q&a: sARAH tREMBATH

A Conversation with Sarah Trembath

by Brooke Olson

If Grace in Darkness is an anthology about keeping your head up, even in the darkest of times, then Sarah Trembath’s “Swaying with Wicked Grace” articulates the difficulty of doing so poignantly and personally. Her short creative nonfiction piece explores the history and legacy of racial inequality and its pervasive influence in the present day, and while the experience she describes is deeply personal, it is also transcendent and universal. The narrative refuses to gloss over the difficult experiences and persecution that the main character experiences, and gives voice to the desperation she feels. The narrator moves from childhood to adulthood through the words of others, including literary and political voices of her heritage, but not without difficulty. At every turn, the reader sees the main character struggle with another moment of pain and sorrow from the world, leading to desperation and anger that we experience as if it were our own: “The disembodied grins you drew everywhere—in jealous reverence for Lewis’ Carroll’s Cheshire Cat—became actual wishes.” The words of past writers punctuate Trembath’s narrative, with references to James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Pablo Neruda, Audre Lorde, and more peppered throughout the story. In the following interview, we discussed the influence of these writers as well as her research and writing process.

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First of all, I just want to know a little bit about how the piece came together. What inspired it and why did you decide to write it?
Sarah Trembath: I wrote a book and it did not have an introduction. I sent it to a poet, and he was kind enough to review it and said that I needed to write an introduction to make the book more cohesive. I had no idea what to write, I felt like I had already said everything. Then when I was getting ready to submit the book for a contest, the preface just kind of fell out of my head. I knew that I needed one and it just came out one day. I don’t usually tell that story to people. Another thing was that I had a friend who had a very similar experience growing up and he told his story, and I thought gosh, I never tell people that, and look at you. He would even mention it while he did public speaking, and he was so fearless about it and had no shame. It was really influential on my thinking, and it all just sort of came out. It’s one of the pieces that I’ve edited the least of everything I’ve written.

If this piece was taken from personal experience, why did you decide to write it in the second person? That’s such an interesting choice for a creative nonfiction piece.
Probably because it’s hurtful, that’s a hurtful memory. I guess I wanted that distance from it. I don’t know why, it wasn’t really a choice, it’s just how it came out. But there’s also a part of me that feels, I think because I’m from a different generation, there’s a lot of memoir and personal narratives and selfies and these sob stories that people tell, and I find it a little off-putting. My book is not memoir. I mean there’s a little bit of me in there – it’s creative nonfiction, so now and then I show up as a presence because I noticed something, observed something, or participated in something, but it’s about something else. I think I just come from a generation where it’s a little unusual to be so first-person-centered – I call this the selfie generation. I just wanted a little of the distance that you don’t see as much now.

Another thing I wanted to ask about was your epigraph. You quote a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks where she writes “The time / cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face / all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.” Can you tell me a little about why you chose this quote to frame your story?
What I think is interesting is that I chose it before Melissa even put the call out, so I like that the word “grace” is in the epigraph and is part of the title. I guess it has to do with a lifting of the head – there’s that part about lifting your face all unashamed. And I like that it’s not a perfectly peachy image. It’s about swaying with wicked grace, it’s not like, “Oh I lifted my head and life has been amazing.” There’s a little bit of an edge to it that I think I like, in the whole poem actually.

You bring a lot of outside voices into your work. In this piece, you mention James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and a lot of revolutionary voices. Was that an intentional choice for you?Probably, yes. It’s really a mark of my work. For some reason, it’s important for me to bring in other voices of writers in my community. I don’t know if it’s me paying homage or situating myself in a community, but I do that a lot when I write. I almost always take an excerpt from a poem when I name something. There’s a West African proverb from the Sankofa ethic that says you reach back to the past to bring forward what is necessary to make a better future. It’s an ethic that I hold really centrally, and a lot of the time it takes the form of bringing back other artists. It functions very prominently in my creative work.

Who were you reading when you wrote this piece? Were there any people who inspired you to write it the way that you did?
Yes, I read my student papers. Laughs. No, there’s an important writer who shows up in my book a lot, and because this is the preface I was very focused on his work. He is a revolutionary historian named Walter Rodney who wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1969, and it’s really one of the most important works on American slavery, which is my research area. He did all this incredible primary source research, and what he discovered is really the foundation of what most reputable scholars use. He was also a labor union organizer, and he was so threatening to the status quo that he was assassinated by his own government in 1980 with a car bomb. He’s one of the people who I really conscientiously want to bring forward because there are all these battles about American slavery, like it wasn’t that bad or the civil war was about states’ rights or we’re taking it out of a textbook or we’re calling it something else. One of the chapters of my book really has a lot to do with that, and he’s the prominent voice, his is the primary scholarship. I do primary source work too and I have a picture of him tacked up over my workspace. I quote him a lot, so he’s probably the person I was reading the most of. It was not a student.

What non-writing aspects of your life do you think most influence your writing?
I would have to say teaching because a lot of what I do I see as a part of my teaching. One of my mentors was one of the great poets of the black arts movement. For the people who led the movement, their mode, their method, their reason for doing what they did was to educate. So they would study history and they would go out and do these performance pieces or plays, public theatre, frequently free, and they taught black history. They were actually the people who made black studies and put it in universities. One of my teachers was one of the founders of that movement, and I kind of follow in that vein. A lot of what I can’t say in my classroom because my job is not to indoctrinate people, it’s to help people grow as thinkers, I will say into a microphone on a stage. And because the things that I study are so heavy and emotional and  difficult to read, a lot of time when I’m writing academic scholarship or creative nonfiction, the feelings I have about it come out in a poem. You don’t want to rant and rave in an essay, you want to mold it so the reader experiences it in the way that you want, so I’ll take the ranting and raving and put it into something else, or the sorrow and put it into something else. I would have to say my research and my teaching.

Is there anything that you’re currently working on after the book you wrote?
I have so many projects. I have a creative nonfiction piece about Haiti that will be published in The Rumpus. It’s a response to the comments on Haiti being a “shithole,” so that’s the main thing I’m working on now.
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As you mentioned, your piece is titled in the same vein as the title of the anthology, Grace in Darkness. What does grace in darkness mean to you?
To me personally it’s a very feminine image in a lot of ways. I think women, of course everybody in some ways, but women in particular have to hold their heads up through whatever life gives us. Not to take anything away from men and male survivors of difficult things, but it seems part of being a woman that life can bear down on you pretty hard, but you just hold your head up. You just do. I think that’s one of the things that’s special about women and important about women. Most of the people I admire have a dignity in the face of tragedy.

Sarah Trembath writes poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her first book, The Past Was Waiting for Me is a collection exploring the history of race and its impact on the present day. Her work has appeared in Azure, The Rumpus, Everyday Feminism, and Sally Hemings Dreams ‘zine. She is a graduate of Temple and Howard Universities and currently teaches writing at American University.