watch your kids, you know, these
(10:24):
tiny little humans here sort of discover the world for
the first time. Yeah, now that's a that's very powerful
and evocative. So could you share, um? Could you could
you read one of the poems from from Above Ground Force.
I'd be happy to given that I was talking about
(10:44):
the sort of writing into a space of joy. Um,
let me just do this this other one. That's all right.
Dance party. Sometimes in the evening, after dinner, after spaghetti
has been slurped and I have bribed the broccoli into
their bellies, I give both of my children the look
(11:05):
when my eyes meet theirs. They know what time it is.
They push in their chairs, they stretched their legs, and
we moved the table to the far end of the
dining room to clear space for what we all know
is coming. Alexa play the post dinner dance party playlist,
and within seconds, Martha WASH's booming voice rolls like thunder
over our bodies. Everybody danced. Now. The electronic keyboard and
(11:29):
the drums meet in the middle of the room like
two dinosaurs ready to claim this kitchen as their own.
Immediately the jumping begins, and my daughter is flinging her
limbs like an offbeat octopus, hands slapping the air behind
her as if she is trying to smack anyone who
enters her sacred space. I turned around and my son
is doing the robot or is being eaten by a robot,
or is trapped in a universe where robots take over
(11:51):
the bodies of little boys and peanut butter pajamas. Nonetheless,
there is a robot somewhere, and my children, bless them,
have not yet learned how to clap on the two
and four, So I laugh but also cringe as their
small bodies make a mockery of the melody around them.
Now halfway through the song, everyone is jumping, and I,
(12:12):
caught up in the ecstasy of this moment, fall to
the ground and convince this no longer young body that
it is a good idea to start doing the worm.
And when my children see me, their eyes become pools
of possibilities, and it is clear that they see this
as a clarion call to climb onto my back. And
now here we are. This strange trifecta is unlikely trio
a robot and an octopus riding the back of a
(12:33):
worm who will certainly need some tylan, all before bed.
And it is in this moment that their mother comes home.
And when she opens the door, everyone is screaming. The
speakers are blasting, and the percussion is shaking every wall
around us. We look up at her, and she looks
down at us, and we have no explanation for this
strange scene. Only an invitation for her to join. Right,
(13:01):
but we're going to take a quick break. We'll be
back with more Clint Smith in a minute. All right,
(13:24):
we are back on Some of my best friends are Clint.
That that poem is is all the things you said
about sort of being immersed in your in the life
of your family and to find the beauty and joy
in these details and how they're I don't know they
but they're expanded. Um. It makes me think too of
a recent essay you wrote for The Atlantic where you
(13:47):
wrote about Tyree Nichols, who was recently murdered. Yeah, you know,
so this this essay you're talking about is about um
for those who might not be familiar, it's it's thinking
about Tyree Nichols um and his love of sunsets, you know,
And he and his life are a reminder of the
plurality and the heterogeneity of the black experience in this country. Right.
(14:10):
I think it will be so easy for somebody maybe
to hear his name and to make a set of
assumptions about who he is, where it comes from, what
his interests are, what he was into, and that largely
for him is not the case. And I think, you know,
one of the things that I was most struck by,
and the sort of aftermath of his death and the
(14:32):
subsequent video was this quote from his mother where she
talked about how much he loved going to the skate
park in the evening at dusk and watching the sunset.
And there was this photo that his brother had started
sharing of Tyree taking a getting out of his car
as the sun was setting just beyond the horizon and
(14:54):
sort of taking a selfie with this sunset in the background.
And I, you know, as I talked about in the essay,
it made me think about this painting by Van Gogh
that I had seen. And van Gogh similarly had this
love of sun sets and tried to capture them in
all sorts of ways. And and I there was a
moment where I had stumbled on it, not because I'm
(15:15):
you know, a well learned art historian or anything. It's
because I was googling sunsets to draw with my with
my kids, and and there was you know, his van
Gogh wrote this letter to his brother where he talked
about attempting to capture the beauty of the sun setting
before it crossed over the horizon, before you know, this
(15:36):
fleeting thing that is both so quotitian and yet so miraculous,
wanting to capture that through his work. And I saw
the same thing in Tyree, and heard the same thing,
and saw it in his photo, and heard it in
his mother's voice when she talked about his love of
going to the skate park to watch the sunset every evening.
