Day 60 and 61 – Telling the truth and not buying the lie
I am always so moved by the faces of the graduates and by the small snippets of their stories that I have had the privilege to know. I know that for me – the journeys to getting my masters and doctoral degrees were filled with both challenges and joys, of hard work and huge sacrifices. It is always a triumph and for these students the challenges of completing a degree in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, under the reassertion of White supremacy, the shadow of police shootings, increasing civic divides, unprecedented economic disparities, and a global climate crisis certainly made their achievements all the more remarkable.
It was such a privilege to have one of our own dance therapy students give the student commencement speech. Unfortunately, Kevana West was unable to deliver the speech themselves, but Tosh delivered the talk with clarity and passion! (You can hear the speech at 1:08:10 on the YouTube recording of the ceremony! Go and listen.) I particularly appreciated Kevana’s invitation to breathe – to know our own embodied experience, and to trust that if we are feeling discomfort we may need to act. I appreciated the reminder to get back to work, to recognize the ways the systems that have perpetuated the global crises of the moment need to be dismantled, and to not trust the ways the system works to keep itself going.
I’ve been reading Begin again: James Baldwin’s America and its urgent lessons for our own by Eddie Glaude, Jr. Glaude begins the book by talking about Baldwin’s insistence on not believing the lies – on self-inquiry, and on unmasking ourselves. Most importantly, he is remembering the Baldwin who admonishes African Americans to not believe the lies America tell them about themselves.
These two events Kevana’s speech and Glaude’s text have me thinking a lot about telling the truth, and allowing myself to know the truth, and about not believing the lies the dominant culture tells us, day in and day out – that to be a man is better, to be a White person is better, to be educated is better, to have access to power is better, to be healthy and without trauma is better!
I am trying to be me. To not believe even the lies I tell myself. I am reminded of a poem I wrote back in 2001…
Liar, liar, liar
Two bodies face to face
are two stars falling
into an empty sky
He tried to sing, singing
not to remember
his true life of lies
and to remember
his lying life of truths
Octavio Paz
memory lies. What I remember is not the truth. Not the way it happened. Only the way I remember it - my life of words are lies. Life happens in taste, in touch, in fear, in sight, in sobbing, in cold dark aloneness, not in words, not in full blown sentences which run one after another and have been told so many times they numb my heart from the truth. The truth which could not be told in words and could not be remembered in sentences, but which is sometimes felt in the night when I am sad, alone and tired, too tired to sleep, too tired to think in words. Then in the shadows of the room my memories emerge in taste, in skin, in throat, in sniffle, in heart pounding, cold sweat, frightened quick breath.
“A person’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his/her heart first opened.” Camus
September 2001
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