This is a conversation between Birmingham’s first poet laureate, Salaam Green, and AL.com columnist John Archibald.
John Archibald:
Hi Salaam. You’re the first poet laureate of Birmingham, Alabama, a Black woman, a native of the Black Belt, where some pretty amazing writers grew up. I always thought so many Alabamians found words – or their voice some other way – because of all our state’s contradictions. We are sweet and bitter, easy and hard, hospitable and downright mean, if you look at, say, the Legislature. Alabama is beautiful and sometimes not. Do those things make us, as a state, who we are?
Salaam Green:
Hi, John. Alabama is America’s Classroom. Like any classroom there are micro and macro aggressions. Alabama tends to lean toward this in a way that is both passive and pastoral.
Growing up in the Black Belt felt hard and soft, tender, and sweet, the sour way justice felt in Greensboro as a child in a school system still segregated shaped my view of Alabama. Both in good and bad ways. The stigma of rural Alabama fueled from its past of racial tension always looms, however the beauty of family and home is also important. Rurality for me as a black woman felt like connectedness to a space, a people, and a place that gave me kinship to myself. My home and family were my first introductions into poetic life. Rurality allows me to transcend those realities. Alabama and Birmingham especially is the classroom that keeps on teaching the lessons.
Archibald:
You’ve been going around talking to people, asking them to describe -- in a poetic way -- their Birmingham and Alabama experiences. What have you learned?
Green:
I have found that Alabamians are in a very pure way tied to the land. The red clay and the oak trees, the way the interstates stretch across the state. Sometimes the land divides us and Alabamians, or the folks I am speaking with, want to talk about those divides. Race comes up a lot. Maybe it’s because I am a Black woman. People assume I feel some kind of way. But most of the conversations begin and end with hope and bring us into a space of who we can be now that we see each other.
Archibald:
I’ve heard you talk about how you used to watch your grandmother on her front porch, and how you determined to be a witness to the world, like her. How does that – how does she – affect what you write?
Green:
My writing and poems are lessons or teachings. Some fire, some rain, some good, some about the fragility of our state. I became a certified listener poet, basically someone who sits with people, listens to their stories and writes a poem to reflect what is witnessed. This work has given me insight into what I am positing “reparative poetry” poetry that seeks to tend or mend something. I am wanting to mend the American South, through witnessing the human voice and offering poetry as resonance to those stories. Maybe that is way too arrogant of me to believe that poetry can be a force to change the world and better yet transform the South’s two-faced challenges, or that I, a country girl from rural Alabama and now the first Birmingham poet laureate, could be a conduit for this to happen, but here we are.
Archibald:
You sort of have to be a little arrogant to take it on. It’s wild out there. Not a day goes by that people don’t tell me they love this place, but they are worried for children or friends or family who are targeted because of race, sexuality, politics, whatever, by a Legislature that pulls people down instead of bringing us all up. They talk about a love/hate relationship with the state, and many tell me they don’t think they can stay.
Green:
Yes. The contradiction to stay or go as a young person are normal themes. Young creatives often tell me they can’t create where there are barriers to change. I say that’s when we create best. Staying and experiencing a state that seems to not care about life and livelihood is a challenge. We must find joy – all of us. We must decide what that feels like and set our bones free to the joy.
Archibald:
How does all that color what you write? And how you live?
Green:
I feel that Black American writers often are expected to write about the mortal wounding of the world rather than just writing some pretty poem about the birds and the way the land speaks to them. However, I do believe as a poet and creative writer my job is to speak to the consciousness of people, culture, and the world. I find myself writing a lot about liberation. I believe freedom is what others can give you and liberation is what you give yourself. For example, we may have free speech and that is a given freedom, but using my story to liberate myself and others is something I can give myself.
Archibald:
I know I focus too much on things that go wrong. The threats and challenges and corruptions and politics and AI and technological changes that seem to threaten the things I value -- liberal arts education, the written word, storytelling, truth, etc. And you can give me such joy talking about fruits and vegetables and such. Heal me.
