Amanda Gorman: «I give you my word». On the new issue of Vanity Fair

This article is published in number 21 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 25, 2021.

At the bottom of the closet of Amanda Gorman there is a doll that may or may not have stolen the facts of the life of its reserved owner. A month after the galvanizing rap rhythm of his poetry The Hill We Climb, which eclipsed the handover at President Biden’s inauguration ceremony, the 23-year-old poet told me she was looking back on a frustrating previous engagement.

.. at the American Girl boutique in the Grove of Los Angeles. We were in a green area a stone’s throw from where Gorman lives, a studio apartment in a pastel-colored building. Lying on some sheets that she had spread out on a well-kept hillock, swinging her head, like a bird, she softly whispered to me: “Maybe they’ll be angry at my words.”

Mattel had invited Gorman to give a reading to the young waiting customers, to celebrate the arrival of Gabriela, the latest «Girl of the Year». It was the first day of 2017, and Gorman was an 18-year-old Harvard freshman, home for the holidays, trying to recover from the shock of the New England frost. She had already been nominated at the time Youth Poet Laureate of L.A. (the first ever) and was a well-known and admired figure on the national circuit of spoken-word, the declaimed poem. The evening before the event, the American Girl team had provided her with some biographical information about the doll. It had been like a horror movie: “Stuff to make your skin crawl,” we agreed after she told me the story. “Gabriela loves the arts and uses poetry to find her voice and be able to make a difference in her community,” reads the website of the now defunct toy. Gorman loves the arts and uses poetry to find his voice and be able to make a difference in his community. Gabriela has dark skin and curly hair. Amanda has dark skin and curly hair. “She was a black girl with a speech disorder,” Gorman said (referring to her disorder), happily playing with the lovely twist hive above her head, and adding that her twin sister’s puppy, Gabrielle, was also not to be believe it, his name is Gabby.

However, Gorman held the reading. American Girl let me know that the doll was not inspired by Gorman’s life, and sent me a photo of her, taken during the performance, dressed exactly like Gabriela. “I had a feeling that if I retired from the event, I would let the girls who had that black doll down,” she told me. The rest of the year, when Gabriela’s advertisements ended up in front of her, or her friends wrote to her excited to have seen her doll, she looked away, thinking about that absurd vinyl thing that she had locked up in a closet at home. .

With a quiet temperament, Gorman does not want to make a case of that experience, but years later, the idea that the “life of a public figure” can be undermined without his consent still burns, basically because this sort of impetuous flattery is now inextricably linked to her career as a rising writer. “In my head I had built this narrative that I had to be,” he paused, raised his hands from his lap in the gesture of quotation marks, “” a model to follow. ”

It was mid-February and the temperature, even for a Los Angeles winter, it was incredibly hot, giving our meeting the conspiratorial vibe of two teenagers who had skipped school. Mid-afternoon was the only time Gorman could take away from his busy schedule. She’d been a guest on a Hillary Clinton podcast the week before, and the next she’d be participating in an initiative with Oprah. It was Gorman who remembered to bring the towels, and hers was embroidered with the zodiac signs (“being a twin, I’m happy to be a Pisces, because it’s a double sign,” she remarked. Her sister is also her best friend). . She is incredibly petite. The next time we met, he brought his lunch – a vegan burger in a Tupperware – and some snacks for me: homemade popcorn, gummy bears, candy. Lunch gave me the opportunity to see her without a mask, behind a splash shield. Her profile is reminiscent of the supermodels of the golden age. His laugh is sonorous. As we sunbathed on our patch of lawn, Gorman reflected on the long journey of his short life: “It took a lot of work, not only mine, but also my family and my village, to get here.”

“You will start the article by writing: ‘Did I meet Amanda Gorman in Los Angeles one day?’He teased me. The keen pleasure he gets from words is palpable. She described the speaking styles of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr., her relationship with Hillary Clinton (“a great grandmother,” he affectionately glosses) and with other Democrats, with whom she became familiar, such as Barack Obama ( “A dad”) and Michelle Obama (“a great aunt”).

In the weeks following our meeting, I found Gorman, or his radiations, everywhere: on the cover of the Time, where she appears posing in her yellow (yellow like the iconic Prada coat) and on the inside pages, where she holds a cage with a bird, invoking Maya Angelou, interviewed by Michelle Obama; at celebrations, round tables, meetings; in the headlines of newspapers, ready to highlight every tweet on a current episode; commemorated in vibrant murals in the District of Columbia and Palm Springs that remind me of Shepard Fairey’s Obama posters; courted by the most important fashion houses (one of her team members recently sent a request to them to stop sending her floral gifts).

