Townships: The Past is Not Past

               On our last day in Cape Town, we traveled to the memorial of Amy Biehl, the young white Fulbright student who in 1993 was killed by an angry mob as she was dropping off friends in Gugulethu the day before she was headed back to California. The violence occurred in the turbulent moment when apartheid was just ending.
              As we were gathered and reviewing what we knew from our research and the book we read, Mother to Mother by Sindiwe Magona, two men were watching us from an idling car. I went over to talk to them. Would it be okay if we took a picture with your group, they asked when I approached. I said, Probably—but first you have to tell why you want this, and I want you to be honest about it.
              In the four years since they had moved from the Eastern Cape, in all that time, they had never seen white people in Gugulethu before. They wanted a picture to mark the occasion, but perhaps the picture was a pretext to talk with us and find out what we were up to.
              We took the picture and launched an exchange of welcome and gratitude and questions.
              Amy Biehl was killed more than three decades ago. Apartheid ended more than three decades ago. But these men taught us so clearly the past is not past.

               The night before, the mamas held a braai for their guests and the Isilimela and Roosevelt teachers. Our students gathered all the adults in the yard and sang for us—“Lean on Me,” “Stimela,” and “Yahkalipi koko”; they were leaping and jumping in excitement while the Isilimela teachers were shouting at each other in surprise and joy, look at what the Americans are doing, our music, in IsiXhosa, singing with the students, all of us joined together.

Guilt as Pathway to Humbling

              We spent our first day at Hoërskool Bellville today. So many elements converged in our students to ramp up nerves and preconceptions. This includes how tightly and how quickly they bonded with Isilimela students and Langa mamas and a culture of song and dance and sharing, openness not replicated as unreservedly elsewhere. It also includes a progressive Seattleite’s suspicion of privilege while extending our curiosity and trust to the marginalized—commendable when so much voice and power is going the other way. Students also had a whole week to grow close with Langa, coming to these comfortable beds and warm showers with both an emptiness and sharp guilt.
              During the testing period this morning, we gathered to check in, and there were so many fears. During the retreat, HFB friends from Bellville pumped them full of negative expectation. Then some families made off-hand comments about township life that disturbed their guests. Some of our students missed the warmth and swapping of stories with their Langa mamas and found conversation with host families in Bellville superficial in comparison. And there was that guilt around the welcome comforts surrounding them.
              After school, Bellville HFB student Anzél explained that people didn’t bring up race because they wanted everyone to be comfortable and didn’t want anyone to be offended. She also said teaching about apartheid was very limited here: it’s taught by grade nine (after which, no history is taught at all in Bellville while it’s elective in Isilimela), but what happened after apartheid is not taught at all—nothing about what it took to get past apartheid and what it now takes for the nation to heal. But, Anzél says—and I would love our students to hear this—if someone has a real curiosity, then we know it’s okay to talk.
              When students compare communities in binary ways, I want them to consider what a privilege it is to travel to a place where as outsiders we can see history and all of its legacies so nakedly. It’s hard to do when you’re in it. And if you’re living in a place of vast income inequality, what kind of blinders and fear must one wear if you have so much and others have so little. In Seattle, this is also the case, yet you’re not likely to see it clearly: how often do you think and really feel with the full of your soul the way you do here about what it is to live on appropriated land, about the untended poverty, mental illness, addiction, sexual abuse, and other compounding violences in Seattle’s unhoused and walk between those who have and those who don’t until you feel so wrenchingly the wrongness and strangeness of so much culture aloof to it?
              The stinging guilt many of our students feel about enjoying their Bellville comforts is a good sign: it’s a pathway to humbling—to becoming more considerate and grateful, to being mindful, to actively organize to improve our world and the plants and animals that inhabit it. But honest seeing and big-hearted feeling is the tool, not the guilt that is that first stop on the way. You have to get on the other side of that guilt—to honesty and humility, the catalysts through which the world can be both heard and transformed.

Poverty Tour or Progress Tour

               I have now taken Langa’s cultural center Guga S'Thebe’s neighborhood tour four times. It always leaves a mark. It is always uncomfortable. It always incites guilt, sorrow, and anger.

              We began at the Dompas museum, housed in an old courthouse used to process neighborhood violations. In the nineteenth century, Langa was a place to house migrant labor; but later, after the Group Relocations Act, Langa was designated a township for Blacks only, and people were brought to the courthouse and jailed if they failed to have the Dompas, which you couldn’t get if you weren’t registered with a company in Langa, and you couldn’t be registered with a company in Langa if you were a woman. If you were from another township, you would need a special pass to come into Langa. Otherwise, jail.
              Our guide wanted us to see the continued hardship following the many violences done to Black South Africans after a colonial project which continually dispossessed the native peoples, and then, with a government spread thin, which gave them far too many opportunities to stay and wait in limbo. The guide in the back of our tour had both given us historical context for Langa but also whispered that our forward guide was giving us the poverty tour rather than the progress tour we should have had instead.
              We reflected in Guga S'Thebe, a beautifully built campus for the arts—ceramics, music, painting, and more—with studios for creating and teaching artists learning to make a living turning discarded plastics and wax cartons into saleable art.
              Our student Gabby said going from the childcare centers in one of the blocks and having the best fifteen minutes of her life with the children to then walking out and seeing where those children lived was not something she had words for.
              I told students I know they came out of that neighborhood tour with many feelings, the weight of what they saw, their voyeuristic implication in what might have felt like viewing exhibits in a zoo. But they have reasons for inviting you into their homes and showing you how they live, I said. They want you to witness and speak what you saw. That doesn’t make it easier.
              But I want you to think of all the things that are true—Gabby’s joy and hard witness, the progress tour we might as easily have taken, this place of vitality and art all around us. This is true also.     You need to look with honest eyes, not polite eyes—don’t be so polite you don’t notice the trash everywhere, but ask why. Notice honestly; and deeply ask why. Yes, have all the feelings. But then, open your hearts; observe with honest eyes; ask why; and use it to see to next possible steps; and where and when you can, organize, stand each other up, and act.