(15:57):
And so I think in in these moments, I try
to I try my best to say something that is
less centered on though who murdered this person, and more
on an attempt to remember the person as a person,
(16:22):
remember the person as a human. Yeah, yeah, thank you
for that, Clint, that essay, it is extremely powerful. I
actually want to shift gears a little bit, and I
want to talk about another work of yours, the book
you released in twenty twenty one, a work of nonfiction,
How the Word Is Passed, a reckoning with the history
of slavery across America. You know, it's this series of essays,
(16:46):
like these trips you go on, you go to these
sites of memory, these sites of memorializing. And for me,
you know, as somebody who writes long form features, magazine features,
reading this book, it felt a lot like like eight
reporting trips You know, for a magazine and where you're
(17:07):
there as the the seeing eye of the reporter that
we can do in those kind of pieces, and so
the experiences could be kind of you you're both bringing
back the information of a place, but also this kind
of seeing eye of taking everything and it's immediated through
your own experiences. I wondered how you conceived of the
book in that sense. Did you did you think of it,
you know, related to your magazine work, did you think
(17:29):
of it related to um, you know, how your role
would be and sort of using yourself in this sense,
like like even in a kind of move, a narrative,
a storytelling move. Yeah. No, I really appreciate that question.
And it's interesting because so the book came out in
June twenty twenty one, and it was fascinating when when
all the reviews started coming out, there was this everybody
(17:52):
started saying like poet and journalist Clint Smith goes to
these different historical sites. And I was like, who's a
journalist talked about? Like what? Like it was like like
a magazine, right, I was like, what like it? It's
so interesting because like I I only started working at
the Atlantic in twenty twenty September twenty twenty. And this
(18:13):
was after I turned in the book. And I had
never I hadn't worked in media before, Like I was
a graduate student, uh my PhD at Harvard. Yeah, so
what so what were your models? Like? What then? What
were you what were you thinking about as models for
this trip? Yeah, for these eight trips? I should say,
I think that writing this book taught me how to
(18:35):
be a journalist. It taught me how to be a
writer of narrative nonfiction. It taught me and I think
what I what I tried to do was just I
kind of just looked up, like, what are the best
examples of narrative nonfiction UM that have been published? And
so spent a lot of time, you know, reading the
(18:55):
work of folks like obviously the one of the other
Sons as Bell Wilkinson, sort of stands on its own
at the at the zenith of the genre UM and
and I kind of was learning as I go. And
because originally it wasn't imagined as a narrative nonfiction book,
(19:15):
I thought that it was going to be my second
collection of poetry, the first being Counting Descent, right, the
first being Counting Descent, And I thought that this one
would be my next collection, because the origin story of
the book is that in twenty seventeen, I watched several
Confederate statues come down in my hometown in New Orleans,
statues with PGT. Buregard, Jefferson Davis, Roberty Lee. And as
(19:36):
I was watching these statues come down, I was thinking
about what it meant that I grew up in a
majority of black city in which there were more homages
to enslavers than there were to enslave people, and thinking about, well,
what are the implications that what does it mean that
to get to school I had to go down Robert E.
Lee Boulevard, to get to the grocery store, I had
to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway, that my middle school
was named after a leader of the Confederacy, that my
parents still live on a street today named after someone
(19:57):
who owned over one hundred and fifteen slave people. Because
the thing is, we know that symbols and names and
iconography aren't just symbols. They're reflective of the stories the
people tell, and those stories shaped the narratives that communities
car times. Narratives shape public policy, and public policy is
what shapes the material conditions of people's lives. So it's
you know, and that's not to say that you just
take down a statue of Roberty Lee and sudden, suddenly
(20:18):
you'll raise the racial wealth gap. But I do think
it helps us, helps us recognize the sort of ecosystem
of ideas and narratives that help ground our understanding of
American history and help us understand the way certain communities
have been disproportionately intentionally harmed throughout American history. And a
simple point, I just want to echo this here because
you said it, I just want to say it, say
it slightly differently. These symbols matter, which is why they
(20:40):
went up in the first place. Yes, and if you
engage yeah, and as and as you and so many
others have written about, like if you think about the
context in which they were erected, correct, it is real
to be very clear what the intention behind them were, right.