After the inauguration ceremony, he participated in big talk shows, remotely from his Los Angeles apartment. A spectacular scene. The Trump years and the pandemic had erased joy, elegance, optimism, intelligence and hope from the circuit. But when Gorman appeared on the screen it was as if DeGeneres, Corden and Noah had awakened from their slumber. She combines the wit of the comedians with the embodiment of spring. In his program Anderson Cooper 360°, Cooper asked Gorman to repeat the rhythmic mantra she recites before going on stage: “I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me(I am the daughter of the black writers, descendants of the Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me). The host’s proverbial composure faltered: «Wow! You’re amazing!”.

“I have yet to see her finish a performance without the audience standing up to applaud her,” noted Aaron Kisner, theater director who has worked with her on several of her public appearances. Gorman’s friends, colleagues and family members I spoke to have all invariably confirmed to me that they were in no way surprised by his success. If you hire Amanda Gorman, her mother Joan Wicks told me, “you know you don’t take any chances.” For Gorman, the public is not an abstraction, but a collaborator in his stimulating poetic discourse, facing the outside and full of civic sense. You are a kind of caring pedagogue, who translates the “critical race theoryFor the benefit of passionate Americans. Gorman works in the affirmative mode of reaction and response. I spent hours absorbing his poems, or seeing how he interpreted them on YouTube. For the climate disaster he wrote Earthrise. For the contemporary crisis of white supremacist violence, in all its forms, he wrote In This Place (An American Lyric), his most ambitious work, a poem he recited to celebrate the 2017 appointment of Tracy K. Smith to Poet Laureate of the United States.

Even if he wanted to, Gorman could hardly cause panic among moralists. “Oh my God, I think I’m one of the cleanest speaking people,” she told me. The importance of maintaining an image of righteousness was passed on to her by her mother, a middle school English teacher in Watts, the neighborhood where Amanda and Gabrielle grew up. The family shares the same vision of social and literary success. And success means reaching as many readers as possible. Gorman prefers not to swear, or at least not to swear in public, but when it happened to me while I was with her, out of habit, she immediately pitied me with unequivocal nods of the head. If something bothers her to the point of making her blurt out, the swear word also arrives, but always spelled out by censoring the vowels with an asterisk.

When we first met, Gorman wore a matching Clare V. jumpsuit, white with large marigold tie-dye patches. “I feel very Billie Eilish,” she almost sang to me. What Eilish and Gorman may have in common, I think, is an instantly recognizable and conceptually fascinating worldview. Today there is a hunger for cultural references. Committed to spreading a shared value of multicultural liberalism, many seek to enlist Gorman in their ranks. But what does Gorman want? For the immediate future? Time and quiet to finish two books – a book of drawings entitled Change Sings: A Children’s Anthem and the long-awaited collection, The Hill We Climb and Other Poems -, both to be released in September, both already best sellers. When I asked her if she could show me something, she was evasive. The work is not done yet. She has who reads her books, but she is protective of her writing. Feel the pressure. She wondered aloud, “How do you keep up with what you’ve done before?”

When he writes, he confessed to me, he usually looks for water. In another era, she probably would have been a biologist or something. During our walk, we found wild ducks resting in the wettest part of the swamp. There was a useless wooden fence that Gorman jumped over for fun. To get as close to the shore as possible, he would have to slide down a mound. She held on to me so as not to lose her balance. “In spring it is beautiful, because they are all ducklings. Then they grow up and they all become rapists, ”he commented with a touch of cynicism. “Thank goodness I’m not a duck.” We laughed at that grim joke.

He told me he wants to be president and which already has the unofficial endorsements of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. This is why you won’t find “negative comments” about her on social media, to quote Wicks; any image, of her “at a party” or “in a bathing suit,” that future commentators might find inappropriate. Black women will understand this form of adaptation. We adapt to the judgmental gaze, eager to criticize, and it is now natural for Gorman. It gives her satisfaction to have learned to set limits.

During one of our conversations, reminded me of an article written about her since Washington Post. Leaving aside the part that concerned her personally, the article talked about how, in history, poets have been pop stars. For her, being able to draw attention and resources to the art form she loves represents an achievement, although she is aware of the negative aspects inherent in consumerist and capitalist dynamics. Gorman is increasingly attentive to situations that could make her appear as a symbol. He fears this will become a kind of cage where, to be a successful black girl, you have to be Amanda Gorman and go to Harvard. “I rather want someone to destroy the model I have established.”

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