Sanctify It
For the Boston University English Class of 2024
Because my time at BU is coming to an end, the English Dept asked me to give this year’s commencement speech. Here are the words I pulled together for the majors and HUB comrades. Know this: you are so loved.
May 18, 2024
I turned to many students for advice about what to do (or not to do) with this time. One said, I’ve heard a lot of speeches this week, but I don’t feel like I genuinely got to know any of the speakers. So, I’ll start there. Who am I? Here is a quote from my favorite teaching observation during a lesson on Corregidora by Gayl Jones:
Owen opened a discussion on desire, intimacy, embodiment, and not being able (or willing) to promise not to hurt others. The students followed warily into this risky space, and then Owen asked if any of them were friends. Two were; and Owen asked them—in a carefully non-coercive way—if they would be willing to hug each other in front of the class […] As they hugged for the full minute in the middle of the circle, I watched the huggers and the students (and myself) move through nervous laughter, to some signs of unease, to more reflective comportments. It changed the atmosphere of the room, and the class was ready to talk about bodies, vulnerability, power, pain, and care, and how we might think and feel about their entanglement. It [...] combined thoughtful community-building strategies with pedagogical generosity and creativity to create the conditions for deep intellectual engagement of vital, risky material.1
We have a lot of weird fun in the humanities because the size of the classes and the nature of the material require us to turn toward one another. Our conversations and our interventions are more powerful when we build trust in each other. In this day and age, we’re afraid to make mistakes because they are so public and so costly. But if we play by all the rules and stick to only asking questions that we know the answers to, we’ll be sentenced to a life without change. Or, to quote Eugene O’Neill, “people who succeed and do not push on to greater failure are the spiritual middle classers. Their stopping at success is the proof of their compromising insignificance.”2
For a lesson this semester on friction as metaphor for cultural theory, a student voluntarily gave himself a rug burn. Toward the end of what was a great conversation, I asked why he was willing to volunteer for my admittedly questionable ask. He said simply, I wanted to know what would happen next. This is a perfect summary of what I wish for each of you: the daring to ask, the motivation to do, the curiosity to reflect, and the generosity to offer what only you can.
I started here in Fall 2020 along with many of you, and I’m leaving with you, too. I've learned so much from you and alongside you. I can’t help but think about everything I have been through these last four years, and I would guess you are doing the same. At the rehearsal of my own undergrad commencement speech, I remember the college vice president said, If that’s how you see the world, I feel bad for you, because I started out by naming plainly what it takes to get into a room like this today. I said in 2008, and I continue to know now:
[N]o one can judge the most deserving person here. Some of you had hardships on the job market, some of you survived sexual or physical violence. Supported and lost loved ones. Confronted the law. Learned a new language. Survived health complications, discrimination, heartbreak, or coming out to your parents […] What you know and what you've been through and how you’ve grown will never be reflected in your GPA.3
You decided to live when you thought you couldn’t live.
When I was a student, it was clear to me that a lot of adults thought a “rude awakening” awaited us when we entered “the real world.” At my last job, it got clearer still as I listened to colleagues in the faculty senate insist that students were “too sheltered.” But every one-on-one conversation I’ve had with a student has led me to understand that anyone who thinks school is separate from the real world is a fool.
What you’ve been through is real.
School is “no crystal stair.”4 If it were, the graduate students wouldn’t have established the union in an unprecedented landslide victory last year. They wouldn’t be on strike now. They wouldn’t be risking blood poisoning on rotten teeth without dental coverage. If we were living the dream, the dean wouldn’t be threatening department and program chairs with budget cuts for supporting our students, nor surveilling junior faculty for doing the same. If school was a fantasy apart from the real world, BU wouldn’t be investigating and charging undergrads for protesting (miles away from campus) against Israel’s campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestine. From where I stand, college administrators “prepare you for the real world” by choosing to emulate some of the worst parts of this world.
You can see through arguments like, oh, graduate students can’t be paid a living wage because then staff would need to be paid more…5 And, a handful of hostages is worth thousands of deaths…6 The “math isn’t mathing,” or as Gil Anidjar wrote on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq:
Were it so that we only took an eye for an eye, a life for a life, a death for a death. In the setting apart that governs the mathematics of death, we might proceed to a more important, a more just, recount, one in which taking a life for a life, a death for a death, only increases the speed — exponentially magnified already — to which we add to the death counts.7
His words slide easily into the present moment.
You’ve been trained to read closely, to operate both intellect and heart at the same time, and even to break rules that have been forced upon you for your entire lives. (Shout out to my student who used the first-person in a paper for the first time!)
Of intimacy, Megan Nolan wrote earlier this year, “They knew, as we so often forget in ordinary life, that our lives are inherently porous projects, and that perseverance and ongoingness require the merged threads of connectivity instead of their severance.”8 Before (and after) you realize she is describing the collective efforts of the Andes flight disaster survivors and their consensual cannibalism, it’s an incredibly moving passage. Though I moved constantly in graduate school, Nolan’s lines remind me there was one place I lived for three whole years. Unspeakable things happened to me there, but not only that:
it was also a bldg where people shared what they picked up from the food pantry. where i didn’t have to pay for internet because someone shared another’s password with me secretly. where people were dying of addiction & cancer or living with aids & you could be as loud as you wanted. the man at the foot of the stairs would play a recording of his own karaoke performance at max volume on repeat every single day before he died. it was the first bldg i ever made friends with any neighbors. & when earthquakes hit we’d gather in the hallway to make sure everyone was okay. my window faced a concrete wall. i hung purple lace. it was ugly & beautiful at the same damn time.9
I know the real world.
And I know you do, too.
Because of that we must, as poet Jack Gilbert has said, “have / the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless / furnace of this world.”10 Sometimes we win, and sometimes we lose – but in all scenarios, we must hold fast to the knowledge that “not all gains are material.”11 Inside a building occupation, holding the barricade with one hand and a critical theory book in the other – I felt viscerally that politics and theory are meant to go together. Don’t trust anyone who says they don’t or can’t. We need both to pose new questions and both to answer them.
In 2020, Cameron Awkward-Rich wrote with awe over the glimpses of another world abrading the barriers of this one: “Although we tend to think of earnestness as a kind of naïveté, naïveté is nowhere among its definitions. Instead, earnest is defined as, at once, a form of potency and a portent, as ‘showing sincere and intense conviction’ and ‘a thing intended or regarded as a sign or promise of what is to come.’”12 I share his awe now, so I repeat, again, my wish for you to continue to build your daring to ask, your motivation to do, your curiosity to reflect, and your generosity to offer what only you can.
In one of my all-time favorite poems, Melissa Broder writes, “I sanctify the ground and say fuck it / I say fuck it in a way that does not invite death.”13 I translate her words with the help of that student I mentioned earlier: I want to know what happens next.
I say fuck it in a way that invites life. More life.