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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y R E V I E W
Winter 2024
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Congratulations to all of you graduates of the English Department, and warmest greetings to your families and friends, and to my fellow faculty, administration, and staff at NC State. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” American essayist Joan Didion wrote in her book, The White Album, published in 1979.1 I’ll tell you a story. When I was growing up in Nigeria, West Africa, not North Carolina, USA, I swam in a crystal-clear, cold river. It poured out of a spring in the rain forest. Underwater, I could see to the sandy, white bottom, but because of surrounding trees, the river shone like an emerald. The current was strong and fast. You had to be a good swimmer to make it across, and by the time I was eight I could do it. The river was twentyfive feet deep and one hundred feet across. A third of the way across the river, in front of a set I consider my of wooden piers, past recursively, that is, floated a raft conover and over, to pick structed from oil
up an image and follow it and learn something about myself and the world.
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Joan Didion, The White Album (Simon & Schuster, 1979) 11.
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Words to the Department of English Spring 2023 Graduates North Carolina State University, 5 May 2023
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drums and hardwood and painted red. On any day, when we drove down the sandy road and around a copse of trees to the landing, we spotted the raft on the rippling current. It was always, miraculously there. It was there like the river was there and the hardwoods and palms surrounding the river and the sky overhead. When my friends and I weren’t crossing the river to climb a tree and catch a long rope to swing out and drop into the middle of the current, we swam to the raft. We climbed on and dove off. The raft remained for years and years, all of my girlhood. At some point, I discovered that a substantial metal chain descended from the raft into the river, that it angled upstream because the river pulled the raft downstream, and that it disappeared into the white sand at the bottom. I tried often to dive against that current all the way down to find how that chain was anchored but I never made it. So I just took for granted that the raft rode the current. Recently I began to think about that red raft. I can’t say why except that I’m a writer and a memoirist and I consider my past recursively, that is, over and over, to pick up an image and follow it and learn something about myself and the world. Thinking of the raft, I began to wonder ELAINE NEIL ORR is the author of two scholarly books as well as her two novels, A Different Sun (Berkley, 2013) and Swimming Between Worlds (Berkley, 2018; reviewed in NCLR Online 2019), and a memoir, Gods of Noonday (University of Virginia Press, 2003). Born in Nigeria, to missionary parents, Orr later moved to the US, where she earned her MA in English from the University of Louisville and her PhD at Emory University. She is now a Professor of English at North Carolina State University. Read more about her in an interview with Kathryn Stripling Byer in NCLR 2015.