Thanks for this Lorraine.

You really don’t want to get me started on this subject right now, but...somehow your writing just unleashed a bit of a torrent here, which would probably make more sense to post on MLW, where more people are familiar with the “background.” I’ve tried to make up for that by hyperlinking to some of it. Sorry if this comment still doesn’t make any sense and comes across as just so much wallowing in self-pity, not as the stream-of-consciousness lamentation that it is.

I’m just looking back at the 13 years I’ve spent beating my brains against a wall (and getting my ass kicked six times around the block and back again in return) attempting to drive home some of the points you make here. The thwarted effort to regain ground, to get back up and do it again : to fight for the job that, to me, is not just a “career,” but rather a purpose. Ah, the luxury of it: to live a life of purpose. Considered a basic right in Europe, actually.

Last night, at a performance of Les Ballets Africains, I ran into two kids who’d been my students as pre-teens. Half grown men now, they just returned from their first trip to Guinea, West Africa. These kids were never so far gone as to have been declared “incorrigible”—their parents and community, thankfully, saw to it that it never came to that. But without those efforts, it could just as easily have gone the other way. There was great joy in seeing them—and the feeling was palpably mutual.

I’m reminded again of these kids, and these (some days I really can’t bear to look at them). I’m reminded of the “incorrigible” 6th grader—one who didn’t make it onto that stage (because he was getting into too much trouble), but with whom I worked on an individual basis during the lunch periods. They’d placed him in remedial classes—mostly because of behavior issues; based on his performance level in these private sessions with him, I convinced the school to place him in the “gifted and talented” program. I told them, “This child is not stupid, he is bored.” Of course, I didn’t elaborate further. Kept the whole truth to myself: “Bored. Bored with your bland, lifeless, meaningless culture. Bored with your approaches. Bored with your prejudices, your preconceived notions about who he is and why he is who he is. Bored with your bullshit attempts to “figure him out” and “fix him” when you don’t have the slightest inkling of where he has been and how he has come to be who he is.”

It’s hard. As I said, I’ve had my ass kicked around the block and back again in these 13 years. My career has pretty much been destroyed—the rug pulled out from beneath it by a combination of forces: some of which really ought to have been on “my side,” but all of which have colluded in putting an end to that career as a career. Here in the USofA, you’re supposed to do this kind of work as a “hobby,” expected to find reward in the hugs and kisses, and in this type of bittersweet encounter. I want my job back. I need my job back.

That reality becomes even harder to swallow every time one of these “encounters” occurs: that is, an encounter with one or the other of my former students whose life really took a completely different turn based on the original impulse I provided. It’s not so much the fact that I’ve been left empty-handed, stripped—indeed, robbed—of my career and reduced to prostituting myself in the vicious world of academia, which to me is a world of careerism and bullshit: a world without purpose: to cite Ingeborg Bachmann, an “empty garble of syllables....spun from the fabric of dust.” It’s not so much about me and my losses, even though I sit here watching myself spiral downward into a deep depression, indeed, despondence, that threatens to bowl me over. Daily.

Every time I have an encounter like this, a bittersweet, double-edged sword of emotion all but knocks the wind out of me. On the one hand, I am validated—vindicated, if you will—beyond my wildest imagination: indeed, there is great reward in knowing that you made a difference. But that knowledge doesn’t pay the fucking rent. No, what is most frustrating about it is knowing that, given the resources, you could be making this same kind of difference in how many more lives? But for the lack of resources. But for the lack of willingness on the part of this goddamned society to pay me to do the things that really matter: to me and to the people I “serve.”

So I sit at this desk cranking out academic bullshit for a pittance, but for less of a pittance than this society would afford me to do the things I know I’ve been put on the planet to do.

I try my best to suck it up. Stiff upper lip and all that. In front of the children, I usually succeed. I must. To fail in that endeavor would undo the good that’s been done. They cannot know the prices I’ve paid to give them that gift. In that brief moment of encounter, their appreciation of that gift—it’s like our little secret, ours alone: I know and they know, no one else does—is enough to make me “keep it together.”

But then comes morning. And there’s thing kind of emotional hangover. Waves of regret, frustration at being prevented from sharing that gift with more of them—and with more of them who need it even more than these two, these four, these six. However many. It matters not. Their numbers are legion. And that’s the killer. Their numbers are legion. My passion and my energy for them is infinite. My resources, unfortunately, are not. So, in these morning afters, all that passion and energy bounces off the interior walls of my skull—I do my best to channel it into the academic bullshit lying (and yes, I do mean prevaricating) on my dest. The left and right ventricles of my heart constrict. “Is there a clot in there?” I wonder.

I shouldn’t have come in here. Ought not have read this. Funny how something so simple can translate into a devastating blow. It’ll cost me a couple of hours, in the best case scenario. In the worst, I suppose, a day. But on days like this, 24 hours can feel like a lifetime.

One of these days, I’ll get around to sending those boys-now-turned-men a note:

Hey, back then I knew you were probably to young to understand, so I tried to make it look like we were just about “having some fun.” With these drums. These drums from Guinea. But did you know that Langston Hughes was not only a great poet, he was also a translator. Among others, of a Haitian poet named Jacques Roumain Jacques Roumain, author of this poem “The Long Road to Guinea.” Now that you’ve been there, to the place that, for so many years, was the closest I’ve ever been to a place I might call home, I suppose you’ll understand when I say to you that this work I do—this work no one seems to understand but you, this work that no one but you is willing to acknowledge or reward in any meaningful way (not unless they can steal it, of course)...this, is what that work is about.

It’s about the Long Road to Guinea.

It's the long road to Guinea
Death takes you down
Here are the boughs, the trees, the forest
Listen to the sound of the wind in its long hair
of eternal night

It's the long road to Guinea
Where your fathers await you without impatience
Along the way. They talk
They wait
This is the hour when the streams rattle
like beads of bone

It's the long road to Guinea
No bright welcome will be made for you
In the dark land of dark men:
Under a smoky sky pierced by the cry of birds
Around the eye of the river
the eyelashes of the trees open on decaying light

There, there awaits you beside the water a quiet village
And the hut of your fathers, and the hard ancestral stone
where your head will rest at last

I’m so damn glad you got there.

Today, that will have to be remuneration enough. Today, that will have to pay the rent. For everything else, there’s Mastercard, right?

My Hobbithole in the Hood atHistoricalFootnotes