Hello.
You are on my heart. That saying says it best. On my heart. A weight of presence. A pressing concern. A push through silence toward utterance. You, my students current and former, are on my heart.
Toshi Reagon’s opera adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s prescient novel Parable of the Sower was the last piece of theatre I saw in February. It ends with this song:
“A sower went out to sow her seed
And as she sowed
Some fell by the wayside
And it was trodden down
And as she sowed
Some fell by the wayside
And of it the birds did eat
A sower went out to sow her seed
And as she sowed
Some fell upon the rock
And as soon as it was sprung up
It withered away
Because it lacked water
It withered away…”
I consider those of you who I’ve taught over nearly twenty years in various schools and in workshops. I consider those of you who are my students now at Fordham. I see your faces, your smiles, your thinking postures, your walks. I hear your voices (so distinctly), your bright laughter, your fiery assertions. Most of all I recall you as energetic beings becoming, remembering your questions and epiphanies, your frustrations and leaps of faith, and the works that branched out in all dimensions from your capable (if sometimes unsure) hands. I consider those who I hear from. I consider those who I’ve lost touch with. I consider those we’ve lost. My heart, like so many hearts, aches in this undoing time. And you all are especially on my heart.
So much of what I urged of you was connected to a work bigger than just you or me. It is a deeper work we do because it needs to be done. It is work that does not guarantee a result at all, let alone an outcome that appears exactly as we picture. So much of what I urged you toward was engagement with expansive imagination–to be about what can be and to reach beyond what is. (Even as we apprehend we may not see the shift in our time.) [1.] I urged you to see without illusion, but to be clear that a vision of a just society is not illusory. [2.]
Recently, I revisited a film from 1953 called Bright Road, starring Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte. While the film belongs to its era, and will come off as saccharine and stilted to contemporary eyes, something vital pulses inside of it. Dandridge and Belafonte play a dedicated teacher and principal of an all-Black school who are both invested in their students–one young man in particular, who struggles with the weight of the world’s injustice and some heavy blows from life. I got teary watching, not because of the sentimental tone, but because I was reminded of the embodied dedication of generations of Black teachers for their students. A sometimes life-saving love in action. I contemplated the reciprocal experience for the teachers who, through their work with students, are reminded of their purpose and the importance of that aforementioned deeper work.
I often consider the teachers I had who absolutely saved my hide. Sometimes from foolhardy steps. Sometimes from my untried ego. And so many times they mitigated the venom of racism, homophobia, and classism. These teachers found ways to create and hold generative space for us within contexts that were sometimes indifferent to us or often downright hostile toward us. They encouraged our exploration and free expression while also protecting us from (and alerting us to) the unjust systems, caging stories and malignant people who threatened our growth. As I wondered, writing recently of one of my teachers, the late Aishah Rahman, “how did she hold our vulnerable minds in the palms of her hands and free us from the words, the phrases, the images, the narratives that ensured our own erasure?” They did their best to reduce harm. But as Labelle sang, sometimes, “good intentions just ain’t enough”.
It was a heavy task for them. And costly. Many of them suffered a great deal as a result, though they hid that fact from us. They carried rage and bore regret even as they did their best to keep their eyes on the prize: seeking positive change in the world around us and creating the optimal conditions for our holistic growth and development. There were costs too, for we students: many of us were traumatized by institutions and toxic individuals within them. There’s a razor-thin line between inspiration and illusion, between disillusionment and devastation. Unintentionally, some of our professors’ efforts to spare us may have made us vulnerable. This is the intergenerational dilemma.
Many of you have suffered. That suffering has pressed on your hearts. Pushed you through silence to utterance. Even a cursory glance at the current tidal wave of testimonies from among arts institutions and educational institutions lays bare the fact that the days of suffering in silence are at an end. Good. And, too, that is, itself, a precarious state, full of possibility and danger.
The song at the end of Parable continued:
A sower went out to sow her seed
And as she sowed
Some fell among the thorns
And as soon as it was sprung up it withered away
There was no air to breathe
There was no room to grow
It withered away
In her incisive book on the patriarchy, The Will to Change, bell hooks wrote: “The ability to critique oneself and change and to hear critique from others is the condition of being that makes us capable of responsibility.” That condition of being holds the air to breathe and the room to grow. This time of reckoning has exposed familiar wounds, but also deeper thorny structures usually hidden from view that maintain systems of oppression and resist change and eschew responsibility through self-preserving and self-repairing mechanisms. [3.] We may argue that institutions are just aggregations of people. Well, people are the bearers of the systems they inherit and extend. There are noble folks and corrupt folks just as there are noble institutions and corrupt institutions wherein both contain both. When faced with a time of reckoning, some seek absolution not transformation, a pass not a process, lip-service not liberation. Some bring their heart-of-hearts to bear, and seek to live their word. Those who do try to do right are often stymied. Those who push back are often punished.
What condition of being are you pursuing? That’s a question I keep hearing right now.
When I state you’ve been on my heart it is in part because I recognize the profound harm that so many of you have weathered. I recognize the harm I have weathered and the harm weathered by my soul-teachers before me. I recognize the harm that I, regardless of my intentions, have been a part of extending because of the systems in which I have moved. This even as I sought, like my teachers before me, to protect you. I am weary of but not surprised at the unneccesary repetition of harm in all the fields of which I am a part. I recognize our habits of reaction and response to hegemony. I have felt my own rage, shame, guilt, and exhaustion-near-paralysis. I, too, have been pushed through silence to utterance. Throughout our history times of backlash have been both damaging and profoundly dispiriting. This time especially so with its multiple strains and violences. But perhaps there’s a gift here for all of us. Some revelation about the “normal” we have been wrested from. And some insights about how we might extend that deeper work I’ve referenced.
In her novel, Butler’s protagonist, Lauren Olamina, who leads a weary band of sojourners through a fractured future, states:
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
We changeable beings are in the presence of a deep call toward intentional change. Some will heed the call. Some will not. Who will take responsibility for what they see? What does responsibility, in such a mercurial time, look like? These questions may well lead us far away from what we have known, through new steps on uncertain ground. As you know I often ask in classes: “what will you do?”
The song from Parable concluded:
“A sower went out to sow her seed
And as she sowed
Some fell on good ground
Some fell in food ground
From it the plants did grow
From it the flowers bloomed
And in due time cam forth bearing fruit
A hundred fold
A hundred fold
A hundred fold”
Moving. My feet are on the road. I cannot see the destination. But my eyes are open and perhaps at this time more discerning than they have been. For that, I’m grateful. Discernment. Fellow sojourners, moving through this volatile time, you who are on my heart, I say to you: beyond these literal or virtual walls, with my next new steps, wherever they may lead, I will seek good ground.
I invite you to do the same.
Daniel Alexander Jones
———
If you ever took Young, Gifted and Black with me you’ll remember my talk about lineage, about that work that extends across and through generations. I identified the long list of artists and educators who carried and passed along the sacred fire of education and responsibility to the work–the embodied work–of transformation.
To be clear, I, like many have worked outside institutions and within institutions as both educator and artist, but this pertains to the challenge of work with institutions and the questions of purpose, intentions, outcomes, etc.
For a clear rendering of these interolocking structures within U.S. culture & history, please read Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, Caste.