Snapshot: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
by Erika-Janea
Poet. Painter. Photographer. Writer, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, seems to have covered all of her p's (and q's)! A Cave Canem Fellow, Griffiths received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a Masters Degree in English Literature from the University of Delaware. Her words have stuck to the ears of audiences from numerous venues, including Cornelia Street Café, Nuyorican Café, The Bowery Poetry Club, louderARTS, Busboys & Poets Café, Kettle of Fish Reading Series, and EARSHOT Series, just to name a few. Her artwork? Check Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, Puerto Del Sol, Inkwell, and Black Arts Quarterly. Already on her way to becoming a household name, what’s the real behind this triple threat?
Erika-Janea: Where did you grow up? What affects has it left on you? Tell me about your youth.
Rachel: I was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. I get a lot of jokes about Dela-where??? but geographically, culturally, and historically Delaware functions in some curious ways.
I'm the eldest daughter of four siblings. My parents encouraged education, independence, and hard work. The idea and understanding of families affected me in as much as it taught me to look out for my "brothers and sisters" literally and metaphorically. I also learned how to become a very good cook and a fast eater if I wasn’t making dinner! Being an artist, the idea of community is significant for me though I do nurture a substantial amount of solitude.
As a child, I had an epidemic imagination. I still hold onto it fiercely. My family, teachers, and now – adult – life experiences encouraged this. Most of all, books influenced me and I spent much of my childhood befriending books – their worlds, their fears and hopes, their heroes and villains, their beauties and deaths, their secret universal tongue/language.
I also began practicing and studying visual arts heavily. My siblings and I would spend hours at the Wilmington Library reading, drawing, and creating adventures for our selves in a small town. I also took art classes. As an artist now, the notion of 'adventure' still influences me in the way that on an adventure you have at once the excitement and anxieties of a journey, you know that you must get lost, you must get found, you must meet friends as well as ghosts and let them be your heroes when you need saving, you must remember the trolls under the bridge and the flying horses whose backs were made for your burden(s), you must talk to trees, you must be captive in a lone tower and save yourself by your own hands, you must fly, you must get back, if you can, to home and find yourself both comforted and changed by the entire process of discovery.
Who are your influences?
That is a question-in-progress...Because I work in the blurry space of several genres I will just name some individuals and things and try to figure out later why they came up and out today. James Baldwin, Frida Kahlo, Rilke, Mary Ellen Mark, Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Gordon Parks, Degas & Rodin, Albert Camus, Wole Soyinka, Sonia Sanchez, Romare Bearden, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Pablo Neruda continue to be figures whose words and passions, however lonely or roaring, I revisit regularly.
A good friend of mine uses a Maasai proverb that I love: "Eyes that travel see." Travel especially influences me and travel has always deepened my "ear" and "sight" both as a poet and a photographer. The art of 'seeing' is often like a trapdoor for me. There is surface and then there is an opening of surprise or revelation and yet surface/form is as crucial as the point of breaking. This act of "seeing" and witnessing life, as poet and photographer, in very different but familiar worlds is crucial, I feel. Getting the mood of a place and its people into you is important for me, as a human being and especially as an artist. These things aren't exclusive.
Nature is always an insistent influence upon me. Right now I'm feeding a serious sweet tooth for whales, mountain lions, owls and hawks, peonies, summer moonlight, watermelon & wild raspberries, the sea (always), lupin, hummingbirds, and wildflowers, particularly wild honeysuckle.
What challenges as a woman do you face in your experience?
There are positive and negative challenges, with plenty of gray tones in-between, to living a full experience as a human being. And gray tones include race, gender, mental, spiritual, and physical health, social class/status, education, etc. There are endless riffs here. And when I say 'riffs' I mean it in the sense of the musical, the torn lyric – how there is always space for improvisation and tension, how silence and/or speaking function through the lens of an artist.
I have been and continue to exist in the presence of a great history and legacy of women. I have been fortunate to have all sorts of women – dead and living, real or fictional – challenge, support, praise, haunt, protect, question, and love me.
