May 2018 Meeting: Air Traffic by Gregory Pardlo

Our May book club selection was the recently published memoir Air Traffic by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet and essayist, Gregory Pardlo. The titles and designations in front of his name are important, because as our discussion unfolded, we examined the ideas around how much of our character we get to claim as our production. As his father’s namesake, Pardlo’s essays became the vehicle for which he interrogated himself about the narratives we create for ourselves. Their importance, their responsibilities, their weight, are designed to better understand and explain a thing. To create some order in the midst of what can be life’s chaos. But a narrative can also leave us beholden to ideas that do not grow or change with us. Of generations of men in his family he writes, “I’ve had to accept that they were a part of me, and for my sanity construct a biographical narrative that proved me the better for it. This is how people get trapped carrying their forebears in a sort of ectoplasmic pregnancy. Ancestor worship is the survival strategy of the dead.” For a people long denied the opportunity to control their own collective and individual narratives, the participation in, and practice of Blackness and its constructs floated throughout our conversation and the book. There was a collective when in Colored People’s Time Pardlo declares “I didn’t want to be white; I wanted all the shit I thought comes with it.” With that privilege of whiteness comes the benefit of the doubt, room for error, and a lack of absoluteness that allows for an ownership of the self. We challenged the idea of making it, as if the it is beyond the something one already is. There can exist a deflation that comes with achieving something you were told you weren’t supposed to have because of everything you went through to get it and everything you missed out in pursuit. The American narrative of simplicity is the dream; an expensive removal from reality, especially for those that are awake.