Tracie D. Hall: The Capacity for Expansiveness
One of the people I most revere in this world is Tracie D. Hall. From the first time we met, in her then Pilsen-based gallery, Rootwork - which is most certainly a portal from this life to the next - I knew she was a conduit of spirit, politic, and a voyager across dimensions. Tracie is an artist, artivist, cultural worker, and the Executive Director of the American Library Association where she sees herself as the chief advocate for “access to knowledge as a human right.” Our conversation took place on the heels of national demonstrations related to the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd which is reflected in her comments.
Irina: Thank you for the gift of your time! The space that we share is really conversational. My intention is to listen and paint… I have a few questions, but it’s really designed to be co-created. I’m curious about how you’d like to be depicted in this portrait.
How’s your day so far?
Tracie: You know, the thing about Sundays for me is that it’s really the day that I try to make sure I do the things that are going to get me through the week. Some of it is a little bit of catching up on what’s happened, but I do try to keep one weekend day where I try not to do any work things. I’ve been scanning my email, cleaning, there are a couple things I’ve set as goals. I’ve moved from Pilsen to Pullman, so it’ll be a year later this month. I’m still in the process of getting things where I want them to be… to get organized and weed things out. I’ve been more motivated to do that lately, mainly because when you move you already do that, but there’s another layer, you know what I’m talking about?
I was able to catch up with one of my really good friends, who’s an educator, and she’s working on this big virtual educational forum so I got to talk with her before she launched it and so we caught up today to see how it’s going, and we get to mutually support each other in our goals. You’re a highlight of the day! And later I’ll social distance with a friend whose partner’s in town, so we will get the chance to see them together as a couple.
Irina: That’s so nice!
Tracie: Right?! C’mon love! How are you?
Irina: I’m good! I’m part of a reparations task force at my synagogue and I’m facilitating a session today where we’re looking at reparations in the Talmud and looking to white Jewish American accountability and complicity in anti-Blackness and Indigenous genocide in the US.
Tracie: That’s wonderful. The significance of this moment -- and I know it’s important to you -- is not just that we engage in discussion, but that we actually make real change. There’s a lot of comfort in talking about race -- I think people are much more comfortable talking about it than we let on because we’ve actually fetishized racism and the discussion around racism. For some people, it is a place of venting and for others it is a place of contrition but it is something that we keep around rather than actually take out to the fire and burn in the way that it must. I think that it is so incredibly damaging and depleting that it robs us of our humanity -- actually both the victimizers, the victims and the witnesses. I’m worried that unless we deal with it, it’ll be like climate change where in our lifetime we are seeing mass erosion and also pretending that climate incidents are coming from nowhere.
Also, back to your point about how I’d like to be portrayed -- I had a portrait done by Liz Gomez, who's such an amazing painter here, and I was nervous about it, but I just trusted her. The portrait that she made of me was so aspirational for me, that it reminded me of how I want to be maybe in a couple of years, but I loved it.
Any way you do it, I don’t mind because it’ll show me something new. I saw the beautiful piece you did of Kamilah -- what was that like and what did you find out?
Irina: Thank you for asking. Actually when I painted Sandie Yi, an artist who has a physical disability, she talked a lot about her co-creation process with other artists with disabilities. That portrait planted in my mind, consent goes beyond I won’t share the finished product, but let us actually have this process be co-creative.
People have this notion that you have to sit completely still when someone is painting a portrait of you, but Kamilah was up, making breakfast, moving around and I said, “Don’t worry, you’re fine!” The time that we’re together is more of an under-painting, so it’s not so much about the details. Talking to her… she’s so brilliant… every time we interact, I just feel like it’s a gift. She talked about seeing young Black boys playing football together and roughhousing and how that brought her to tears, even amidst COVID… that’s something that stuck with me in that conversation. In this moment, having images of Black death all around us… stopping to notice all the joy and the playfulness and moments where there is a sense of safety and allowance.
Tracie: I love that. The reality is, our notions of ourselves and our collective selves is phenotyped. It’s deeper than our suffering… it is a lot of times about desire, about the quest for meaning, about the search for bliss, about how we internalize and externalize love, grief, anger. It’s deeper than skin and I think even sometimes it’s deeper than our thinking about ourselves -- In the morning, it’s the thing that moves you forward.
