Diamond Forde | Wednesday, January 28, 6:30 p.m. | Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh
Diamond Forde’s grandmother, Alice, kept her King James Bible close at hand on her nightstand.
“She was one of those older women who got very little sleep, so she’d sleep for four hours and go straight into the book for a meditation and prayer,” Forde recalled of her grandmother, who was born in the Jim Crow South and had eight children. “If she were talking on the phone in another place in the house and needed it, I would rush off and grab it for her.”
When Alice died, Forde inherited that family Bible—a well-worn red leather copy with gold-leaf edging—and drew from it for The Book of Alice, her second collection of poetry, published January 20 from Scribner Books. Forde is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University; her award-winning 2021 debut collection, Mother Body, touches on some of the same themes as The Book of Alice, like family, identity, survival, and the experience of being a Black woman in America.
With both her collections, Forde strikes a polished, profound balance of formal innovation and lyrical depth. Writer Kiese Laymon called The Book of Alice “ecstatic,” and that feels right—the book is organized into five sections, each named after books of the Bible (with one apocryphal addition), weaving between stylized forms (census reports, recipes) that effortlessly reflect their subject. References abound: Toni Morrison and Doechii, ham hocks and cicadas.
The Book of Alice digs into the stories we inherit—those passed down between generations of family, and those passed down through an ancient text that has offered both comfort and harm to those who hold it close. “Dear LORD, why did you make me in your image if you wanted me ta kneel?” Alice implores in “Womaning.” This question of subjugation is transformed into a granddaughter’s brave expression of liberation, a few poems later, in “Acts of Submission,” a response to the Book of Timothy: “You tell me to submit / so I submit / to fish & grits / to the goodwill of well-timed rain,” the speaker intones, concluding, “I deserve each earthly pleasure / before the world flits into hot mist.”
In advance of Forde’s January 29 reading at Quail Ridge Books, the INDY spoke with her about family, faith, and storytelling. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
INDY: Can you tell me about your grandmother Alice?
FORDE: She is a complicated woman. I think that is what being human requires, that we’re all a little bit complicated—that being human means we have our successes and failures. My grandmother was no different. Part of what I’m trying to capture in the book is the successes and failures of my grandmother’s survival and, in particular, the way that that surviving still manifests in me as a thing that I am holding on to.
But also, she was a human subject to the insecurities of the world, especially as a Black woman navigating pre-civil rights America, trying to save both herself and her children, which is probably what led her to her faith the most. When my grandmother couldn’t believe in the safety of the world, she could believe in the safety and security of eternal life. Trying to think about what the importance of that investment must have meant to her—the ways it would have affected the way that she raised my mother, the way that, in turn, affected the way that my mother raised me.
My grandmother wasn’t perfect. One of the hardest things I had to learn was that my grandmother didn’t tell my mother that she loved her. That’s a really mind-blowing and difficult thing to learn, but it also means that, as a mother, my mom kind of worked double time to make sure I understood how much she loved me. Thinking about inheritances across multiple generations—not just in the Bible that she gave me, but in the way that she has created a force that [shaped] how my mother and I have moved through the world—is part of what I’m trying to unpack in this book.
I wanted to ask about that poem where you mention how Alice never told your mother she loved her. In Southern families and families that have experienced trauma, a lot of things are left unsaid. What was the process like of putting and imagining words to things?
In any Southern family, especially my own, we’re pretty good at weaponizing silence against ourselves and each other. There were times when even the ideas of womanhood were constructed in and through silence—for my family, the harms and navigations of family life were constructed in and through silence.
I remember being maybe like 10 years old, a young girl, and listening to my mom and my aunts have a conversation with my grandmother. They’re talking about my grandmother’s last husband, who was incredibly abusive—I also found out later in life that my grandmother didn’t know a man who didn’t hurt her. As they are talking about this man, my grandmother gets really angry. They’re trying to, like, tell my grandmother, “He abused you.” And she says, “No, he didn’t. He never did that. He would never do that. He never hit me.” And it was really surreal to watch, because my mom’s face drops. My aunts all look very confused and startled. They were like—“What are you talking about, mom? We had to pull that man off you. We had to call cops.”
