Resilience and Healing in Call Us What We Carry
Introduction: The Thematic Claim
Amanda Gorman’s Call Us What We Carry does not offer a simple tale of bouncing back. Instead, it presents resilience as a collective process of excavation, recognition, and transformation. Across the collection, healing is never a solitary act. It happens when individuals and communities name their wounds, hold them up to the light, and forge them into a shared artefact—what Gorman calls an ark. The book’s fundamental claim is that we are not defined by the things that break us but by what we choose to carry forward from them. As the speaker declares in the culminating poem, “What We Carry,” loss is “the cost of loving,” and survival demands that we “believe beyond disaster.” Healing, then, is not a destination but an ongoing practice, rooted in memory and sustained by language.
Carrying the Collective Wound
Gorman insists that resilience is not a solo endeavor. In “Pre-memory” she introduces the concept of remembering an ordeal “still experiencing,” a phenomenon that dissolves the boundary between past and present, speaker and community. The poem’s dense theoretical underpinning—Hirsch’s postmemory, Chu’s postmemory han, the inherited trauma of Jim Crow—reframes personal grief as a fundamentally shared condition. By shifting from “I carry” to “we carry,” the collection positions collective remembrance as the precondition for healing. This is reinforced in “Good Grief”, where the etymology of trauma (from “piercing” or “turning”) is reclaimed: the hurt confirms we are “alive & awake,” clearing us for the “exquisite, excruciating enormities to come.” Here, Gorman articulates the thematic paradox: anguish is not an obstacle to resilience but its raw material.
The early sections of the book stress that ignoring pain is not an option. Chapter 3, “Please,” with its deliberate brackets and erasures, gestures toward histories that have been silenced, yet the plea to “maintain [ ] yourself & others” is a call to care for the collective body. The gaps are not empty; they are invitations to fill in what has been lost, an act that requires both memory and communal effort. Resilience begins with the acknowledgment that the individual is part of a larger “we,” a point echoed in “Call Us,” where the human microbiome becomes a metaphor for interdependence: “We are not me— / We are we. / Call us / What we carry.” Healing depends on this recognition of shared substance.
Language as an Ark
The collection’s most potent image for resilience is the ark. In “What We Carry,” the speaker links the biblical vessel that preserved life through the flood to the act of writing: “We put words in the ark. / Where else to put them.” This is not a retreat into solipsistic language games; the ark is a chest, a container that both defends and carries those things too precious to lose. Gorman’s Shipwreck and Ark symbol evolves from earlier mentions of shipwrecks and floods into a deliberate metaphor for poetry itself. Language becomes “an articulate artifact,” “a life craft,” and ultimately “a life raft.” The progression from artifact to raft captures the dynamic of resilience: what we make from our wreckage is what keeps us afloat.
This is not a passive hope. “Every Day We Are Learning” insists that hope is a craft that must be practiced, and the survival manual woven through the collection shows that the craft demands rigorous honesty. Poems like “Cordage, or Atonement” dig into the historical roots of reconciliation, tracing “atone” back to “at one,” and then to the sacrifice necessary to achieve harmony. Resilience, in Gorman’s lexicon, is not the absence of suffering but the willingness to walk through “the sea also grieving & giving / Enough to be walked through.” The sea is both wound and pathway—an echo of the ark’s double function as memorial and vehicle.
Postmemory and the Figures Who Carry History
Gorman populates her collection with figures who embody the labor of carrying. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Selma Epp, Roy Underwood Plummer, and the Donohue family are not merely historical footnotes; they are anchors in the sea of communal memory. Each one stands for a specific dimension of resilience: Wells-Barnett’s journalistic witness, Epp’s Holocaust testimony, Plummer’s forgotten voice, the Donohues’ private grief. By incorporating their stories, Gorman puts flesh on the abstract notion of postmemory. The “whiplike echo of Jim Crow” that passes “through Black bodies, even before birth” is not an abstraction—it is the lived inheritance that these figures represent.
The Collective Speaker dissolves the distinction between the poet and the dead, between the seer and the survivor. In “Surviving,” the speaker declares that “The gone were/are no threshold, / No stepstone beneath our feet. / Even as they did not die / For us, we shall move for them.” Healing here requires carrying the dead forward, not as burdens but as companions. This is also where the Mask symbol gains traction: what we wear—literal masks during the pandemic, figurative masks of grief—can become a sign of collective responsibility, a visible marker of care for others.