It’s interesting because, for me, I’m really interested in contemplation and really chewing on the marrow of what our humanity means in this particular time. I’ve always been that way, even when I was little, I’d like to go up into places like the stands and watch what was happening from afar as well as get close to it… to take the field as well as to watch it, just to understand it and myself and the people around me. The sadness around now is that we’re so afraid of just being small… what I mean by that relates to the seduction of racism and how many people, despite any kind of intelligence that tells them otherwise -- racism shouldn’t be the thing that amplifies your being nor should turning your eye to it or pretending like it doesn’t exist. All those things are robbing us of a certain type of basic level humanity. Unless we have a grand do-over, if we stay in this state, we will have robbed ourselves of a portion of our humanity.
Irina: Something that has always struck me about you is your connection to spirit. When you mentioned watching from the stands and seeing what’s there and seeing what’s not there -- I’m curious how that’s resonating with you now. I’m just remembering the first time I ever went to Rootwork and you talked about how you curate the space with your grandmother and I thought that was so beautiful and profound. It made me realize something about myself that I didn’t expect.
Tracie: What did you realize about yourself?
Irina: Well, I was brought up in the Soviet Union and my family is very secular to the point of Atheist. Spirit and the divine was always cast as irrational or other and I am always curious about why I’m always drawn to spiritual people. What is it about this connection that I find lacking in my own upbringing and that I yearn for? When I see it in others, I’m like oh, that’s possible.
Tracie: It’s interesting about you saying that about yourself because with Rootwork, a lot of people had that same reaction. Either, they grew up with a family where spiritual expression wasn’t necessarily part of their collective process or it was deliberately so. Or, there was maybe a family member or a culture where there was a lot of spiritual practice that was suppressed and they were attracted because here it was out in the open. Rootwork was something that sprang our of a conversation I’ve been having with my grandmother since her death. A conversation about the relationship between art and healing an about how ancestral memory creates a bridge between them.
I opened Rootwork when I was still a deputy commissioner over at DCASE, so a leadership position that is somewhat in the public eye. To start something like Rootwork might have been risky at a time where people really disparage what it means to lead with intuition People have these expressions like, “This person’s very woo woo,” because a certain type of “rational” intelligence is prized over intuition. I think Rootwork –which I had been carrying around for two decades –came about because I was working in a space that really is about your ability to be chiefly and successfully rational and objective -- and at the same time -- declare yourself part of a system that really prizes intuition...for me, it was about trust and how intuition is as valid as linear thinking.
Part of my belief is that we are seeing the logical conclusion in that line of thinking like climate change, racial paralysis and ignorance that we persist in, dehumanization of others, persistence in valuing one life over another. The only reason we uphold a certain type of system over another is really based on what the people who hold it gain from it because it isn’t enfranchising many people. The system that we’re a part of now is disenfranchising at such a rapid rate even as we have all these other tools of resistance. I’m happy that you’re doing what you’re doing in this work and with the Talmud and your community because places where we can be vulnerable and invite the vulnerability of others are really the only safe places that we have.
Irina: It’s that rationale, that cartesian separation of mind and body...the roots of capitalism, white supremacy, hetero patriarchy and colonization is all “rational.” It’s all a chart, a rubric, an outcome, a goalpost. All these things can be measured and checked off. If people were really in touch with their intuition, how could they? How could we?
Tracie: Right! We’re not aiming for a culture where there is a hierarchy like “only these people can be the prom king and prom queen” and everyone else are the subjects. We’re trying to party! Everyone can come down the Soul Train line… everybody!
For me, too, ontologically, in the culture that I come from, there is a belief that we are here to have a reverberating impact on each other’s lives. My system is that we all come down to the Soul Train line, not one prom king or one prom queen. For racism, we gotta free everybody. We weaponize it and it makes the person who has never fully benefited from it unable to get on the court or come to the dance -- we have to allow ourselves to see everybody as who they are not what their drag is or what people are making their drag be.