And so I think watching the monuments come down for
me was a catalyst to a sort of personal reckoning,
(21:04):
right and me being like, man, like I grew up
in this city. I'm the descendant of enslaved people, right,
Like my grandfather's grandfather was enslaved and yet my own
understanding of the history of slavery in New Orleans, in
Louisiana and really across this country is not actually commensurate
with the impact and residue that it has had on
(21:25):
this country today. And so at first I was like, Okay,
well this book. I'm going to write a book of
poetry that's about all of these different statues in New Orleans.
And so I started with poems, and then it was like, okay, well,
you know, I think I need more space. And so
then I started writing these sort of extended lyrical, sort
of meditative essays, and then I was like, I think
(21:46):
I need additional voice, Like if I'm trying to think
about how different parts of this country think about this history,
then I need more voices beyond my own. So then
I started incorporating other people. And then I was like, well,
I have to bring in the sort of historiography that shapes,
you know, the things that I'm wrestling with. And so
then you bring in the archive, then you bring in
(22:07):
all of these scholars and so you know what's true.
And I tell this to young writers all the time,
like what you the fully formed book that you see,
Like I spent probably like a year and a half
writing over and over again what I thought would be
the first chapter of that book, right, and I probably
wrote like four versions of it. Yeah. Man, the beginnings,
the beginnings of those kinds of books are always the
(22:29):
hardest because you're like trying to figure out the mode
of storytelling. I mean absolutely, yeah. My last book, same thing,
six months just on that first chapter and many many
efforts that are failed, complete wrong approaching. And the thing
that I always try to tell people is that, like,
the way I think about it is it's like you
can think of it as failure in some way or
(22:51):
like a sort of necessary failure process I think about it. Yeah,
it's and and let's not say that's how you were saying,
but like I think of it as practice, right, Like
because I played sports my whole life. You know, I
played soccer. You all played tennis, I and you know
you know that you don't just show up to the
game right and like and play and like are good? Right,
(23:12):
You have to put in hours and hours years of
work that people never see, so that when you show
up to the court or the field, people are seeing
the manifestation of the work that you put in previously
and I think of writing the same way. It's like,
you know, I spent a year writing, you know, fifty
thousand words that will never leave my computer. That's right.
(23:35):
So Claion, let's talk. Let's talk a little bit more
about what's in the book, because Ben and I are
both fascinated by some of the places you visited for
personal reasons, and and I'll start. Obviously, you're reporting on
the Whitney Plantation, which is an extension of your hometown.
(23:56):
It is today the only museum dedicated to the history
of enslaved people at a plantation, in this case, a
plantation about sugar. It's surrounded by plantations that are often
sites of museums and tours. So in the country there's
(24:16):
no other museum dedicated to the history of slavery or
enslaved people sugar, slavery for sugar. And there are other
sites that tell the history of slavery and even have
our artifacts. But as a plantation, best I know, this
is the only one that is centering the experience of
the enslaved. And so wrote it. You wrote about this
(24:37):
for sixteen nineteen. Yeah, yeah, I wrote about it for
sixteen nineteen. In any case, I was fascinated to read
your own experience on it. I really appreciate it the
more expansive treatment that you gave it, and I just
wanted to hear you talk, you know, at least a
little bit about something that you took away from the surprise.
(25:00):
I guess the question, you know, for me to you is,
you know what surprised you about the Whitney Plantation as
opposed to what you expected? Yeah, you know, I had.
