At the beginning of Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs, the young narrator says, “Ever since I lost my mother and father in a road accident when I was eight, I’ve had my eye on other people’s parents.”

When I first read this line, I must have been 22 or so, and I related to it even though both my parents were alive. I’d always kept my eye on other people’s parents because I was curious. This species of creature was most often revealed over the dinner table at my friends’ houses, particularly if the parents were at diametrically opposed sides of the political spectrum (like the parents in Black Dogs), which the most interesting ones were.

That many of these couples could disagree fundamentally and still live amicably in the same house defied the laws of gravity — didn’t conflict lead to a mess of snot and tears, skulls knocking rock bottom? I wasn’t out to prove Leo Tolstoy’s famous line from Anna Karenina — “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — because it wasn’t the point.

Instead, what crossed my mind then, as it does now, is that curiosity is its own teacher; we lumber along through our lives, short or long, observing similarity, being inspired by difference. Curiosity can sometimes freeze our hearts into judgment (how could those parents enable!) and unfreeze it (there but for fortune go you or I), helping us come to terms with the inevitability of the seven ages of man or the circle of life.

A tragedy is less of an existential life sentence if we notice that other species of human also experience it; laughter can connect; none of the insights into life can be learned in isolation, in separation.

It is like that with poems, too, so now I joke: I’ve had my eye on other people’s poets, collecting and recollecting their work. My mother just gifted me Joy Harjo’s spanking new memoir, Poet Warrior. Harjo is America’s poet laureate and a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Harjo writes:

“I had been using [Audre Lorde’s] poems as maps, the way some of our indigenous peoples used songs for star maps. They told me how to get from here to there, in a land of beautiful diversity.”

The first time Harjo read activist-poet Lorde’s Coal, she could not leave it behind in the bookstore. “I needed it to keep me warm.”

With its multiple references and histories, Harjo’s body of work holds many lifetimes — her own, plus those of ancestors, descendants, and her community of writers like Lorde. When she quotes Lorde’s famous anthem, “A Litany for Survival,” she tells about their first in-person conversation, where Lorde says, “Let’s find a place to sit and break bread together.”

Later, Harjo asks if Lorde had figured it all out. “She threw her head back and laughed. ‘Nooooooo, honey!’”

Curiosity reveals the lines between the stars.

~by Leeya Mehta, September 13, 2021