Resilience as Communal Practice
The collection’s central narrative arc, mapped with devastating precision in “Monomyth,” tracks the pandemic’s timeline as a hero’s journey in which the hero is not an individual but the entire global community. The ten-scene structure moves from the known world through trial, dedication, and darkest moment to the power within. Gorman refuses to offer a triumphant ending; the poem’s last scene, “Power Within,” is left blank, an open space that readers must fill. This structural choice embodies the theme: resilience is not a story we inherit finished but one we must write together.
Smaller, more intimate poems reinforce this message. “The Miracle of Morning” stirs gratitude from grief, noting that “it’s our grief that gives us our gratitude, / Shows us how to find hope, if we ever lose it.” The poem’s catalog of everyday heroes—healthcare workers, grocery deliverers, families—insists that resilience inheres in mundane acts of kindness. The warmth of this vision does not erase the pain; it coexists with it. The dad with a stroller and the girl chasing her dog are not escapist images but evidence that life persists, that carrying on is itself a form of defiance.
The Lost and the Dead haunt the edges of the collection, and their presence is never resolved into easy consolation. In “Essex II,” the speaker acknowledges that grief becomes a gift only after we have “greet[ed] it... let it live.” The transformation is not a reduction of sorrow but a lightening of load. The poem’s marine imagery—tides, diving, rising—connects to the ark and the shipwreck, suggesting that deep immersion in our wounds is the only way to surface. This is the heart of the collection’s complexity: resilience is not about escaping the depths but about learning to breathe underwater.
Contradiction and Complexity
Gorman does not flinch from the fact that healing can feel like betrayal. “Pre-memory” asks whether we will “forget, erase, censor, distort the experience as we live it.” The temptation to numb, to turn away, is real. The book’s resistance to tidy resolutions emerges most powerfully in poems that admit the persistence of suffering. “Cordage, or Atonement” speaks of a heart “so huge / It can’t help but wail,” and “What We Carry” discards “rage, our wreckage, / our hubris, our hate” on the shore. But discarding is not forgetting—it is a deliberate leaving-behind, an act that requires us to have first carried the weight long enough to know what must be released. The shore that receives our burdens is the same shore where the ark lands. Healing, then, is a rhythm of holding and letting go.
The Arborescent Trees symbol and Lighthouse symbol reinforce this dialectic. Roots anchor and sustain even when branches are torn; the lighthouse warns of danger but also signals safe passage. Gorman’s resilience is similarly rooted, a slow architectural patience that does not promise immediacy but does promise continuity. The final lines of “What We Carry” send us forward “Carrying nothing / But the world.” It is the lightest and heaviest burden imaginable, a contradiction that captures the entire theme: to be resilient is to be entirely here, bearing the whole weight of history and love, yet walking anyway.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does Gorman redefine resilience as a collective rather than an individual trait?
She connects personal survival to communal memory through concepts like postmemory and pre-memory. In “Pre-memory,” suffering is experienced and remembered across generations and individuals; healing requires a “loyal we.” The book’s speaker is rarely singular—poems like “Call Us” insist that “We are not me— / We are we.” Resilience becomes a shared project of truth-telling and carrying forward.
2. Why is language described as an ark, and how does this metaphor influence the theme of healing?
The ark saves life from destruction and preserves what is precious. By comparing language to an ark, Gorman suggests that storytelling and poetry are acts of survival. In “What We Carry,” words become both “life craft” and “life raft”—they hold memory, foster connection, and keep communities afloat through catastrophe. Healing happens when we place our experience into language that can be held, shared, and passed on.
3. In what ways does the poem “Cordage, or Atonement” complicate a simple view of healing?
The poem traces “atone” to its etymological origin meaning “at one” but also acknowledges the necessary sacrifice. Healing requires us to “suffer the pains of whatever sacrifice is necessary to bring about a reconciliation.” It is not a smooth process but involves walking through the grieving sea. Resilience here is not avoidance; it is a deliberate re-entry into unity by confronting what has torn us apart.
4. How do the historical and contemporary figures in the collection embody the theme of resilience?
Figures like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Selma Epp carry traumatic histories that resonate with the present. Their stories show that remembering is a moral act that resists erasure. By including them, Gorman demonstrates that the dead can be guides for the living, and that carrying their legacies transforms individual endurance into a multigenerational practice of hope.
5. What role does the deliberate omission of the “Power Within” scene in “Monomyth” play in the book’s view of resilience?
The blank “SCENE 10: POWER WITHIN” refuses to offer a pre-scripted triumph. It implies that the ultimate movement from darkness to renewal is not yet written—it depends on the reader’s participation. Healing is an ongoing, open-ended act, not a fixed ending. This aligns with the collection’s insistence that resilience is a practice, something we must collectively craft each day.