Emma Tai’s (Brown ‘07.5) Midyear Completion Speech
December 2nd, 2007 by webmasterThe following entry is Emma Tai’s (Brown ‘07.5) speech given at Brown University’s Midyear Completion Ceremony. It is published with the permission of the author.
Thank you, Dean Bergeron, and thank you to all of the family and friends, mentors and teachers who have joined us for this celebration.
There are nearly a hundred point-fivers gathered here today, December 1, just shy of the middle of the school year. We have completed eight semesters—or possibly more—or possibly less—and quite possibly not all in a row—at Brown, and thus we converge today with a well-earned sense of achievement. Yet the foremost question on my mind is not where we are going to work after this, whether or not I will have health insurance, or even what the cheese platter will be like at the reception, but rather: what are we doing here? Some of us might have walked this past May; some of us might be walking again this coming spring. Many of us still have finals to take, and none of us will actually be receiving diplomas until next year, anyway. A December completion is a unique thing, and I’m left wondering: by what means did we add that point-five to our graduation year, and by what crooked routes did we travel to arrive here today? What are we doing here, each and every one of us?
It’s a good question, but I’m not sure that we’ll ever fully be able to answer it for ourselves, no matter how many times we’ve asked it. Whatever we did during that point-five time–sitting on a plane to Ecuador, cleaning up the post-election debris of a political campaign that lost, healing ourselves at home, building a school in India, making money to put ourselves through school, or organizing for better wages for others—whatever brief sentences we try to cram our experiences into, the question persists: what am I doing here? It’s the question that drives many of us to tack that point-five onto our graduation year in the first place: what am I doing here, in this place, when there is so much else to do and so many other ways of seeing and knowing the world?
Like many of us here today, I augmented my childhood vocabulary through a steady diet of the daily comics. My favorite comic strip, by far, was Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, which followed the adventures of Calvin, a precocious six-year-old mischief-maker, and his best friend, a sarcastic tiger named Hobbes. There’s one cartoon in which Calvin and Hobbes are in the backyard, staring up at a big sky of stars, and Calvin asks Hobbes if he believes in astrological predestination. Hobbes, always level-headed, says no, but Calvin disagrees. When Hobbes asks why, he replies, “Life’s a lot more fun when you’re not responsible for your actions.”
Ten years after the strip’s retirement, Calvin and Hobbes continues to raise provocative questions with humor and honesty. But the comedy of Calvin’s character lies in the fact that he is not only ignorant and arrogant, but that—to whatever degree he recognizes these traits in himself—he prefers it that way. “Live and don’t learn, that’s us,” the protagonists conclude after a particularly hairy adventure. When we ask ourselves what we are doing here, we reject Calvin’s easy and irresponsible way of living: we choose to live and to learn; we choose to be responsible for our actions and ourselves. We unleash a series of questions that can be difficult, that can pose contradictions and challenges to the conventional ways of looking at the world. What are we doing here, in this world that is still so unjust, and how are we going to work to change it? Even at Brown, an institution dedicated to the support of research and critical inquiry, we can settle quickly into an easy complicity. As Brown’s Slavery and Justice Steering Committee has revealed, the university directly profited from one of the most brutally exploitative economic systems of the modern era. What are we doing here? And even today, we must question our relationship to the atrocious working conditions in the sweatshops that produce our Brown apparel. What are we doing here? Whether we’re leave-takers, super seniors, or early graduates, something about adding that point-five compels this kind of questioning—but most of us have yet to settle on a tidy or conclusive answer. When we ask ourselves what we are doing here, we push ourselves to look more closely at a tangled web of relationships: what do the nuances of Brown’s complicities and resistances to an unjust world look like, and what do they mean for us? What do the nuances of our complicities and resistances look like, and what do they mean for the world?
The insights we gain from an engagement in these complexities and contradictions often only add more questions to the pile. Which is, maybe, the only realistic way we can ever hope to answer those big questions, the ones most in need of asking: we come to them in messy and complex ways and then we leave them having revealed loose ends—not tying them up.
This is research in the truest sense. Research is not about beginning with a question, searching for its answer, finding it and then writing a paper. Rather, we begin with a question and search once, search twice, re-search, always with new knowledge and new questions emerging. Rarely do we find the answer to our original question; more frequently, we find ourselves traveling down the new paths of inquiry that emerge and branch out in infinite possibilities. The willingness to always question, to not accept with blind gratitude the things that we are given, is something that we’ve developed during our time at Brown and our time away from Brown. And now, as we prepare for one long-lasting time away from Brown, I hope that these will be the kind of research skills that we take with us wherever we go. I hope that we will remember to keep ourselves open to the possibilities that are sure to emerge: the possibilities for the twists and the unexpected, the possibilities of collapsing the assumptions that we started with, the possibilities for change.
In some ways, yes, this kind of research is a fundamentally self-involved process: What am I doing here? But to say that it is self-involved is not to say that it is easy; in fact, it is often much easier to be critical of the “here” than to be critical of the “I” that is in it. In her 1978 paper “The Erotic as Power,” poet and activist Audre Lorde takes us to what is often the most private, inner part of ourselves—our sexualities. She writes:
Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
I first read this essay last year, when I was in Professor Rose’s Black Feminism class. Audre Lorde was one in a long history of those who have challenged movements based on single identities: race, gender, class, sexual identity. From the margins of these movements, Lorde and her complex, intersecting identities demanded a new level of self-reflection and internal critique within the movements. Ten years earlier, in 1969, Toni Cade Bambara picked up these same themes. Writing on gendered inequalities within the black liberation struggle, she argued that “revolution begins with the self, in the self.” This is the kind of intense self-knowledge that Lorde describes in her essay, suggesting that when we do this, “our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.”
I use the words of Toni Cade Bambara and Audre Lorde today because they—and some of those who came before and after—give us a way to think about the question of what we are doing here. In no uncertain terms, they remind us that we cannot just ask hard, critical questions of our world—we must also ask them of ourselves.
When we take something at face value—from the stitches that hold our Brown sweatshirts together to a college education itself—we risk complicity in the systems that run counter to our visions for a more just and equitable society. To ask ourselves what we are doing here is thus to begin to engage in a kind of research that has the potential to transform ourselves and our world. And we have started already—we have not settled for the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe. We have deviated from the plan that was given us; we have asked ourselves what we were doing here. And as we prepare for the next big unknown, let us continue not to settle for an easy complicity. Let us bring our research with us, and let it always lead us to the hard questions.