There’s this palpable physical violence that lives inside the memories of my mother and my aunts that my grandmother refused to acknowledge and in that, honestly, only hurt herself, truly, right? We have no way of understanding what weaponized or motivated that silence—whether it was some kind of amnesia, a refusal to acknowledge, or a whitewashing of the history. I have no way of knowing what was motivating that particular moment.
But just because my grandmother doesn’t want to acknowledge the hurt and harm doesn’t mean that it goes away. One of the things that I’ve had to sit with in the telling of this project is giving voice to those silences that my own family has tried to manufacture, trying to respect the balance between what is my story to tell and what also is the thing that I can allow to exist in silence? Trying to tease out those possibilities was probably the most challenging part of trying to write this book. But in doing so, I do hope that I found my grandmother’s voice in ways that she couldn’t find while she was still here.
You have the Bible to work with but also all this ephemera, like recipes and the census. How do family texts work as storytelling vehicles?
There’s this essay by Saidiya Hartman called “Venus in Two Acts.” In that essay, she talks about the archive of violence that basically shapes Black history, in particular during enslavement. She talks about the ways that we can only find evidence of Black life through archives that are meant to categorize our death. We’re looking at stock lists, at obituaries, at police reports.
Taking that as a lens through which you capture history, part of what I wanted to do with this project is to resist that dehumanization. What are alternative forms of history that we often overlook, that are often forgotten, that do signal subjectivity, that do signal humanity—or at least could be put into tension with the ways that they are trying to erase our humanity?
We have recipes, which I think are beautiful celebrations of a life, because there is, it’s a life that is contingent on this feeding and this feeding of family, like you’re not just cooking for yourself, you’re cooking for others, and you’re cooking for reunions and celebrations. There are all of these opportunities for joy and for wholeness and care that we don’t necessarily find in something like a census. We’re thinking about these two very different modes of categorizing a person, and how we create or find the tensions of humanity in between those spaces.
I’m curious about the book structure—you have Genesis, Exodus, Lamentations, Daughters, Revelations. How did you go about choosing which Bible books to include? Were any other books on the short list?
When I first conceived of it, there were only three [books]: Genesis, Exodus, and then I believe Revelations was the last one. In thinking through the arc of the book, and thinking through all of the poems that were conceived in these sections, I really wanted to think about origins, which is a beautiful manifestation of Genesis. And Exodus has a parallel of leaving, in particular [Alice’s] travel northward from the Jim Crow South, but also, at the same time, an exploration of her own journey into death, right? Which is its own kind of leaving. And then Revelations, which is kind of like, “OK, well, where do we go from here?” That the joy of leveling is in revelry, is something that I wanted to kind of move toward in the end.
As I was looking at the full scope, I realized there were so many different intimacies and minor themes that were being overlooked in some of those books, and so I expanded outward from there. That’s when we opened up to Lamentations, and that’s when I created my own apocryphal book, Daughters. Part of what I was trying to do is look at the Bible [as] my grandmother’s first and true understanding of poetry. It was the only poetry that she knew and consumed on a regular basis, so if I wanted to connect with her, I needed to do it through that poetry. But also, it was my way of looking into what I thought were gaps in the most canonized text in the world. Who are the voices that are the most overlooked?
The first printing of The Book of Alice has some text in red, the way that Jesus’s words are sometimes printed in the Bible. Can you tell me about that style choice?
I knew I wanted to play with red letters, but I didn’t know whose voice I wanted the red letters to be in. There’s always the tension of who plays savior in a biblical text, and one of the things that I wanted to resist was the idea of a savior. There is no singular savior in this particular book. That’s not something that I’m interested in recreating. Instead, when I’m using the red-letter text, what I’m trying to highlight is my grandmother’s humanity—her ability to speak, the importance of her voice, the thing that we do lose through systematic violence but also through time, through death. To resurrect her voice as a means of understanding who she is, but also, most importantly, who I am.
There is a clear tension in the fact that I am the one constructing this voice, thinking about the tensions between what moments are spoken and what moments aren’t. Part of what I wanted that red letter to encourage—what I want from the audience, or rather readers, most of all—is for them to read this book out loud. I want these words to live off the page. That’s part of the point; my grandmother did live off the page. And I hope that even though I’m constructing her story on the page, that at some point during the reader’s experience, the words get to live off of the page.
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