On Tuesday, writer Emily Bernard spoke with Lis Harris at the School of the Arts as part of their ongoing Nonfiction Dialogues. The conversation was streamed on Zoom.

On September 21 at 7:30 pm, the Columbia University School of the Arts held its latest installment of its ongoing Nonfiction Dialogues series, now in its sixteenth year, where authors of notable works of nonfiction are invited to converse with a professor about the themes of their own work and about the art of writing nonfiction. This week’s featured author was Emily Bernard, whose latest work is Black is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, a collection of narratives based on her own life. 

Bernard is a celebrated author; she has won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work and has been honored with the James Weldon Johnson Fellowship in African-American Studies. She currently teaches at University of Vermont, where she is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English. 

Bernard was introduced by graduate student Sabrina Qiao, and then the event began with Professor Lis Harris asking Bernard to read from Black is the Body. Bernard read from the essay “Motherland,” a narrative about her journey to Ethiopia with her husband to meet the baby twin girls that they were adopting, and their journey back as a new family. Bernard’s reading sparkled with humor and feeling. Her somewhat dry tone offset the tight, sparse quality of the prose, as she described the Ethiopian landscape: “Everything lies in front of me, nothing is behind, there is no shelter, nowhere to hide.” Bernard cut off the reading in the middle of a vivid anecdote about her plane trip back with her new daughters, with her doubled up in the airplane bathroom while a harried flight attendant tries to give her back her daughter to hold. 

Harris asked Bernard about how her daughters are doing now. Bernard laughed as she talked about her children, now teenagers, and humorously alluded to the challenges of parenting in a way that earned chuckles from the audience. 

Next, Harris asked Bernard about how much her consciousness has been shaped by her awareness of her own racialization. She quoted a passage from Bernard’s book where she says that when everything is raced, everything is named: “When we went to school, it was integration; when we moved in, it was desegregation.”

Bernard responded that she definitely thinks that her developing consciousness was shaped by a constant awareness of her own racialization. She described growing up in the South and fantasizing about someday going to the North, where she imagined that she would finally be able to “inhabit multiple subjectivities,” or, in other words, “be a real person.” She quoted what was once said to Jackie Robinson: “You’re onstage all the time.” Describing her struggle to determine her identity as a writer, Bernard explained that she constantly asks herself what kind of Black writer she is, and what kind of Black writer she wants to be. Sometimes, said Bernard, “I just want to talk about the books I love. I cannot jump into this economy now where we’re really saying the same things to each other.” For Bernard, therefore, Blackness is both a creative boundary that defines her and something that feels limiting when constantly imposed by others.

Next, Harris asked about Bernard’s 2001 book Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten. The book is an exploration of the correspondence between celebrated Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and the white writer Carl Van Vechten, who was known for patronizing and supporting the work of Black artists in the early 20th century. Harris asked what, in Bernard’s opinion, did Hughes want from Van Vechten.

Bernard described Van Vechten somewhat affectionately as a “crotchety bastard,”  explaining that he was one of a certain kind of white person who felt like he was an insider to the Black community, and received encouragement in this “delusion,” as Bernard called it, from his Black artist friends, such as Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Bernard argued that Van Vechten actually did a lot of good as a patron of his friends’ art; he used to take out full-page ads in the New York Times upon the release of their latest works. Answering the question of what Hughes wanted from Van Vechten, Bernard described Hughes as someone who didn’t get a lot of support or encouragement from his parents, so Van Vechten represented the older figure who supplied Hughes with the praise and encouragement he was missing. Ultimately, their relationship ended up becoming strained as Hughes’ literary star continued to rise and Van Vechten’s prestige plummeted, but Bernard emphasized that Hughes never lost respect for Van Vechten and “remembered his elders.”

A central theme of Bernard’s work is the recovery and processing of the trauma she sustained when she was stabbed by a stranger in New Haven as part of a random mass attack in a cafe over twenty years ago. Harris asked about a particular moment in Black is the Body, when Bernard describes facing racism from the white surgeon who was treating her when she arrived at the hospital with a stab wound. Bernard described the process of writing through rage and anger. She said that in order to be able to commit that story to the book, she had to take a break from writing it and instead take out all of her anger in a letter personally addressed to the surgeon, which she described as being sufficiently strongly worded as to put the recipient “in his grave.” “Whoever got that letter,” Bernard said, “would think twice about how they treat Black women on their operating table.”

However, said Bernard, the anger that she expressed in the letter was ultimately out of place in the book, which is why she had to get it out extraneously.  “It wasn’t for the reader, it was for him,” she explained. After “getting it under control,” she was able to write the story that the book demanded. She described the irony of the fact that, three weeks after finishing the book, she ended up back in the hospital needing another round of blood infusions to deal with ongoing complications from the stabbing. Ultimately, the realms of the written and the physical do not intersect as much as we might sometimes wish they do. 

Harris turned the conversation to Bernard’s essay “I Can’t Sleep,” in which she writes about her reaction to all the national violence that took place in the past year. Bernard, with striking pessimism, replied, “I don’t know that there’s a solution… I don’t think there’s salvation on this earth at all. I think all of our institutions are corrupt. How can you live purely in a corrupt world?” It was a somber moment, but it was clear that Bernard’s passion was offering itself as a potential solution to the corruption of the world. She stated emphatically that she didn’t believe that America was ever “innocent,” either before or after the election of Trump, before or after the pandemic. Before the election, said Bernard, she had been inclined to believe that most people were good; now, she believes that “many” are good, but she wouldn’t say “most.”

Nevertheless, solutions – or at least balms – for our problems can be found in the simple rituals of creativity and productivity that we dedicate ourselves to. “If you’re alive and you get up every day, that is optimism,” said Bernard. “I’m going to try to do what I can do to make this human life better.” 

Finally, Bernard took a question from an audience member, who asked how Bernard copes with having to put up barricades between her life and her art as a nonfiction writer. Bernard responded, “your obligation is to the story first. Write the story that feels right to you, and then begin negotiations.” Speaking of the occasional ethical conflict that arises when a nonfiction writer feels compelled to write about someone who does not want to be written about, Bernard said that it is important to respect people’s boundaries, but also important to tell the story that needs to be told. She claimed, “the times I’ve regretted what I’ve written are when I haven’t been honest.”

Overall, the talk was a surprisingly stark and solemn one; the themes touched on—racism, trauma, and despair—were obviously dark, and yet Bernard spoke with ironic humor that nevertheless managed to convey a surprising sense of hope. As I left the Zoom meeting, I came away with the impression that if everyone cared as much as Bernard, if everyone were as thoughtful as she, the world might not seem like such a bleak place.

Emily Bernard via School of the Arts website