Diamond Forde indicates the devotional character to The Book of Alice, her grandmother. And to generations of Black women. I like to consider The Book of Alice as an origin story, tracing out the life of Alice, the poet’s grandmother. Because where she came from, that’s where the poet came from. And what does that mean? The book exists on one level as the eulogy Forde was unable to deliver when her grandmother, Alice, died. But who she was to Forde, and the mythic influence she had on the family, these aren’t easily understood.
On another level, though, the book is about women growing through girlhood to arrive at what seems inevitable, the life of a mother. And because what might be known about the girl, Alice, isn’t really available, Forde speculates using the only real frame her grandmother left her—the King James Bible. Laying out the the first two-thirds of the book using Old Testament scaffolding, Alice can appear as both the actual grandmother and the archetypal family matron.
Within this intersection lies a determinism that shapes the book’s arc. A determinism that will inevitably lead to the poet’s birth. But also a line that runs from Alice as daughter to Alice as mother. And that line, in particular, feels especially present to my reading. In her family life, Alice can really only exist as a mother. Which is emblematic of her time. Her first husband, named The First Man, was around enough to have fathered The First Born, but he wasn’t around to father that child. And Alice had to find her own way. When the book stages Alice’s migration from The South in terms of the Israelites escaping Egyptian enslavement, it states a cruel irony. Alice boarding a train to the Promised Land seals her to a life centered on motherhood. It’s like a Biblical determinism reminiscent of the Old Testament’s destined truth. Life a girl’s life will always succumb to the forces that shaped Alice into this particular life she had no power to avoid.
This correspondence between Biblical truths and Forde’s biography of her grandmother proves a fruitful poetic tension throughout the book. Yes, the culture ushering Alice into womanhood had only one real vision for what a woman would become, especially a Black woman. But the poetic structure of Forde’s book constantly struggles with whether Biblical analogies are the right means for describing the stages of Alice’s life. They strike a resemblance, one the poet can see, one that supports Forde speculating what might have happened to Alice. But, as Forde reveals in the last third of the book, Alice’s “life story” is only a best guess. So the imprecise fitting of Alice to Bible, observed by Forde in “Poem in Which I Should Write About Cain, But I’m Tired of Writing About Death,” says something about tying a book of poetry to the Bible stories. Is the Bible telling the poem what it should do?
But should The Book of Alice only be read as Alice’s origin story? Where Alice’s life inevitably leads her from girlhood to motherhood, the book openly wonders whether that will also be Forde’s destiny. Forde’s “Lamentations” revolve not only around not knowing her grandmother , and a comment on what the next best actions are for a daughter who lived a prized girlhood. Does that necessarily direct her to being a mother herself? Or has the difficult life of a motherhood like Alice’s served as a cautionary tale?
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.