Ordinary Light

Ordinary Light (2015), a memoir by American poet Tracy K. Smith, wrestles with themes such as the individual’s yearning to control the world, the limits of language, and the search for God in a world that often seems godless and irrational. The memoir follows Smith’s life, tracing her journey from her birthplace, California, through college at Harvard, and into her professional life. Smith also touches on her African-American identity, her tumultuous childhood in a racist America, and her internal conflict between her mother’s devout Christianity and her own agnosticism.

Smith’s memoir begins in her birthplace, California. A precocious, imaginative, and emotionally sensitive child, she intuitively understands the evils of racism, bullying, and hate speech before she can read. She is also skeptical, early on, about organized religions. She sees that the Christian church brings people together, and yearns to feel united with them, but she struggles to believe its tenets, many of which she finds hypocritical or outright false. Her early poems show that Smith finds no organized religion to be capacious enough to contain the whole world. Moreover, she questions whether any language or set of axioms can capture reality.



As she grows up, Smith is a victim of frequent bullying. Her wild imagination signals a difference from her peers, which plagues her with persistent social anxiety. Her feelings of alienation from her friends and family pervade her poetry, stemming from her religious agnosticism, for which they give her no space to express her own views. Smith is accepted to Harvard College. There, she finally finds a safe space to express her creative life and religious doubts. Out of a desire to organize her thinking, she starts a Bible reading group. She describes one peculiar meeting in which she found the discussion to resemble mass, full of trite arguments and Biblical rephrasings stated as facts rather than open interpretations. Smith suggests to them that the Bible should be considered with a degree of ambivalence and the use of analytical tools, just like any other piece of literature. Blurting out that she wishes there were “something better” than the Bible, she is scorned by her peers.

Smith goes home for break and learns that members of her family’s parish are spreading rumors about her relationship with her then-boyfriend. She sees that they are clearly being judgmental, newly recognizing the extent of their small-mindedness. From her perspective, newly an outsider one that calls college home, she begins to actively deconstruct the church’s destructive arguments and promotion of negative emotions, like fear and shame. At last, she has an epiphany that God, if one exists, “is not that small.”

Smith concludes her memoir by stating that she has yet to find a single framework, religion, or more generic spirituality that has convinced her to see inherent order and rationality in the chaos of everyday life. Yet, she believes that her search for spirituality, as well as the search for her true self, are never-ending projects that consist, in part, in using poetry to grasp the world. Ordinary Light is an appeal to keep looking for beauty in the seemingly banal aspects of human experience.