Aracelis Girmay writes poetry, fiction, & essays. Teeth, her collection of poems, was published by Curbstone Press in June 2007. Her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, Callaloo, & MiPoesias, among other journals. Her collage-based picture book, changing, changing, was published by George Braziller in 2005. Girmay is a Cave Canem Fellow & former Watson Fellow. She teaches writing workshops in New York & California.
(That's the official bio, gente, but I think you'll love hearing Aracelis on Aracelis in a recent email I received.)
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"I've loved books & the idea of reading since I was little. The story goes "you used to memorize the books & sit & read from memory before you knew how to really read." I used to sleep with my books. I LOVED to read, and then, I used to tell my younger brother stories. My grandmother still has folders of stories I'd write at her house. When I was 13, though, I read The Bluest Eye, I remember thinking: Oh, god, we're allowed to write like that? The way we think? The way people talk? The ways my people talk? Oh, really?
It opened up this door of permission — I didn't know, really, that writing could represent me, not until then. wow, something in the way that I perceived writing & reading changed in me then.
I started sharing my work with other people when I was in college — Writing has always been my lifeline — my way of figuring & making sense & asking questions & maintaining hope, a hope. But it wasn't until college that I realized that I HAD to cultivate this work — that I HAVE to write. It is one of my absolute necessaries. Circulation, breath, communication, memory, wildness, & order.
My mom is Puerto Rican & African American (Georgian) — from Chicago, & my dad's Eritrean, born in Gondar, Ethiopia. Both of them are amazing story-tellers — who tell the stories in very different ways. But, oh! The stories — they are essential — I always had the sense (even when I was very small) that these stories would be the only landscapes in which I'd meet, say, my Great Aunt Tiny, my uncle Samuel, my grandparents, my countries. I knew, too, that the stories were not only important for me & my brother to hear (my sisters weren't born yet), but for my parents to say out loud.
I remember witnessing the powers a story can have on the person telling — the way connections that weren't made before can be made in the telling. I write because it is my way of speaking, my way of figuring, my way of connecting, moving deeper into my life. I write, too, in the words of Carolyn Forche: against forgetting. I write the things that others wish I would forget. The things I cannot bear forgetting. The things I cannot survive forgetting. I write to get something back: world, that is, to still myself, somehow, & consider the things the world is constantly showing: see, see this! hear, hear this! say this! remember, remember! I write to undo time, to go back & fiddle, to sit with what I've been given, to learn something, really, to visit the ghosts & let them know I see them.
Article comments
1 - maryam blacksher
wow. truly, thank you; i have been brought to tears of life,of rememberance, the richness of us that is like feeling grains of sand slowly. thank you for these words aracelis about yourself as well as your poetry. they bring a calm around me,feelings of relief, of, 'of course' - the calm brings my truth to my senses; blotting out the craze that can be the social mind wind.. i relax... and this poem -arroz poetica- is one of my favorites Ara. so glad it is out for everyone to take in. thank you thank you .