Green:
That’s what we can do with poetry: we can reimagine the world we want to live in and want our children to thrive in. The land, the food, the way we nourish and care and gather ourselves. Those elements of survival are just as present as safety and violence and political corruption. What is alive in you must be cultivated. Then a poet comes to call forth the hidden and the invisible and integrate the memory of them all. I have a poem entitled “Little Girls of Birmingham” a wish and prayer to the four little girls who were killed in the 16th Street bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. In that poem I challenge readers to witness and to really reimagine what we want the world to be and believe that it can be. We owe it to those girls, we owe it to Birmingham, we owe it to America to reimagine and then to create it. It only takes a critical mass to change the world. Start with our neighbors and our neighborhoods and loving each other.
Archibald:
I think going to integrated schools was one of the most important and formative things in my life. I came to see similarities and differences, and learned to appreciate both. It has stayed with me my whole life, not just about race but in appreciating different cultures and foods and music and customs and people who do things or think things differently than I do. I worry that we have resegregated ourselves and have lost some of that. Thoughts?
Green:
For me as a Black woman, going to a school where I had Black teachers and was taught Black history and Black life was honestly my saving grace. Remember Black people didn’t ask to be segregated. Segregation and inclusivity wasn’t our problem or issue. We weren’t the problem. Our history and culture was under attack. We got inclusive ideas from everywhere. School and our home was the only place we got our truths; the purity and essence of that came from brave Black teachers.
I learned the Black national anthem. It was the only way I could pass Alabama history. It wasn’t in the thin Alabama history book. But Mr. Brinson made sure I knew this poetic revolutionary battle cry. We all did. This hymn now softens my vitriol against the attacks on Black history today. Without those lessons I wouldn’t know who I am. It allowed me to go to a liberal arts college with a 7% minority population in 1994 and flourish as a whole person and also appreciate the storied narratives of others. I am grateful for both spaces. My understanding about Black life was preparation and protection from the sting and stigma of segregation and my life in inclusive spaces taught me fellowship with others.
Archibald:
We are at a different place in time now. Those institutions were essentially broken, and we resegregated in a different, perhaps more detrimental way than before. Now we have legislative efforts to edit history so that people don’t feel “uncomfortable,” to legislate what libraries can do, to reshape the narrative to make it read like one of those old “Know Alabama” fourth-grade history books that said ‘Slaves were happy so what’s the big deal.’ I just don’t know if we, as a state and a region, have ever been honest with ourselves. And I don’t know if we will progress until we are.
Green:
It’s maddening. My 78-year-old mother says everyday we are going back to the ‘60s. She is a retired teacher and taught early reading. She also said she is grateful she learned and knows how to teach without the systematic structure of a society that hates. But not everyone does. We have to put poets in positions to recharge these systems. Our legislators are not faithfully responsible for humanity.
Archibald:
This is why I am so leery of AI and efforts to make education purely about job skills. The humanities are key to humanity. And art -- who said this? -- is the highest form of hope.
Green:
Trust poets not politicians. Basically the humanities are probably going to save us. Our fight is to get to the libraries before the books are all gone. That begins with truth, education, and poetry and artists fighting through their words. No change in our world systems have occurred without poets at the helm and poetry igniting the frontlines.
Archibald:
So really poetry is looking at the world honestly. And honesty is both beautiful and terrifying.
Green:
Hell yes. It’s scary as shit being a Black woman in Alabama.
But it also brings me so much pride. Poetry allows me to speak about the pride of my past and the proud nature in which I live and people live daily. Poetry doesn’t suffocate the truth, it just illuminates it. For me I write and speak about both. But mostly I am so proud of my people and myself and how poetry allows me to be me!
Archibald:
I love that. What brings you comfort?
Green:
I am most comforted by witnessing the earth and the people. I am a poet in residence in Harpersville, Alabama, at an old Wallace house plantation. I am doing poems based on the enslaved descendants of that space and town. What I witness the most between cotton fields and the sounds of cicadas is the importance of remembering. Memory is what shall heal us. Nothing is more racially reconciliatory than the truth. And the truth is comforting and confronting.
Salaam Green’s works are published in the Alabama Arts Journal, Southern Women’s Review, Glass House Journal. She is to debut a full length poetry collection this year with Pulley Press.