AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Subsume your life4/15/2023 It was less about trust than it was about curiosity. Even for the places that I intended to go to, like Monticello, for example, I had no idea. Part of what I loved about this book was the serendipity and the spontaneity and the surprise of what I encountered at each place. Smith: I definitely did not know what I was going to encounter when I went to any of these places. After your visit, in a discussion about these sites and the histories and memories they hold, Louis Nelson, an architectural historian and vice provost at University of Virginia said, “If you are going to purport to tell the history of a place, you need to have relationships of trust in that place.” With that in mind, as you traveled to these places, did you have a sense of what to expect? Being in these places, you feel it in your bones, you feel it in your blood, you feel the space and the history pulsing through you in a way that I think just makes it a more dynamic and emotionally visceral experience.Ĭhhaya: One of the stops in the book takes the reader to Dakar, Senegal, specifically to Gorée Island, where enslaved people were held before being forced by-mostly white-enslavers across the Atlantic Ocean. The idea then that it would have nothing to do with what our contemporary landscape of inequality looks like is just both morally and intellectually disingenuous. I think about how when I was in elementary school, I was taught about slavery like it was something that happened in the Jurassic period, like it was dinosaurs and slavery and the Flintstones altogether, and being on that land, being in those rooms, being in the spaces reminds you that in the scope of human history, this was just yesterday. And so my four 4-year- old son sits on my grandfather's lap, I think about my grandfather sitting on his grandfather's lap. My grandfather's grandfather was enslaved. Being somewhere, being in conversation with people, having my feet on the land, having my body in the room, it creates a different level of intimacy with the history. I've always known that I'm an experiential learner. In many ways I had in mind that 15-year-old Clint. It was a four-year project in which I was attempting to teach myself and learn about so many of the things that I wish I had learned about when I was 15. Priya Chhaya: Who did you write the book for, and how does that reflect the power of the places where the story is being told?Ĭlint Smith: The book is written by someone who did not begin this project as an expert on the history of slavery. Below is a condensed and edited version of that conversation. This summer, I had the privilege of talking with Smith about his book, the role of public historians, and the power of words as vehicles to tell the full American story. And then to what extent they were maybe doing something in between.” And to what extent they were running from it. And to what extent they were being honest about it. What are the implications of that? And so, I started thinking a lot about how different places have told the story of their relationship to American history and specifically slavery,, and then broadened it out to start thinking about how different places across the country and across the oceans thought about this history. And thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city in which there were more homages to its enslavers than there were to enslaved people. It is a book that is relevant, accessible, and filled with needed moments of honesty.įor Smith, the creation of this book began in May 2017 when, he says, “I watched the statutes of several Confederate monuments come down in my hometown New Orleans. At each stop, Smith takes his readers on a journey as he considers the role this history plays in our present understanding of who we are as Americans and emphasizes the weightiness that comes from listening to the stories presented at each of these places. In a lot of ways, this sentiment is an undercurrent of Smith’s new book, How the Word is Passed, which is a deeply personal story about his relationship to his own past as a Black man in the United States, and also, as the subtitle states, "a reckoning with the history of slavery across America." The book is divided into eight chapters, each focusing on a single place-in addition to a final stop at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. The surface of all that rests beneath us, Meteor Shower, a poem in Clint Smith’s 2017 book of poetry Counting Descent, speaks of our place in the universe, of how we, as human beings, are carriers of history, that we bring our stories with us as we travel through life.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |