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The night before her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths was fretting about her best friend. Kamilah Aisha Moon was due to read a poem at the ceremony, but no one had heard from her. Her phone was going straight to voicemail and staff at her hotel said she hadn’t checked in. “We’ll find her. She wouldn’t miss your wedding,” Griffiths’s sister, Melissa, assured her. But the next afternoon, in the middle of her wedding reception, Griffiths learned that Moon had died alone at home in Atlanta of unknown causes. On hearing the news she collapsed, hit her head on a table and blacked out. Paramedics pried open her eyes to shine a torch on them: “A particle of light that is so distant from the world I once knew.”
For Griffiths, 47, the death of her best friend and “chosen sister” was one in a series of upheavals stretching across a decade. It began with the death of her mother, who was her greatest cheerleader and fiercest critic. She had instilled in her daughter the importance of “independence above everything. I was raised not to lose myself in the stories of others, especially men.”
In 2017, Griffiths met and fell in love with Rushdie at a literary gathering, where he had collided with a plate-glass door that he thought was open, leaving him with a bloody head and a bruised ego. After that came the pandemic, during which two of Griffiths’s uncles died.
But there was worse to come. Less than a year after Moon’s death, a stranger attempted to assassinate Rushdie. The author, who had a fatwa issued against him by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, sustained near fatal stab wounds to his neck, chest, hand and eye. Rushdie would later write about the attack in his own book, Knife.
The Flower Bearers reflects on these events and more in a narrative that hops back and forth across the decades. It is the first memoir by Griffiths, who has published five volumes of poetry and a novel, Promise. The book is simultaneously a love story, a portrait of sisterhood and a visceral depiction of violence, loss and emotional devastation. For Griffiths, the death of her friend and the attempted murder of her husband were “an uncanny Janus coin that [spun] around on the silent, bloodstained earth of my mind”.
As one might expect from an author whose primary medium is poetry, the writing is evocative, full-bodied, perhaps a little overcooked in parts. Griffiths is a serious soul acutely attuned to the subtleties of human interactions and the chaos of her interior world. Though she skates over some troubling aspects of her story – there is passing mention of sexual violence and a serious suicide attempt in her early 20s – she is expansive and moving on her diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. Griffiths’s struggles with the mental health condition led to her calling a suicide hotline in 2013. Unbeknown to her, the police were notified and dispatched to her Brooklyn apartment, where they demanded entry. Once in, they forced her to the floor and handcuffed her, ignoring her requests to walk with them to the waiting ambulance. “I hadn’t been arrested for any crime, yet my mental health episode had criminalised me,” she reflects.
The Flower Bearers goes to some dark places, but there is joy, too, most notably in its portrait of Griffiths’s and Moon’s friendship, which brims with tenderness. The pair met in New York when they were graduate students studying creative writing in the mid-2000s, working multiple jobs and living hand-to-mouth. Their connection was cemented by music, poetry and the challenges of being Black women making their way in the world. Both felt “safe to share who we were, who we were becoming and what from our pasts was keeping us from claiming the promises of our futures”.
In the final chapters, Griffiths embarks on a trip to the American south to honour Moon and the writers who inspired them both, and to confront the grief that threatens to overwhelm her. In doing so, she learns to accept loss as a part of living. “I know that life demands deaths, and births, each day. But it also insists on singing, dancing, suffering, surviving and loving. There is a last hour ahead of me somewhere, and it will be mine too, intimate as my first breath.”
The Flower Bearers by Rachel Eliza Griffiths is published by John Murray (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.comIn the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 1. Delivery charges may apply.
