Cloud burst
|
|
|
Bright: A Memoir by Kiki Petrosino
|
And then there are stories best told in other ways. Poet and Essayist Kiki Petrosino’s Bright: A Memoir is a book of lyric essays [or essay-ic poems] which explores not just Petrosino’s experiences navigating many cultural traditions growing in the United States as a child of a Black African American mother and an Italian/Catholic white father, but also the essence of memory and storytelling.
“Bright” is slang, as Petrosino says, “for light-skinned people of Black & white ancestry. It’s not a compliment.” And “It’s hard to love bright.”
The essays explore her own relationship to the derogatory term she has lived with and her experiences facing the many layered legacy of enslavement of her family on her maternal side. The essays also explore other relationships – with her Italian grandfather who committed suicide when she was in college, with other children and people in her life and with writers she found on the page. She writes of her experiences with Dante, with her teacher Gregory Orr, of racism with other professors once she is one herself, with the Thomas Jefferson she finds in his archival writings, with Shakespeare, with fairytales.
What is so astonishing in this book beyond her beautiful and devastating and beautiful story, is how she also explores the heart of remembering and storytelling through external and internal relationships. How her story is woven from within as it clashes and weaves with the world outside of her. She weaves Dante and Shakespeare because they are intricately woven in her search for selfhood. She weaves teachers and fairytales along with vignettes of her life because they are all deep parts of her.
All part of the weave of her relationship to a core way she has been identified – with “bright”. All part of the weave, too, of her search for belonging. This is a way to find belonging – with the self and with the many conversations/encounters we have in the world and in our inner worlds.
For me, this is a way that memory and remembrance often work. We have all kinds of experiences and those experience spark all kinds of internal experiences. Our internal experiences also spark other kinds of experiences that are personal to us – like who we read and what our encounters with stories on the page inspire and challenge inside of us.
Our stories are not just what happens to us, but what happens inside of us. Petrosino masterfully and beautifully embodies experience and memory in her essays in this way. Bringing the reader into both outer world experiences and her intimate inner experiences that define her even more. She tells her story not just from factuality but from the liminal. The place where memory, with all its lyricism and layers and strange truths, most truly lives. The liminal where we can find different ways of belonging to ourselves and the world.
BRIGHT: A MEMOIR BY KIKI PETROSINO, SARABANDE BOOKS
“Bright” is slang, as Petrosino says, “for light-skinned people of Black & white ancestry. It’s not a compliment.” And “It’s hard to love bright.”
The essays explore her own relationship to the derogatory term she has lived with and her experiences facing the many layered legacy of enslavement of her family on her maternal side. The essays also explore other relationships – with her Italian grandfather who committed suicide when she was in college, with other children and people in her life and with writers she found on the page. She writes of her experiences with Dante, with her teacher Gregory Orr, of racism with other professors once she is one herself, with the Thomas Jefferson she finds in his archival writings, with Shakespeare, with fairytales.
What is so astonishing in this book beyond her beautiful and devastating and beautiful story, is how she also explores the heart of remembering and storytelling through external and internal relationships. How her story is woven from within as it clashes and weaves with the world outside of her. She weaves Dante and Shakespeare because they are intricately woven in her search for selfhood. She weaves teachers and fairytales along with vignettes of her life because they are all deep parts of her.
All part of the weave of her relationship to a core way she has been identified – with “bright”. All part of the weave, too, of her search for belonging. This is a way to find belonging – with the self and with the many conversations/encounters we have in the world and in our inner worlds.
For me, this is a way that memory and remembrance often work. We have all kinds of experiences and those experience spark all kinds of internal experiences. Our internal experiences also spark other kinds of experiences that are personal to us – like who we read and what our encounters with stories on the page inspire and challenge inside of us.
Our stories are not just what happens to us, but what happens inside of us. Petrosino masterfully and beautifully embodies experience and memory in her essays in this way. Bringing the reader into both outer world experiences and her intimate inner experiences that define her even more. She tells her story not just from factuality but from the liminal. The place where memory, with all its lyricism and layers and strange truths, most truly lives. The liminal where we can find different ways of belonging to ourselves and the world.
BRIGHT: A MEMOIR BY KIKI PETROSINO, SARABANDE BOOKS