Graduation 2007

FACULTY ADDRESS
Bhanu Kapil,Writing & Poetics Department
May 12, 2007

Everyone in this room is here today because they love someone.

Beloved family and friends, beloved faculty, beloved staff and administrators, beloved strangers, beloved Alice Walker.

Beloved graduates --

Well, you, beloved graduates, have given me the honor of addressing you today.  As recently as this past Tuesday, I was wandering around with a notebook full of scratched-out lines beginning "Graduates of 2007" and "On this auspicious day," and so on.  Finally, I was fortunate enough to bump into a former student, Danielle, and her friend, Otto, who, it turned out, would be graduating today.  I showed them my completely pathetic notes (Punjabis of British origin are more suited to rambling in about the future over several cups of tea and are not typically known for their ability to present coherent or even creative advice to a mass audience).  "Otto," I said, "I need help.  If you were about to graduate, which you are, what would you like to hear?"  Otto, whom I'd never see before in my entire life, looked me right in the eye, and said: "I want to know what I have as I step into the mess."  Me: "What mess?"  Otto said: "You know…" and gestured to the foliage outside the Naropa bookstore.  "You know," he clarified, "everything that's happening right now."

And so, I have written a letter to you: to Otto, and to all the students graduating today, whether or not we've met before.  We’re meeting now.

Dear Otto, dear immigrant, dear writer, dear person about to step over the edge into everything:

Are you an immigrant?  Are you a writer too?  Though we haven't spoken about these things before, I've seen you digging up flowerbeds with Marco Lam outside the Naropa café.  What were you doing?  Were you grafting something?  You looked up and smiled happily, and I smiled back.  I saw you chanting the Gayatri mantra on a picnic table outside the Allen Ginsberg library, so vigorously I thought you'd fall off.  What were you doing?  Were you grafting something?  I saw you spilling out of African Dance class in PAC, to wash your beautiful, completely alive face in the downstairs loo of Lincoln Hall, and I saw you weeping, on a brown chair in the administrative building next to Tashi's desk.  Photocopying notes for class, in Sycamore, I could hear you through the open door of your classroom.  Speaking, you linked the study of fascia to that of botany: the ecology of everything from a disaster to a kiss.  One night, I saw you dressed as a violent headmistress, reciting the poems of Gertrude Stein as a wave of red light undulated on the wall behind you.  And I've seen you in the computer lab taking surreptitious, semi-illegal sips of cappuccino from your Naropa  travel mug as you typed your paper like a slightly deranged but incredibly well-dressed and recently escaped chimpanzee.  And I've seen you in our classroom, Upaya South, writing rapidly in response to the question: "Are borders real?"

You wrote -- I know, because I wrote it down -- that sometimes, in passage, in crossing, a person might be split in two.  You wrote that a border is an imaginary construction, and when I asked you to say more, you stood up and left the room in tears.  When you returned to class the next week, a conversation about fiction became a conversation about trauma, architecture, and race.  My responsibility, my duty, to you became the document of this exchange: each week, I wrote with you, writing down what you said -- the unexpected, complex and invariably beautiful logic of the room.

Dear immigrant, it's time to leave the room.  Today, a day with a perfectly, insanely blue Colorado sky, you step over the chalk line of the perimeter, or slip, with closed eyes, from the soft gelatin arcade of the campus.  You'll have to wash the university out of your clothes!  Gelatin is edible, so watch out for dogs, ferrets, and other ostensibly calm but fundamentally unpredictable animals.

Today, you cross.  What happens when you make a crossing, and what will you have when you get to the other side?  As a child, my mother crossed the border between a newly created country, Pakistan, and India, hidden in a cart of hay.  It was wartime, it was raining, and my mother saw things, peeking through the wooden slats, that should never be seen.  She told me the stories of that passage many night-times of my own childhood, in England, and I saw, though I understood it much later, that the images she saw, though unseen by so many, were recorded.

In marking this day, a day of ceremony in which you take your place in the world beyond our ecstatic and terrible institution, what will you carry with you when you go?  I am not sure I am saying this well, but if it's true that transgressing a border in the world has effects that are both exhilarating and painful, then it's true here today.  In fact, a person might be able to cross at all.  I'm thinking of the huge red nets constructed on the southern coast of Spain, to keep out the people coming from North Africa in makeshift boats.  I'm thinking a person might leave a checkpoint with no suitcase, nothing.  I'm thinking of my mother's mother who, before she made the crossing, burned her diaries -- elegant Kashmiri bindings, paper as thin as onion skins -- in a fire on her land.  The she scraped the ash into a lacquered box, which she carried with her to the next place and then the next.

Dear Otto, I don't know how to answer your question.

Dear Otto, dear student, dear traveler, dear refugee, dear writer, dear person leaving a space forever (unless of course you come back to do another Master's degree!) --

it's time to burn your notes, your final papers, your two-page assignments, and perhaps some of your poems.  It's time to go.

Here is your little box of ash.  Here is your piece of paper with something written on it.  Here is the story the body holds, and here is the day that cuts the space in two.

Beloved graduates, we extend so much love to you as you step into the mess of the world.  Thank you for the life and the warmth you brought to this home.

Thank you.