Book review: Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History by Camille T. Dungy. Norton 2017.
Camille Dungy is a nature poet. She has published four books of poetry, and edited the anthology, Black Nature, Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. In her frequent travels she hungrily explores local landscape and history. These twelve meditative essays weave apparently unrelated histories into her thoughts on motherhood, race, and nature, creating connections and a clear pattern by the end.
weaving: bolga baskets from Ghana source:binoandfino.com
One essay is a love letter to her infant daughter Callie. Anyone who has had and loved a baby will recognize the nutty intensity of her adoration. Dungy was a well-published poet and a creative writing professor when she had her baby in her late thirties. She was stunned by the power of maternity. “I don’t know if I can define myself anymore, now that I’m your mother. You’ve consumed me.” Hers is an animal love. She wants to gobble Callie up, and has lost all sense of propriety and privacy.
source:oaklandpost.org
She watches as Callie topples over in her crib, almost hitting her head on the bars. “How can I name what I felt when I saw you not hurt? Not this time,” she writes, knowing she won’t be able to protect her child from all harm. “I don’t know if there is a name for this in any language, the hope and hurt and hunger I hold when I hold you.”
She examines the passenger list of the Brooklyn, the ship that carried Mormon settlers from New York to California, in a dangerous voyage around Cape Horn. She reads of the babies born and the babies who died on the voyage, and tries to imagine their mothers. “The story of the Brooklyn makes me breathless with sadness and a relief that almost borders on joy. I haven’t lost you yet. I haven’t lost you yet. Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” And so she has been initiated into the desperate love of motherhood, the joy that is always shadowed by fear.
source: findagrave.com
She is in demand for poetry readings and workshops, and she is an enthusiastic traveler. Because she is nursing, she can’t leave the baby at home with her husband, so she and Callie fly all over the country. She is welcomed into the world of parents, a world she was previously unaware of, and finds that her hosts are eager to help her make arrangements. But strangers in airports are often more eager to hold, to touch, to play with the baby than to help her juggle the huge quantity of stuff that traveling with a baby entails nowadays.
source: themomedit.com
In places like Maine, where there are few black people, people stare. Though friendly, they are curious, and as always in the United States, her native land, she feels set apart. As the only black person at a writers’ retreat, the other writers expect her to speak for and represent all African Americans. At the same time, one woman says, “I don’t see you as a black woman,” which means, of course, that she doesn’t see her.
The group talks about Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, and the movie made from it. She hasn’t read it. “It’s hard to explain to a table full of white folks that sometimes I’m just not interested in spending time or money on films and books that focus on the melancholy of white experience.” I read books by minority authors, by disabled people, by LGBT writers, and seek out books from Asia, Africa, Latin America. But African-Americans don’t have to seek out exposure to the lives of white people; in schools and media they’re surrounded by it.
The Hours source:decider.com
“When you belong, you can overlook the totality of otherness, the way that being other pervades every aspect of a person’s life.” She writes of the freedom and expansive bliss of her time in Ghana, where she could disappear into the crowd.
street scene in Accra, Ghana source:wired.com
Dungy’s connection to landscape, her devoted attention to nature, is what makes home for her. She was raised in California, and says, “Once, I knew the silence and wind-cry of my California hills…When I lived in California, I was at home in the language of sky and mountaintop and sea.” When she moved to Iowa, for a long time she couldn’t write. “When a poem finally came, it was written in a different tongue.”
California hills source:imgur.com/gallery/2V7y4Bp
Iowa cornfield source:iowacore.gov
As a black woman she wonders, “How do I write about the land and my place in it without remembering, without these memories: the runaway with the hounds at her heels; the complaint of the poplar at the man-cry of its load; land a thing to work but not to own?” When she is menaced by a dog, she hears its owner say, ‘Sic her. Sic.’ But when the owner repeats the command, she realizes it is ‘Sit girl. Sit.’
source:greenacreskennel.com
“My poems are informed by displacement and oppression, but they are also informed by peace, by self-possession. When I was a child…the dogs we call bloodhounds…were nothing I knew to remember. When I was a girl-child in that kingdom of open space, and all the land I could see and name and touch was mine to love…When I was a child in the hills behind that street called Bluff View, there was no such thing as history. Sometimes my poems rest again in that quiet space, that comfort.”
source:ifsnj.org
Dungy is a poet, and it is a pleasure to read her prose. Her writing flows smoothly, attentive to rhythm and sound. Her thoughts are complex and subtle, though she says, “When writing about race, there can perhaps be precious little wholly fresh revelation. As with writing about motherhood. As with writing about the corruption of the body. As with writing about landscape. It has been the same story for as long as anyone can remember.” Perhaps there is nothing new under the sun, but the light falls on our world from many different angles. Every individual sees a little differently, and this writer gives us the gift of her vision.
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