Irina: The Soul Train reference is very apt!
Tracie: It all comes back to dancing for me!
Irina: Yes yes yes! Have you been dancing much lately?
Tracie: Every now and then I try to get it in because I love music. I was listening to Tall Black Guy and you can’t sit while listening to his music, you know how it is. I mean, literally, this is what we should be doing!
Irina: Instead of these diversity and inclusion training, we should be having dance parties.
Tracie: Okay, so are we going to do it?!
Irina: Yes!
Tracie: Let’s curate a night where we ask a couple of DJs! And it’s on Zoom, so the DJ can go on certain people and have them dancing. It’ll be like the anti-racism dance-off or Soul Train line!
Irina: Yes yes yes! Let’s do it.
Tracie: You know what to make it! Because your inspiration for saying yes -- that’s the divine. The inspiration doesn’t belong to us, what belongs to us is the action. The inspiration is air, how we use the oxygen that we have -- that’s up to us. If we don’t do it, then that shows our blocking of a certain flow so we just do it. We are not interested in the outcome, our only responsibility is to go with the flow.
Irina: Last year we did Queering The Parks and had a whole drag ball run by queer youth of color and it was amazing! We were planning to do it again this year and COVID happened, but we got Zoom, we got DJs, y’know!
Tracie: Right right right! We can make it the Chicago-wide Soul Train line. Everybody’s invited and included. This is like playing off each other in an unchecked way -- that’s what we’re aiming for. What if we lived like that?!
Irina: It would be beautiful. It’s the “yes”, right?
Tracie: Exactly.
Irina: I want to ask you the question I’ve been asking everybody and it’s Grace Lee Boggs’ question: what time is it on the clock of the world?
Tracie: Time to wake up! Not just time to wake up because we’ve been in a suspended state of awakeness but it’s time to get moving. Let’s look at the convergences of things. Let’s look at the climate because, being guests as we are, in this space, being stewards of it for the now, soon I’ll just be fertilizing the soil or the sea -- or whatever happens… Realizing that we don’t have a lot of time, realizing the convergence of where the climate is leading us, this pernicious and costly conversation about something that is as crazy as race, as crazy as saying how big are your ears or what is the exact shade of your tongue -- we are suspended in dumbness of that. We are preoccupied with notions of gender when we know everything around us is fluid in motion, and I even find it problematic that we ask people to choose suspended states around either gender or sexuality. That is so false! Then we have this crazy stuff about class, then we have people in this place where people are gobbling up property as if they don’t understand the danger of that. And then, at the same time, we have people who are really courageous, these children, people, despite all of this, are falling in love… I’ve had some of the best cherries I think I’ve had since I was like 12. Good things are happening and then we’re making all this good stuff just 25% of our lives or 10% of our lives as opposed to 85%.
My aunt recently died, and she was like a mother to me because my mom died in my 20s, and at the beginning of the year, she was really uneasy. I said to her, “Auntie, what’s undone? In the time that you have, what can we do to make this last bit the thing?” because she was in hospice care. My aunt was a nurse, she was in a first cohort of people getting public health degrees, and she’s traveled all over the world. She said, “I don’t feel like I had the kind of love I wanted and I don’t feel like I traveled enough. There were so many places I still wanted to see and learn from.” And those were my marching orders. Before my mom died, she told me to make sure that I could get to a place where I could have a little club because I love music so much. So what I’m thinking about, what my aunt was talking about, was capacity to open ourselves to other people. What she lamented, both in terms of love and travel, is that she hadn’t opened up enough to other people not necessarily for gain, but for expansiveness. For her own expansiveness. This is what I’m talking about.
Our focusing on the lint in our pockets is keeping us from being expansive, from really understanding why we’re in this world: to experience, to contribute, and to reach a certain level of pure joy. The capacity for pure joy; that’s what we are here for. Right?!
Irina: Yes yes yes! I’m here for the Soul Train, the joy and expansiveness.
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This conversation was lovingly transcribed and edited by my dear friend, writer, and cultural organizer Rivka Yeker. You can check out their work at @hooliganmagazine.