Has being a woman hindered you?
Only when I permit (or have permitted) myself or others to do so. Mostly I cultivate a sort of fearlessness in this regard and sometimes it has been good for me and at other times it was dangerous, only because of exterior circumstances concerning my personal safety. I tend to dislike the word "NO" unless I'm saying it.
What is it that you wish to achieve in this world?
I don't know yet about any personal achievements but I would begin by asking others to focus more on our global awareness for children and youth, the rights and dignities of all children.
What advice would you give to young women, like myself who may be interested in following the path that you have decided to take?
Each woman's journey is her own as much as it is a part of a larger collective. Right now I often feel that I'll be at the beginning of my path for most of my life. It may also depend on whether an individual perceives things chronologically or non-linearly. I tend to perceive things non-linearly and age-wise, I feel ancient though chronologically I'm "younger."
I tend to lean away from expectations except when they involve human and civil rights. There are general things I could say but I feel that there are women whose lives underscore and overwhelm, in the best ways, my slight wisdom.
For me, intuition is crucial. The truth of guts. Be aware of your own perfections and of course, your flaws, and still regard yourself as whole. Love yourself and love your stink. See through your own eyes and understand, when necessary, how to see through the eyes of others. Demand dignity but be certain to carry it with you always, even while in sleep.
If you had a dream dinner, who would you invite, dead or alive?
First, I'd have to invite my mother because she is a damn good cook and she is my mother. I would also invite my families – here I mean bloodline as well as families in the sense of artists. My best friend Aisha. I guess, if I'm supposed to name famous or interesting people, I don't know if I could say Jesus because he seems pretty booked for the next few years (as is Gandhi). I'd like James Baldwin to show up. Denzel Washington, if he’s just sitting around somewhere. I wouldn't mind any of these folks, or their ghosts, coming by for a bite either: Aracelis Girmay, Bob Marley, Frida Kahlo, James Brown, Basho, Basquiat, the Dalai Lama, Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, David Mura, Bjork, Zora Neale Hurston, Clint Eastwood, Carl Phillips, Annie Leibowitz, Shrek, Ang Lee, Nelson Mandela, Sidney Poitier, Lester Young, Gilgamesh, and Barack Obama.
What do you think of your art or any art as an activist act?
Photographer/journalist Philip Jones Griffiths (no relation), who died this year, has said, "Journalists should be by their very nature anarchists." I would amend, in a basic way in regards to art, this statement to include poets, musicians, dancers, sculpturers, visual artists, and of course, photographers.
Specifically, I do feel that 'activism' is present in my poetry, whether it is private or public, and that meaning often depends upon its reader. Sometimes a person will come to me and say that a 'Nature' poem I've written is political or is subversive in its departure from traditional "Nature" poems. Well, I believe that Nature itself involves both law and lawlessness. Or, I have focused in poems on specific themes involving race, class, abuse, poverty, civil rights, gender, etc.
It's about the angle and the lens one uses to articulate a circumstance or condition. For example, in the realm of photography, there are continual conversations about the dynamic politics of 'shooting' and other matters of ethics. Both poetry and photography attempt, through boundless incarnations, visually and/or linguistically, to share the element(s) of the human condition. Even if, sometimes, as it often does with the germ of an idea or image, an artist is first revealing or recording life to him/her self.
Some artists seem to get abrasive or withdrawn or condescending when one mentions ideas of 'activism' or the 'political' and its meaning for Art (emphasis on capital A). Let it be what it is. Or, perhaps it will be something else. Transformation and translation always interests me.
Photographers and poets both resist and/or record the passage of time, Nature, and humanity in infinite measure. What is mundane. What is extraordinary. What was missed. What was abstract, form, blur, detailed, light, dark, (in)visible. What was felt or not. What resists. What was secret. What was violence. What was his/her/ face, their faces. What was peace. What was hilarious. What was shameful. What was hands or hand-print. What something or someone was/is – shells, moods of light at any moment upon a fixed or moving point. What does not seem to exist and yet, to (re)imagine. Delight.