Niama Leslie Williams

If a poet were to write an autobiography, what would it look like?

Surely not linearly, an orderly flow of words making progress along time-honored narrative channels. Possibly, instead, splashes of words. Words flung up into the air, the droplets sometimes forming a Paynes grey fog, sometimes a rainbow-filled dazzle of light. Words of frustrated brilliance, craven cowardice, passion transmogrified into self-indulgence, skewed reasoning alternating with blinding insight, childish resentment toward slender blond women hand-in-hand with clear-eyed disquiet over the Western male-dominated literary canon that renders other voices (including hers) inaudible.... Words less read than experienced, without comforting translations. A story told for its own sake, and you free to follow along or no, your choice.

This may be why, in The Journey, Williams doesn't explain herself. The life she describes, the story of a highly intelligent young black girl who suffers great losses and grows into an adulthood marked by mental illness, morbid obesity, and a doctoral dissertation, took place with or without you, and so will the telling of it now. Believe or disbelieve, comprehend or don't. It is what it is.

Example: At one point early in the book, Williams refers to herself, almost as an aside, as "a schizophrenic." Are we meant to take this literally? Certainly the story takes place against a tapestry of mental health interventions, although these are usually specified as being for eating disorders. But then we notice that the book itself is written in a sort of disorderly variegation. One chapter is a short story, another a prose poem, still another a stream of consciousness essay. First and third person interchange constantly. Even people's names seem fluid. We have a sense, not an explanation, of schizophrenia, and, interestingly, it is enough.

In another scene, at 29 years and 400 pounds, after a childhood of brutality and rape at the hands of her brothers, ongoing abandonment by her father, unfailing rejection from men, poverty, loneliness, and unending academic struggle, she tells her mother: "What do I have to eat over? Nothing much." It hardly seems possible she really means this. Is she reassuring her mother at her own expense? Or does her illness allow her to actually believe it? We cannot know. We cannot answer this and the other questions that arise, like the smoke from myriad tiny post-earthquake fires, throughout this book. We can only read on, allowing the fog and the light to continue seeping into us, until (a month after finishing the book, in my case) it suddenly occurs to us that we do know. Her story is clear, not because she explained it to us, but because we experienced it.

Yes. I should think this is how a poet might write an autobiography. This is why I think Williams is a gifted poet, and may well prove to be one of our great ones. Her writing, while clearly still on it's own "journey," shows gigantic talent. Meanwhile, her passion, her abiding love for the literary voices that still remain too much outside the canon, her willingness to be wrong and her insistence on writing what feels right, make me certain that she will never abandon her journey--and that it is one worth taking.… (meer)