I had previous to that. I went to the Whitney
in the first time I went would have been late
two thy eighteen, and I had never been to a
(25:24):
plantation that centered, as you kind of as you mentioned,
that centered the lives and experiences of enslaved people, And
so it went to this place. I had heard a
lot about it, obviously, given um some of the fanfare
that it had opened to, given its unique role in
the sort of landscape of American museums, I had. What
(25:46):
I will say is that part of the issue I
recognized later was that the only first person accounts that
I had encountered of enslaved people were like Frederick Douglas
and and you know, sort of secondhand versions of like
Harriet Tubman you know, the sort of the kind of
superstars of slavery, you know, in the way that we
(26:06):
think about them and talk about them. And what happened
that the Whitney is that it gave me insight into
a set of experiences and voices from ordinary enslave people.
You know, enslave people who did not escape, enslave people
who did not teach themselves how to read or write,
enslave people who did not rescue. You know, dozens and
(26:30):
dozens of people coming back and forth. And I understand
why the stories of Frederick Douglas and Harry Tummen are
told because they are remarkable. I mean, like they are
not just remarkable enslave people. The universe doesn't make many
people like a Frederick Douglas, like a Harria Tummin. I mean,
these are remarkable people in human history. And what the
Whitney House makes clear is that the experiences of folks
(26:53):
like that are not reflective of the experiences of the
vast majority of enslave people, many of whom were simply
trying to make create a meaningful life amid the unfathomable
conditions that they lived in. Ye can I can I
interrupt you? On that point, because I think that's that's
such a powerful connection to your choices as a writer.
(27:17):
And what I know we've been talking a lot about
is like how do we choose to explain things and
the enormity of the crimes against humanity? And what I'm
hearing you say is that part of the inspiration and
the surprise of being at Whitney is that people who
live through this had the first words themselves. And that's
(27:41):
such a powerful reminder for you know, for writers in general,
is that we often discount that the people we're writing
about do have a voice and can speak and do
speak for themselves U and even sometimes get it wrong,
you know, like a interesting unexpected ways, which you you know,
you also write about in this book, particularly in your
(28:03):
trip to Gorrie Island. Yeah, I actually wanted to I
wanted to talk about that for a minute, Khalil, because
I also took that trip. The last chapter of Clint
of your book, you go to Gorey Island off the
coast of Senegal, and I took a trip there as well.
And actually my father is an African historian, he's now emeritus,
(28:23):
and I had tagged along as a young adult with
a group of African historians and africanists. There was like
a conference in the Gambia, and I was like, this
seems like a really interesting way to explore the world.
I remember that it was nineteen ninety eight because the
Bulls just won their second three pet and we watched
it in a bar and the Gambia. Um. Oh man,
never forget. It was like one of the greatest nights
(28:45):
of my life of my dad and I in this
bar watching it and then swimming at night in the
Atlantic Ocean together. It was beautiful. I heard that story
if I was if I was Clint, I would turn
it into a poem because it was really it was
like um. But then so then you know, you we
we traveled to Senegal to Dakar, and we get on
this boat just like you did, and you go to
this island and we went to uh the the Maison
(29:10):
des Esclaves, the House of Slaves, this this memorial to
the slave trade. And there you know, there's the it's
called the Door of No Return, is that right? And
the little door and you look out into the Atlantic
Ocean and this place tells this story of you know
that millions of enslaved people of Africans were taken here
from from the continent and taken to the United States
(29:31):
and taken to the Americas. And as you write in
the book, you know, I'm there with all these historians
who were like, you know, listening and also assessing. And
my dad I remember saying to me, he was like,
there's nowhere to dock a ship out this window. It
was like there was there was you know, this wasn't
a spot where where where where human beings where Like
thousands and thousands, if not millions of human beings were
(29:53):
taken out this door. Um, you know, was like it's
physically impossible. It was physically power there's nowhere. There was
nowhere to like dock a ship. And like you're still
looking out at the ocean and you're thinking about this
and as you write, like, you know, some of that
memorial sites facts were inaccurate. You know, maybe there were
tens of thousands of people taken from Gray Island. They
(30:14):
were sort of stored there before been on this journey.
