The Book of Alice is precisely what one might expect—a collection of poems centered around the life of Diamond Forde’s late grandmother Alice. Yet, one is completely taken aback by how Forde bravely opens up this private world of family histories to explore grief, Black womanhood, religion and the legacy of oppression, as well as language as a bridge to grasp the intangible and make visible the invisible. Be ready to be surprised by the unconventional movement on the page, awed by the music and earnestness of Forde’s words, graciously broken by the violence and lingering wounds and at last, revived with the urgency and jolt of coming alive with hope.
Over email, Forde shared her experience of bearing witness to the stories that are so often painfully overlooked, the memories that remain, and the redemptive act in writing this book.
The Rumpus: Can we start from the beginning—the moment you came across your grandmother’s King James Bible? Where were you and what do you remember of that time?
Diamond Forde: I remember it was many years after my grandmother’s passing; I went to temple with my godparents—my Aunt Cee from the book—to watch my godfather carry the Torah, a momentous occasion for him, one that we remember fondly, and my Aunt Cee was so grateful to have me there that she gifted me my grandmother’s Bible after the ceremony as a momento, a snapshot of the moment we witnessed.
I remember that when she handed it to me it felt like she was trusting me with the world, which in a way she was. She told me that she wanted me to have it, that it would protect me. This was in the years when I had just started graduate school in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the same city and state my godparents got stranded in over a decade before, on the darkest highway they could imagine, with a cop and a gun clanging like a hammer on his hip.
I think that my Aunt Cee recognized, before I could recognize, what was coming. She gave me that book during a time she knew I was old enough to have it, but also during a time she knew I was old enough to need it. From the beginning, that book was a gift toward my survival. I’m grateful for that care.
The first time I opened that Bible, truly opened it, it was the middle of the night during a tornado warning in Tuscaloosa, about four years after an F5 tore the city to ruins. I was scared and alone and too far from a shelter to drive in the dark, so my mom told me to read my grandmother’s favorite verse—Psalm chapter 23—and pray, so I did. I read it in the bathtub of my studio apartment, over and over, until the words slurred into early morning light.
These days, I keep the Bible on my writing desk. Not for any religious reason, at least not in that sense. But because it reminds me of who and what I write for. It reminds me of where I come from. I’m grateful for that reminder.
Rumpus: The collection is one of preservation and powerful storytelling. It is beautiful to see all the ways poetry holds and keeps alive voices long gone. What was most important to you about creating and re-telling these family histories?
Forde: Thank you for holding your heart open to these stories.
My first aim was resurrection; I wanted my grandmother back; I wanted to speak with her, hear her, hold conversations with her, understand her in ways that I was too young, or naive, or self-centered to make room for when she was alive. I wanted poetry to do the impossible, to bridge the gap that death creates.
But the more time I spent with her stories, the more time I had to acknowledge all of the ways poetry creates survival, too. I am alive because of these stories, but also the process of collecting them taught me how to live meaningfully, too. I used to spend hours on the phone with my mother, my aunts, listening to their stories. I was grateful for their time, their history, their voices. I was grateful for the perspective they gave me, how much had to happen to carry me here, to this moment. I learned through their love and patience what it means to know our stories, to tell our stories, to live them.
This book brought me the courage to remember and to live.
Rumpus: I thought a lot about the relationship between grief, memory, and writing as I read this collection, and felt thankful for the gift of recollection this medium offers. In a recent interview, poet Hanif Abdurraqib described grief as the kind of emotion that is “knocking on the door of memory and asking to recall something.” What memories did you often return to, or rather, what memories arrived and stayed with you as you wrote these poems?
Forde: Most of my fondest memories of my grandmother were memories of girlhood—summers spent at grandma’s house, tending to her with the clumsy and earnest love only a child can give.
Even in my memories, Grandma Alice was a complicated woman. She was a disciplinarian for sure, kept her switch ready on the folding table(the one she used as a dining table back in those days), and I used to eye that thing like a warning any time I spent time in her room.
But she was also very loving, in her own way (which is to say she loved more through her abilities as a caretaker than in any kind word she might’ve said). I remember one summer afternoon, my grandmother treated us to dessert after lunch, grabbed one of those industrial-sized cans of sliced peaches from the cupboard, then scooped us heaping bowls with whipped cream, which we ate until our fingers stickied, our grins smeared with cream. It was the first time I had ever experienced peaches and cream, and it was magical.
I came back to these memories often during this project.
Rumpus: Coming across familiar biblical elements in the poems felt both surprising and refreshing. In “Lot’s Wife,” you reimagine the biblical story of looking back on a city destroyed by fire and its consequence. There are also several poems written in numbered verses. How did this formal decision evolve?
