I and I: Elizabeth Alexander's Collective First-Person Voice, the Witness and the Lure of Amnesia. — Page 7:
31 Despite the fact that I and I looks like double-consciousness and resembles the DuBoisian split into a bifurcated consciousness, it is actually closer to the collage concept, which is an infinite series of links between people, even between people and God, so that when any one person speaks, he or she bears a certain awareness of speaking for the group or with the group in mind. Of course, there are problematic limits to this-who represents whom and in whose interests? It is a concept that can be and often is abused when the desire power comes into play but it nonetheless represents a possibility of expression that opens up innovative aesthetic and social formations. I and I can represent what Alexander argues for in the expansion of I that would include the wider community. The way in which she corrals the media, often a hindrance to black community formation, into a vehicle of this formation-whether it brings news of glory or of horror, reclaims it from a multiracial viewership in the public arena and repurposes it for a Jet-defined viewing public of I and I.
32 Still, how to live with yourself after witnessing black people's, your people's horrific history? How to manage the pull toward NOT looking and NOT listening to the storytellers?"What do a people do with their history of horror? What does it mean to bear witness in the act of watching a retelling? What does it mean to carry cultural memory on the flesh" (ibid. 201)? Can you be BLACK and NOT LOOK at this?
33 One of the epigraphs to Alexander's King essay is from Betty Shabazz on witnessing her husband, Malcolm X's murder: "I still carry it with me all the time. I prayed for years for it to be taken away, not to be able to remember it" (qtd. ibid. 175). I and I feel that.