And I got to say that neither from my dad
nor the other historians there, they weren't dismissive. This was
still loaded with meaning. But they also were pointing out
the inaccuracies they actual like the impossibility of this actual
site being this this major transportation hub, because that's also
(30:38):
what they do. They're like telling history and and in
your book, I mean, it's so striking to talk about
these memorials and what memory is and what what symbolism
is too, because you know, you're deep inside of that
at the end of this book, like what do we
really want? What do we even need from our these
memorial sites? I think, Um, I'm so glad, I thank
(31:01):
you for sharing that story. Um it sounds like a
really um special inform of experience. Amazing. Yeah, it truly was.
You know, I think about what I think about with
Gorey and Gave. I kind of put it in conversation
with the chapter that starts the book, Monicello, because part
(31:26):
of what Monticello reveals to me is that these sites
of history and of memory are not static, and the
way they tell the story, the way they once told
the story, is not how they necessarily have to always
tell the story. And I think Manicello is a place
(31:46):
that I think really is a reflection of the abilities
for places and sites of memory to evolve in how
they tell the story of themselves, because how Manicello told
the story of itself ten twenty, thirty, forty fifty years
ago is fundamentally different than five years ago. Right, It's
like very different than how it tells the story of itself.
(32:08):
This is the Thomas Jefferson, Yeah, Thomas Jefferson's plantation. And
and you know, it's because of the work of scholars
like a. Net Gordon read. It's because of the descendants
of people who were enslaved there and insisting that those
stories of their ancestors be told, right, Because part of
what we have to remember is that like that Senegal
(32:29):
was colonized until the sixties, right, and so many of
the documents, so many of the archives, so many of
the histories, so many of the stories that would inform
how that place is able to tell the story of
itself were taken away or we're dismissed, right, And so
it's a place that I think is still learning how
to tell the story of itself while while at the
same time honoring the tradition of the histories that have
(32:54):
been passed down in that space. Yeah, we are going
to take another break, and when we come back, we're
going to talk about how we write through analogies, historical
analogies to make sense of the different choices that Americans
have made to talk about their past and Germans have
made to talk about their past. We'll be right back
(33:15):
after the break. Recently, Clint you published a cover story
in Atlantic, and I was so eager to read it
because I saw this as the ninth trip of how
(33:38):
the word has passed, but this time not just leaving
the United States. I mean, obviously we just talked about Senegal,
but leaving the black white story, leaving the story of
what happened to black people, And it's such a powerful
way to reveal the water we swim in the United States,
the way in which we are trapped in a debate
(34:01):
about how we should remember a past which has mostly
been soaked through with white supremacy and Confederate monument men,
and the erasier and the ongoing right now erasier of
black history and black studies, whether it's anti CRT bills
or whether it's the now meddling with and altering of
an ap African American studies class. And so share a
(34:25):
little bit about the insights you gleaned when you walked
to the streets of Berlin and saw up close to
witness and to write about what happened during the Holocaust
in that country. Yeah, I mean, there's, man, there's so
much to say. But you know, one of the reason
that I went to Germany is because as I was
(34:46):
on book tour for How the Words Passed, people would
often say, you know, well, you talk about America sort
of largely failing to reckon with this relationship to the
history of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide, and well, what's
the place that's doing it well? And I would always
be like, oh, you know, Germany is doing this, Germany
is doing that. Germany has this memorial, Germany has that monument.
(35:07):
And there came a point where I was like, I
keep talking about the memorials in Germany, and I've never
been to the memorials in Germany, right, And so it
felt disingenuous to me to continue to talk about this
thing that I hadn't encountered myself. And so went over
to Germany initially spent a week there and traveled to
all these different sites of memory, the train stations from
(35:30):
which Jewish people were deported and sent to death camps,
the memorial to the murder Jews of Europe, this massive
two hundred thousand square foot monument in the middle of
downtown Berlin. You know. Then there's the Stolperstein or the
Stumbling Stones, the largest decentralized memorial in the world, the
seventy thousand brass stones across thirty different European countries that
(35:52):
are placed in front of the homes where Jewish people
and others who were persecuted by the Nazis were taken
from before they were sent to these death camps. I
wanted to understand how Germany tells the story of its past,
and part of what it was revealed is that there
is a level of complexity and nuance in the sense
(36:14):
that many Jewish people in Germany have very different ideas
about the efficacy and the texture of these different memorials.
