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stanaass
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Comrades,
In the summer of 2022, I returned to Howard University to teach writing. Given my rather middling career as a university student, I could not help but feel somewhat sheepish about the honor. But it was an honor, because it was there that I met you. Our first class was in the woods--out in rural Virginia, where, with my friend the poet Eve Ewing, we spent two weeks reading, writing, and workshopping. I have been teaching writing in some form or capacity for almost as long as I have been a writer, and the only work I love more is writing itself. But with you I found the former rivaling the latter. I do not mean to slight any other cohort of students I have taught in other times and places--all were talented and hardworking. But the fact is, we were drawn together by something more profound.
I guess it begins with our institution, and the fact that it was founded to combat the shadow of slavery--a shadow that we understood had not yet retreated. This meant that we could never practice writing solely for the craft itself, but must necessarily believe our practice to be in service of that larger emancipatory mandate. This was often alluded to, if not directly stated. All our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among our people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular--especially the small and particular--becomes political. For you, there can be no real distance between writing and politics. And when I saw that in you, I saw myself.
A love of language, of course, is the root of this self. When I was barely six months old, I would crawl all over my father s speakers when he played the Last Poets. And when the record ended, I would cry until he played it again. At five I would lie on my bed, with the Poems and Rhymes volume of the Childcraft series splayed open to The Duel, and all day I could not help but to murmur to myself, The gingham dog and the calico cat/Side by side on the table sat. I did this for no other reason than the way the words felt in my mouth and fell on my ears.