how the word is passed clint smith review

I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. Beauregard riding on horseback, his Confederate uniform slung over his shoulder and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes. Every day on the way to school, I passed a statue of P.G.T. (Reading) Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an ever-present fixture of my daily life.

And I've been writing, in many ways, for the last few years that served as a sort of entry point to this interrogation because we can take down these monuments, but if we don't address what led the monuments to be put up in the first place, then we're not actually solving the issue.

And so I wanted to share a poem that I wrote. And so while the book is a narrative nonfiction project, the poems are the things that help me ask the questions. And, you know, that's how I was trained as a writer. So I began thinking of that and thinking about how different places across the country, including my own hometown - to what extent are these places being honest about their relationship to this history, and to what extent are they hiding from it? And this ultimately became the book that I've written that comes out next year, which is a narrative nonfiction book. And I began thinking about, what does it mean that I grew up in this city, you know, where there are names of hundreds of people who were Confederates or owned enslaved people that sort of ornament the iconography of the place I grew up, in this majority Black city? And what does it mean that we have a city that, in many ways, honored and memorialized enslavers more than it did the enslaved?

And should they be taken down? Should they stay up?Īnd in 2017 in my hometown in New Orleans, we removed several statues and memorials of Confederates, including Robert E. And within that is this interrogation of Confederate monuments and memorials and statues. But what's top of mind for me as we end 2020 is the sort of racial reckoning that this country has experienced over the last several months and really over the last several years, both since George Floyd was killed and since Black Lives Matter has begun. Here's Clint.ĬLINT SMITH: Obviously, a lot has happened this year. His forthcoming book 'How The Word Is Passed' explores how different sites across the country reckon with or fail to reckon with their relationship to the history of slavery. His book of poems 'Counting Descent' won the 2017 literary award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. As 2020 comes to an end, we ask Clint Smith what he's thinking about as he looks back at this year.

How the word is passed clint smith review