There are some who really love the Stumbling Stones and
who think it's so meaningful to place these intimate objects
that sort of symbolize individual Jewish people on the ground
(36:37):
in front of the places where they once lived. Other
people think it's fundamentally disrespectful to place the names of
Jewish people on the ground. Some people think that the
memorial to the murder Jews of Europe is the size
and scale of it conveys the horror of mity, worse
genocide in modern history, and the enormity of it. Other
(37:00):
people think it's too abstract and too passive, and this
was really important for me because obviously no group of
people is homogeneous in their sensibilities and their thinking. But
it was just important to be reminded there like, oh,
even there is no consensus, so to speak, on what
these monuments are, how they work. And the other thing too,
(37:20):
that I hadn't fully considered until I was there, was
that one of the primary differences between how Germany grapples
with his past and how the United States grapples with
his past is that there just aren't a lot of
Jewish people left in Germany. Yeah. You use this great
example of Angola Prison, which was a former plantation, and
you're like, it'd be like if there was a prison
(37:42):
built on top of concentration camp and the two thirds
of the population of the people in carcer there were Jewish.
But yeah, but you know, that's that's Louisiana. But in
in Germany, they're just aren't that many Jews around. It's
an abstraction, as you said, yeah, yeah, I mean there's
there's I think Jewish people are less than a quarter
(38:03):
of a percent of the population, right Like, there are
more Jewish people in the city of Boston than there
are in all of Germany. And I don't think I
fully understood that. And so the thing is, you know,
one of the women I was talking to that I
talk about in the piece, she was like, it's easy
for Germans to build monuments and memorials to Jewish people
and to the Holocaust because we're more of a historical
(38:24):
abstraction than we are actual people, right Like, most Germans
don't know a Jewish person. And as this woman put it,
this Jewish historian, she was saying, you know, Judaism is
almost an empty canvas upon which Germans can paint their contrition. Right.
(38:45):
And then in the United States that's very different. There's
tens of millions of us who are the descendants of
enslaved people. So you can't simply lay down a wreath
or build a memorial, or build a monument and say,
oh man, this was really terrible, We're so sorry that
this happened. If you're not going to also engage in
material interventions that make amends for the harm that has
(39:07):
been done because those people are still year and so
that creates a lack of willingness with which to even
begin to engage that history. And I think it's fundamentally
tied to so much of what we see um happening
in our sort of in the landscape of education around
these That's right, that's right man. I will say Clint,
that that reading that piece and and wrestling with myself
(39:31):
exactly what you're saying, like the absurdity that in the
United States that we don't we don't grapple with our
with our past of chattel slavery, of indigenous genocide. That
it's it's you know, it is that it is our
past and we should be wrestling with it. And at
the same time it shows like that it's whatever ways
(39:51):
we do, it's going to be complicated. Um. Also, in
this conversation with you two guys, both of whom have
gotten to these memorial sites, like I'm the one person
who is not only Jewish, but whose father was born
in Nazi Germany and escaped as a child at three
year old with his parents, Like I gotta go, I
can't be out here like this, like I can't have
YouTube guys like like like I'm feeling like how you felt, Clint,
(40:14):
Like I'm talking about this, but I've never been to Germany. Yeah,
and you know, one of one of the ways. Even
but even that, like that's that's so interesting to me
because I met so many people who are like that,
and not because they haven't thought about it, because they
were like, no, none, like we don't go to Jaman
like their parents had instilled in them. And I don't
(40:34):
know if this is the case for you, but it
just makes me think of all the people I talked
to who are like, why would I ever go back
to that place? Yea. And so it's just interesting the
way that those sort of messages, either explicitly or more subtly,
sort of get passed down across generations. Yeah, man, Clint,
I am so glad that we got to do this,
that we got to sit down and have this conversation.
