Newsletter Eight: "won’t you celebrate with me?”
My First Year as an Assistant Professor"
Last Friday, I officially completed my first year of teaching as an assistant professor. With each distinct class ending, I felt pangs of sadness, amazement, gratitude, shock, and an overwhelming realization that I had entered the miracle of the profession— the art of promised endings. Many loved ones asked me what I was going to do to celebrate this first cycle of an aspiration that was once only a dream. Their well-intentioned call to celebrate was accompanied by a heart heavy from apocalyptic headlines and tallies of death. The only solace I could reach came from a Lucille Clifton poem:
“won't you celebrate with me/ what i have shaped into/ a kind of life? i had no model./ born in babylon/ both nonwhite and woman/ what did i see to be except myself?/ i made it up/ here on this bridge between/ starshine and clay,/ my one hand holding tight/ my other hand; come celebrate/ with me that everyday/ something has tried to kill me/ and has failed.”/
“won’t you celebrate with me?” by Lucille Clifton
This poem embodies grace, defiance, and kindness. It instructs me on how to make room for my joy in the midst of ongoing struggles across regions and soundscapes. But, in these times, celebration can feel out of reach. Education has always been a saving grace. Since I was a child, it has been a place where I found pathways to other worlds, ideas, and opportunities to see myself in a different light. Today, I view education as an avenue for workshopping the transformation of people, ideas, inventions, culture, technology, places, systems, and legacies.
It was a whirlwind to witness how these experiments in worldmaking have performed deep harm across the country. I am grateful to have seen students refuse this harm by transforming spaces, texts, and ideas into seeds that may take root as they venture into new chapters. I celebrated with them, for they have also been my teachers. I couldn’t help but bring them snacks and take the pictures because I realized that I needed to embrace the joy of this ending, as it will not come again—at least, not exactly in the same fashion or form.
This celebration is rooted in all the goodness and kindness we can find right now. And despite my reluctance, the ceremony of jubilation ended up finding me. Visits from happy family members brought necessary smiles, laughs, and future memories. I experienced my first San Diego Padres game and victory.
More family came into town unexpectedly, and the joy spilled over to a new day. I also went to a beautiful celebration of life this weekend. It was a cultural titan’s 50th birthday, and in their truly groundbreaking philosopher kind of way, they requested their guests to bring a beverage and a poem. These poems were sweet offerings of care and declaration of imprints left on the heart. These poems confirmed my intuition that Clifton’s poem laid a path for me to create space for my own joy in having made it through the year.
When I thought I didn’t have it in me, gladness became part of my atmosphere. I will drink up all I can because I know there will be more uncertainty up ahead. I’m grateful for my filled cup, as I look ahead toward a summer filled with research, theatre, celebration, love, writing, and processing this eventful year.
Until then, “won’t you celebrate with me?”
Art I Can’t Stop Thinking About:
“New Directions” at UCSD! Here’s more about the show:
“NEW DIRECTIONS features the work of student choreographers and will welcome dance makers and movers from across all areas, and beyond the department. The purpose of New Directions will be to engage dancers and choreographers across campus, and to support the next generation of embodied storytellers and movement makers.”
Under the direction of the incomparable Ana María Álvarez, these students showed up and SHOWED OUT! Congratulations!
I feel so honored to have learned and celebrated with you, thank you for a great quarter!