Forde: I’ve always disliked American history classes, but I loved world history—partly because I loved learning about a world that I had never seen before, but also because world history would often include legends and mythologies, narratives that we would use to understand whole worldviews, whole cultures, and I mention that because mythologies and origin stories became the only way that I wanted to contextualize history. So when I gave myself the challenge of writing my own history, my origin story, I knew that I wanted to do so through the conventions of the creation myth. “Creation Myth: Alice” became that story. I wrote it using the conventions of the Book of Genesis because I wanted to write what I knew; there’s no creation myth I know better than that one.
As I progressed through the project, I used my inherited copy of the KJV Bible to make formatting decisions—originally placing poems into columns, heading them with chapters and verses, et cetera. It felt important to stay in conversation with my copy of the Bible, especially when I first conceived of The Book of Alice as a resurrection attempt, because it was the only poetry my grandmother knew and loved in this world. If I wanted to use poetry as a vehicle to reach her, I had to start with the poems she knew, understood, lived in and through.
Working with one of the most canonical texts in the Western tradition is tricky; we’ve seen that book repurposed again and again in our media and our literature. There are stories within the Bible that, even if you have had zero religious exposure, you know just because you’ve been exposed to it so often. You can imagine what a challenge it is, then, to rely on the Bible for your book’s central framework.
Part of my goal in reapproaching biblical figures in my poetry was to recognize and recover the marginalized voices in the book, to recover the Black women that I knew existed there, but had been erased for all of us—through revision or attention. “Lot’s Wife” was one of my attempts at that recovery.
Rumpus: The poems written in a recipe format are some of my favorites in the collection. The poem “What Alice Saw” is in the shape of an opened Bible. Can you share what sparked these modes of writing? Did you encounter any challenges in the process?
Forde: I’m so glad you enjoyed them. I gave a lot of consideration to inheritance in this book; it’s one of the central themes of The Book of Alice—inheritance and lineage. I didn’t have much handed down to me from my family, at least not materially. A major goal for the project was to get creative about what inheritance means, what it looks like. What does it mean, for instance, when trauma becomes one of our inheritances? What are the inheritances shaping who we are and how we interact with the world? What inheritances do we keep? What inheritances do we let go of?
As a Southern woman, I think you can trust me when I say I know good food. My mother is a fantastic cook; some of my favorite memories as a girl were the holidays, before my grandmother’s passing, back when the whole extended family would gather and cook together, eat together. But my mother was the best cook among all of them, and I wanted to be just like her. In the years following my own entry into adulthood, I spent years trying to recreate and perfect my mother’s recipes, recipes that are, at once, hand-me-downs—passed on from my mother’s mother—links to identity, history, joy.
It was hard choosing what recipes to include in this book. I wanted recipes that were distinctly Southern (but also recipes that my Mama wouldn’t kill me for sharing). I had to try to strike a balance between the recipe and the poem, which would often compete with one another in their conventional demands.
I think the recipe poem is powerful in that it reminds us not just how we cook but who we cook for, and that was something I tried to keep in mind with each poem, too.
Rumpus: The intimacy, candor, and fearlessness of Alice’s voice is captured in some poems like “Courtin’” and “Womaning.” In “Womaning,” there’s an urgency with which you examine Black womanhood and oppression.
Forde: I want to share with you the central question guiding the creation of The Book of Alice, chiefly: what tensions are created when we transpose a tool of oppression, like Christianity, over Black (women’s) narratives?
I asked this question in the writing of this book because to reckon with the history of Christianity in this country is to reckon with the history of white supremacy, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism, enslavement, gender discrimination, homophobia and more. Black churches can become the center of political and communal resistance, but have also been historically co-opted as a means of indoctrinating Black folks into their own subjugation, too. And despite that history, God’s word weaponized against us, Black folks like my grandmother still found solace in the church, in the Bible’s pages. The same book that once kept us in chains is the same book my grandmother believed would lead her to salvation. How do I write through that tension, that dissonance?
How do these tensions live in us?
I spend a lot of this book thinking about subjectivity—the makings of it. At the time that I was writing these poems, I was reading Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet, and I was enamored with his idea of the quiet interior, of the humanity within the Black person that does not have to exist in resistance to white supremacy, that humanity that just is.
I wanted to create a book that captured both sides—the Black subject in resistance and at rest, in our contradictions and complexities—the Black woman as she is—flawed and lovely, whole, and wholly human. That work felt important.