(40:56):
You are doing amazing work and it's just, uh, it's
making me think of all kinds of things and it's
inspiring my own work. So thank you. Yeah. Yeah, same
here man, And the power of your work and the
stories you're telling and the way you're reaching from the
youngest who can hear and learn something in your poetry,
to the oldest who's reading the Atlantic or reading your books,
(41:19):
is in reminding us that we all have choices and
we can change those choices too, And so that's the
hope in all of this, that we can choose differently,
and I am hopeful that as people encounter your work
they will make different choices in the future. I appreciate that.
It's very generous of you. It's been a real pleasure. Wow,
(41:46):
what a powerful conversation, and what an amazing speaker and writer.
Just really lovely person, lovely person and just very moving
and something I was really struck by when he talked
about the fact that so much of what he has
seen in Germany turns on the fact that there are
(42:08):
just very few Jews there, and you know, you talked
about not having been there yourself, and I just I
wanted to know, like, you know, is this something that
you've struggled with. I mean, have you had a conversation
with your parents, have you have you thought about this
beyond just this conversation. Yeah. Yeah, Clint had said that
there he ran into a lot of Jewish people who
are like I'll never go back to Germany. For me,
(42:29):
it's mostly like I just have money for the plane ticket.
Oh yeah, right, No, no, you visited South Africa, you
can't get to Germany. Come on. So, So the truth
is my grandparents who fled Nazi Germany with my father
when he was a little boy. They moved to the
United States. When I was a kid, they decided to
leave America and moved back to Europe, and so they
(42:52):
they ended up living in Switzerland and visited Germany many times.
And my father also has visited Germany more than once,
many times. I just haven't been. I'm actually curious. I
want to go. So it's not a choice that I
feel like, you know, this is a place like its
verboden to use a German word, that I shouldn't go there. Yeah, well,
(43:13):
I mean, just to to extend this one one minute further, like,
I mean, given that your grandparents moved back to Europe
and your father's been multiple times, so like, what is
the story for that's passed on? How How has the
word been passed on to you about that history? Man?
That's really interesting. I mean, in a way, it's there,
(43:36):
it's not spoken in some ways, and it's when it
is there are sort of these gaps. I think as well.
You know my dad who was very little, and he
fills in some of these stories. He doesn't talk about
it in a way that that this is something we
should avoid. And I don't think there's anything in my
family like this is off limits. Um, but it's still
(43:57):
you know, there is this. It's part of being Jewish,
is that this is you know, Jewish in the twentieth
and twenty first century, that this is this is part
of this immense experience that that we have, that this
is this is this trauma, this genocide is there. Yeah, yeah,
ooh well, um, I'm gonna look forward to either being
(44:21):
there with you when you go or being the first
to hear about it. No. I was when you were
telling me about your trip, I again thought I needed
to go, and I will. I mean, I think Pushkin's
gonna pay for it. They're willing to send us. Let's go.
All right, all right, man, all right, love you, love
you too. Some of My Best Friends Are is a
(44:47):
production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted
by me Khalil Gibran Mohammed and my best friend Ben Austin.
This show is produced by Lucy Sullivan. It's edited by
Sarah Knicks with help from Kishe Williams. Our engineer is
Amanda Kwan, and our managing producer is Constanza Gallardo. At
(45:08):
Pushkin thanks to Leta Mulad, Julia Barton, Heather Faine, Carly Migliori,
John Schnars, Rettakone, and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily,
is by fellow chicagoan the Brilliant Avery R. Young, from
his album Tubman. You definitely want to check out his
music at his website, Avery R. Young dot com. You
(45:30):
can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods,
and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin
dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen.
And if you like our show, please give us a
five star rating and a review and listen even if
you don't like it, give it a five star rating
(45:51):
and a review, and please tell all of your best
friends about it. Thank you, Change said
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