Erica N. Cardwell‘s debut book is more than a memoir. It’s a meditative essay collection that includes cultural criticism. In Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art, Cardwell balances introspective musings with larger, eye-opening explorations into our society.
Today, we have a brief Q&A with the author and an excerpt from “Thunder,” an essay in Wrong is Note My Name.
Can you briefly summarize the excerpt you’re sharing with readers today?
This excerpt depicts the very early stages of grief and mourning after my mother died. I wanted to convey how grief had taken over my body in those early months and years. It was a wild, unruly static and caused me to both radiate with curiosity and despair. I was just 22 years old at the time so this was a symptom of my youth and an expansion of my soul. The desire to make art, be in the presence of art was insatiable. It made me feel closer to my mother.
What was the writing process like for this specific essay? What was the hardest part to get right?
I remember when I first started working on this essay. There was an honest thrill at sharing this part of my experience. Grief can be so private and I wanted to talk about how awe-filled this period had left me. Because of this, the writing poured out of me and this section was extremely long, with many stories woven in. I tend to work in this unabashedly compulsive way – I spent some time trying to find the root of the story, where was the shift? What was happening to my body? When I realized that my body was the central theme, I decided to write about this period, very closely and intimately. This was such a treat. As an essayist, I love working with lyricism and poetics. So getting to this deep sense of clarity through prose was a crucial shift in my writing, and in the process of writing this book.
How does this excerpt speak to the rest of the book?
This excerpt from “Thunder” introduces my voice, the adult Erica. In the first essay in the book, “Chicken Soup: Seven Attempts” , I introduce child Erica in reflection of my mother, as a means of sharing an origin story and my mother’s place in the legacy of Black women artists. In “Thunder”, this clarifies my origin as a writer/critic’s journey and Black women living in New York. Overall, I find this excerpt to offer a glimpse into the raw moments that can bring us closer to our art.
As publication draws near for this, how are you managing knowing so many personal thoughts and moments are going to be in the hands of strangers?
I have what some may consider a strange relationship to this aspect of creative nonfiction writing, and that is, I truly believe that now the book is no longer mine. This is a really personal book and with that, I don’t think I would have been able to write it the way that I did without knowing deep within my soul that I would need to relinquish all ownership and even relationship someday. I feel blessed to have been inspired to write it and made sure to tell stories that felt true while also protecting and preserving my mother and myself. It is not the whole story. Which is why I am willing to let it go. Now this story will hopefully create meaning and purpose in the lives of others.
An excerpt from “Thunder”
Grief had formed a school around me, a place of study. Thick was the despair, but I found myself renewed in the presence of creative expression, a fresh, hungry wanting yet to be named. My early focal point was theater. I could disappear into piles of plays for weeks at a time, only emerging to talk incessantly about them. It was at this time when most of my conversation skills landed like clown-ish, unrelated opinions from the brassy mouth of a child. No one could receive me. And no matter how close I stood, I kept finding it harder and harder to connect. Folks would call me a poet, laugh a little to themselves, and then proceed, often repeating what I said in different words. If not for privacy, it would be easier to disappear into my room. Some days consisted of a loud rolling over to behold the ceiling’s sky and make music out of the remains of afternoon sun. Most months were spent with theater. For instance, Luigi Pirandello, the Italian modernist, had removed the stage altogether with his Six Characters in Search of an Author. I was fascinated with the technique, the anchor coming untethered, the roots of a self and the performers waffling around a bit lost. I read others: The Balcony, Fefu and Her Friends, Waiting for Godot, and strained classics by Chekhov, Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neill, giving myself an education. I didn’t always know what I was reading but I wouldn’t stop. Now and then, something clicked.
The shape of my body formed a cocoon. Small within this fortress, I peered back at the dispositions and expressions often unable to behold me. I flailed within this reflection, an initial disorientation that pushed me to form myself into another’s likeness. And as ill-fitting as those clothes were, I lost years roving within this futile task. My difference was unavoidable. Announcing itself in every aspect of the person I was becoming. The more out of step I felt, the more I had come to realize that this had always been my place. That I was born in this separateness, an outsider whose double consciousness formed a thirdness, clamoring forth, unwilling to be tamed. The poems from these long days into nights exhibit the tension of these warring selves, the knowingness and the refusal.
