The Trayvon Generation Quotes

“Black people today are the product of people who survived, who were not meant to flourish.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation

“. . . I want to turn away but I cannot turn away, because I feel I have to witness.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation

“The historical Negro will not be charmed nor cheered by the triumphal present. Attempting to see things as they really are with the unflinching critical eye is, at the end of the day, the way Black people have strategized and survived. The will to the triumphal is understandable in all peoples who have suffered more than their share of oppressions. But the lesson of African American studies is that the call to the triumphal is a siren song.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation

“Black poetry remembers, and Black poetry memorializes.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation

“One of the men, who had been in prison since he was a teenager, said, "We dress our ideas in clothes to make the abstract visible.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation

“She is remembered because people did the work of remembering her.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation

“But for all of us, language is how we say who we are, and we cannot solve our problems without it. Language is one of the few media with which to make conundrums visible and solutions tangible. Language is how we learn across difference. And language is in trouble.

Poets especially use words in ways that are visceral and remind us in the best of poems that they are products of the human body. People, and peoples, tell their stories to each other; the tribe needs to chronicle itself. Human beings in all cultures across time have yielded to the impulse to make song. A poem is physically a small thing, but it has the density and potency that in the best cases is a force forever.

In Black culture our poetry sometimes holds and memorializes our history. Amid insufficient memorializing and in the face of scant or buried histories, Black poets have made experience solid and enduring in too many examples to count. Black poetry remembers, and Black poetry memorializes. Poems are how we say, This is who we are, how we chronicle ourselves when we are insufficiently found in history books and commemorative sites. And as with monuments, the poem outlasts the poet.”
― Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation