The Flower Bearers: a ‘visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional destruction’

Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s memoir opens in 2021, on the day of her marriage ceremony to Salman Rushdie. “I’m marrying a person that some folks have deemed harmful,” she writes. “What hurt might discover us on such a day?” One may assume that these “overt intimations of tragedy” consult with the assault on Rushdie 11 months later, during which he was stabbed 15 instances and misplaced sight in his proper eye, stated Stephanie Merritt in The Observer. However “in actual fact, her account of the assault comes comparatively late within the guide, the higher a part of which is worried with the tragedy that preceded it – one which didn’t make worldwide headlines”.

That is the loss of life, from unknown causes, of her greatest pal and fellow poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who’d been anticipated on the marriage ceremony, however had “failed to show up”. Solely late on the day itself did Griffiths study what occurred, making it “the perfect and worst day of my life”. Her memoir – which is “preoccupied with loss of life and trauma” whereas additionally being, at instances, “surprisingly humorous” – is an account of Griffiths’ “formation as a poet and artist, an evolution inseparable from her friendship” with Moon.

This can be a “frank and disorientating memoir”, stated Helen Brown in The Telegraph. It data the abuse Griffiths skilled as a baby, and the melancholy and nervousness that hospitalised her a number of instances in her 20s. Regardless of her need to write down, she “struggled to search out the phrases to interrupt by way of her numbness”. It was solely after assembly Moon, whereas finding out inventive writing in New York, that she started to recognise her inventive expertise. Contaminated with “literary insanity”, the pair “exchanged tales of trauma”, bonded over the black writers they liked (Alice Walker, June Jordan, Lucille Clifton), drank an excessive amount of and wrote poetry collectively, stated Leigh Haber in The Washington Submit. Whereas others discouraged Griffiths from writing, “Moon cheered her on”. Now, on this “open wound of a memoir”, she has honoured the lady she got here to treat as her “chosen sister”.

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Griffiths additionally writes movingly of her relationship with Rushdie, whom she met in New York in 2017, stated Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. Whereas their early courtship is tinged with comedy – at their first assembly, he “collided with a plate-glass door that he thought was open” – their relationship turns into subsumed within the darker themes of the guide. “Evocative” and “full-bodied”, if at instances a “little overcooked”, “The Flower Bearers” is a “visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional devastation” – but in addition a strong “love story” and “portrait of sisterhood”.