The room, a grungy imitation of Diane Martel’s pouty ’90s music videos—plush fabrics, faux pearls draped all around, and piles of pastel sheets—but with more blankets, less color, and teetering piles of books. It might have been an unmet need that turned me into a writer. This undisturbed period of self-study allowed me to shove my hand into my navel and pull out the creatures squirming and babbling in languages only I could decipher. When I would finally leave my apartment, I would make my way to a coffee shop and spark up a conversation with a stranger before any other part of me could resist. Evenings were a long dance sequence to the percussive tumble of “Little Girl Blue.” I was practicing my arabesque, balancing my extension on the windowsill. On other nights, I would thrash inside of my sheets—a mess of improvised squats and gestures answering the vibration of my skin’s song. Days continued that way, plodding forward in extraordinary disharmony—a cosmopolitan soundtrack to the fallow blankness at my core. It will always be a strange thing, to have someone you don’t really know tell you that your mother was your best friend, a platitude more prevalent in the absence of her body. An already gaping mouth yanked wide, sputtering nothing. The act of mourning, of being folded upon myself with unbridled sorrow, was not the whole of the emptiness. Cleaving for her body, for the presence of her small stature and tiny reaching voice, invoked an unabashed ache for her conversation. I remained profoundly wordless, yet strangely, compulsively literate.
Being alone in New York made me eager for this tension: a willingness to observe desire troubled by a willingness to pursue risk. Reading provided a brief underworld. There was action and drama and energy and conflict, from what I considered to be a safe distance. And when this grew tiring, when I could no longer ignore the roiling heat within me, I would return to friends whose lives had continued moving. Their interests were the typical yearnings of early adulthood—falling in love and beginning their careers. I tortured myself in fitful attempts at kinship—going on uncomfortable dates with men and weaving tall tales about the aftermath. A family-owned video store was located down the block from my Astoria apartment. It was less than a block from the twenty-four-hour fruit and vegetable markets, United Brothers, at the corner of Thirty Third Street, and Elliniki Agora, where I could get my fresh herbs and wild mangled mushrooms. On the Saturday after payday, piles of customers sampled leaves and bruised fruit as they tested for ripeness. But at the video store, there was a warm, curious vibe shared by many of its customers. Romantic comedies and foreign films were perched smartly in the center aisles: Godard, Buñuel, Almodóvar. The blockbusters lined the walls. I would rent an Almodóvar film and a romantic comedy and, every single time, believe that the ending would be different. That the initially unrequited wouldn’t come to their senses and fall in love.
A glass of cheap wine green curry from Yajai chicken fingers from the Mini Star diner combo number three from the JJ’s sushi, the best sushi in New York.
I was lonelier than I should have been, a frail, shivering reed with anger hanging heavy in my sight line. Outwardly, I was growing into a too-thin woman held up by a forced smile. I found a photograph of myself, somewhere between twenty-one and twenty-four. My eyes reveal that the blinds had been drawn for an undetermined amount of time. My smile is that sly one—resigned to her dissatisfaction; my hair is wrapped in a yellow-and-red scarf. The look in my eyes does not appear to be one of loss or sadness. I look committed. Time will often construct wisdom, or something like it. I have held on to that boldness, only now it has come to mean something more shy, timid. Still bold but awkward seeming— fumbling with even the information I have come to learn through experience.
I began poring over the Beats, mainly its cult of women writers, willing to confess the problems with these so-called heroes. Hettie Jones’s life thrilled me—she made shadows around the East Village in vintage floral skirts and big eyeglasses. Eventually, her love, LeRoi Jones (Baraka), courted Diane di Prima, my other favorite. I went to St. Mark’s Book shop a few times, imagining their silent showdown, a scene from Hettie Jones’s How I Became Hettie Jones, between the stacks. Crammed under my bed lived C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, PhD applications, a copy of Motherless Daughters, and my mother’s diary, my most sacred text, untouched. Hinging within my bedroom’s sky was this enormous overgrowth of decay. An aching presence in the form of sepia-colored mold, furry and replete with return. Another doomed “Giovanni”— abandoned but unable to die. A daily reminder of the self I wouldn’t let leave. The existential task required a sloughing off to make anew. In the absence of being seen by my mother was a new intention. Being “seen” by art. How could I make this change? Could I revise?