I and I: Elizabeth Alexander's Collective First-Person Voice, the Witness and the Lure of Amnesia

Abstract

Black women's writing is characterized by expressive multiplicity in three major ways: intertextuality, intergeneric textual strategies and the collective first person. In this essay, I show the ways in which in The Black Interior and Power and Possibility Alexander speaks in the tongues of many genres and at times uses the first person collective or, "I and I," in a radical depth of identification between a reader and the text. I find that Alexander's anthological or collective first-person voice is analogous to the Rastafarian (imperfectly realized) ideal of unity among people, which is expressed through the collective first person pronoun, I and I.