Rumpus: How often did you think about the marginalized stories of women while you wrote these poems? What would you say has been the most redemptive part of this experience?
Forde: How often did I think about it? Every step of the way.
As a Black woman, I wrote this book for other Black women first and foremost; I wanted to tell our stories, to tell them in a way that encapsulated the entirety of us—diasporically, but also subjectively—as humans with strengths and weaknesses who don’t have to be grand to tell grand stories.
If this book was meant to save anybody, it was only myself. I wanted to feel whole through the process of creating this book. I was surviving through times that felt like it meant to piecemeal me to death, and what I wanted most was to feel whole again, and what I realized I needed to feel that wholeness was community. I needed to traverse around the obstacles of time and space to find the “me” that always existed within the “us.” So, the most redemptive part of the experience was the opportunity to recover and reacquaint myself with myself.
Rumpus: “Fat Gospel” and “Another Damn Body Poem” both explore the female body as well as its complexities. The body shifts and expands to the demands of love. The body widens and contorts to the whims of the world. The body is also a temple, filled with dancing and an avalanche of desire and loathe. How has your focus on Fat Studies at Florida State informed your approach to thinking and writing about the body in all its forms?
Forde: One of the poetics guiding the creation of this book was a poetics of excess. Excessive poetics revels in “going beyond the proper limits,” which I imagined as a metonym for Blackness, acknowledging that our history of fatphobia is also a history of anti-Blackness.
When I constructed a poetics for this book, I was invested in making the invisible visible—giving voice to boundaries the Black body must navigate to live, to be in a poem: the social and cultural expectations for women to be small (in stature, in personality), for instance, but also the limitations of poetry as a genre (what do we consider a poem to be and why). Fat studies was my lens towards these revelations, toward many of the topics the book explores but also some of the more creative forms that it uses to accomplish that work.
Rumpus: How do you think of these poems in relation to your first poetry collection, Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021)?
Forde: In many ways, I think The Book of Alice is a continuation of the work I accomplished in Mother Body. With Mother Body, I thought through fatness and excess, but mostly through the lens of embodiment—how do we embody excess.
With The Book of Alice, I wanted to expand that line of thinking, to recognize and experience the lines of normalcy and excess as they existed metaphysically, too, in our understanding of spirituality, history, subjectivity, and grief. The Book of Alice deepens the critical thought that Mother Body started.
Rumpus: Poems like “Sethe Speaks to Hagar,” “Rememory,” and “The Sow Speaks to Noah” were influenced by Toni Morrison’s writing. Do you recall your first introduction to Morrison’s work and your response to it? How has your relationship with her writing deepened or changed over time?
Forde: I think I join a chorus of voices when I say that Morrison changed my life; the book relies on Beloved a great deal, in large part because of its complicated investigation of the relationship between enslavement and gender, motherhood, family, et cetera. But all of her work guides me—in what I write, how I write, and what I think writing should do.
Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a book that reaches through time; it performs time in its truest sense, simultaneous and sudden and breathless and hard. I think anyone who wants to understand the false dichotomy between past and present should read Morrison’s work. She perfectly encapsulates the tension between narrative and time; all we mean to do with narrative is to create order where there ain’t none.
Morrison gave us such a gift with that book.
Rumpus: One of the things I reflected on as I read this is how much is lost over years that we may not even know, the stories we may never come close to discovering, and the sad realization that it’s impossible to salvage it all. Which, of course, means there’s tremendous joy and gratitude when we do chance upon these hidden stories and have a chance to steward and pass them on. When you look back on all of this—your family’s lineage, particularly the life your grandmother lived and what she left behind, what would you say has been the most meaningful and surprising part of it all?
Forde: I’ve learned a lot about my grandmother through this process—not all of it positively enlightening. Alice was a hard woman hardened by time, by violence, and all the wounds and wonders that exist between. I realized, through the course of writing this book, that my grandmother never knew a man who didn’t hurt her, and that was a hard revelation to have. But my grandmother’s story doesn’t end with her. It doesn’t even end with me.
My grandmother’s story is a story of collisions—of lives bumping constantly into one another, through one another—and her story lives in this book but it also lives beyond it, too, if you let it, because maybe the story gets to live on in you. Like any good life, the stories we tell collide against other lives, within other moments, and those collisions cause change—in direction, in momentum—we are asteroids bumping into each other through the great reaches of time—and we move, always.
So if I had to give voice to any legacy I hope this book accomplishes, I hope that it encourages us to move a little differently, a little more purposefully, towards good, however we imagine we need it. If I may speak for her, I think my Grandma Alice would like that.