Slave Lodge and Sites of Remembrance

 

              The Slave Lodge is a sturdy building raised by the Dutch East India Company in 1660 that housed slaves especially during the British occupation. The active and proud voice accompanying the exhibits throughout was striking. I don’t remember what was written. But this is what I remembered about what was felt: In this space, there is no excuse for ignorance or forgetting. In this space, we honor the pain, the trauma, the complex stories. In this space, we share the voices preserved from grandparent to grandchild and on down because no one wrote them into the historical record, and because stories bring to life the abstracted and the silenced.
              Everywhere alongside horrific stories was a towering dignity—in pictures and in the words of descendants proud of their names however awful their provenance, proud, because their families wore them and passed them on, turned them to love, and strong, because their surnames remind them why they might still be struggling now, still waking up at three in the morning for a job. Knowing the past taught them and teaches us how to organize and resist and build for the future. The trauma and brutality was there in that museum, but with no trace of defeat or despair.
              A couple months ago I read How the Word is Passed, by Clint Smith, a powerful, wise book about how history is actively remembered or forgotten. He discussed places like the Slave Lodge through the Door of No Return on Gorée Island in Senegal and the importance of such “sites of remembrance”: here we can gather history around us, in stone, plaster, lintels, and the very air and ground beneath our feet, and we can invoke a past with both horror and reverence: it was here, it was here, I can’t imagine, and I can’t imagine because I am finally imagining.
              We can read a book and scan a Wikipedia article, or we can go and make ourselves ache to really understand something in the very moment we have started to understand.
              We returned to Isilimela to drum together in quaking, electric unison, every face a light.

First night, first school day in Langa

   

              By now, in our second day at Isilimela Comprehensive School, during the lunch period, you would find our students in a loud hive of energy in Ms. Mimi’s art room, eating with Isilimela Hands for a Bridge and the many others who congregate regularly in that space midday—talking, eating, shouting, standing, and then, a group of Isilimela learners teaching Roosevelt students or the other way round a dance, a shake, an elaborate set of moves.
              Roosevelt students met up in the small park by Mama Viola’s to play soccer and fall in love with the curious, unflappable children who came to them there. One student said it was the best time of her life in that little park. Perhaps all gatherings in that park were deliriously joyous.
              Before they would go home yesterday, students were already feeling the highs of their start here: today, moods were still high though experiencing the jagged demands of their jetlagged bodies in the South African heat. And students getting their hair touched was a shared, curious experience.
              They performed in the hall before Isilimela classes, drawing repeated cheers. The Q&A afterwards was a window to life and schooling here in Langa and as well as what our students chose to represent in answers. The first assembly was followed by a series of historical questions about America in various eras. Someone wondered if we trusted our president. How is our infrastructure in America. How many languages do you speak. Tell us about religion where you’re from. What sports do you play. Two questions evoked audible gasps and a tumult of reaction from the audience: a) do you wear school uniforms, and b) what time is it in Seattle right now.
              Someone wanted to know whether or not it was safe in America. One of our students said Seattle is mostly safe as long as one knows to avoid certain areas. Some Bellville homestay families in the past have expressed a shocked curiosity about our students staying in Langa. Were such shock to be expressed again, I’m sure our students will think back to the delirious joy of a neighborhood park.

Arriving in Langa township, Cape Town

  

              I returned to Cape Town, South Africa, with the Hands for a Bridge program for the first time since 2019. We received a welcome so warm our very world view began to tip.
              We arrived in Langa with our bags and gathered in Mama Dozi‘s cozy living room around two couches and platters of fruit and our sixteen students enclosed body to body in a safety and warmth of neighborhood matriarchs. The next morning, we arrived in the Isilimela Comprehensive School’s parking lot to a parade of Hands for a Bridge learners singing and holding a banner of welcome, Ms. Mimi bringing us together in a circle for more song and step, all of us together in a circle, her hand-mic encouraging volume and forming the spotlight. And then Monday assembly was moved to Tuesday, just for us, speakers filling the capacious hall with song as early-arriving learners welcomed American guests to a morning dance party until the hall was full with standing bodies, stepping, clapping, singing, harmony with the teacher on stage with her mic and full voice as she led us in prayer and song, words sometimes in English, sometimes in IsiXhosa, and all of it, such a tidal wash for us visitors: the joy, the song, so many collectively happy to sing and step together in school.
              Already we see a different way of being and being together in learning community. We see what community can be.
              All around us was a buzz of nervous excitement and shy looks and whispers, so when we could join in music and movement, we could say thank you; we could say, There is nowhere on Earth we would rather be.
              The Isilimela principal welcomed us in the assembly with the promise that they would strive to make us want to stay. They succeeded.

Talking to Students about a Teacher's Suicide

 

              By now many of you have heard that our orchestra director killed herself last night. It’s not clear if I’m supposed to say that yet, but we shouldn’t dance around mental health or suicide when people who most need help are embarrassed to name it and seek it.

              This is not easy for me to stand before you and talk about now, because Ms. G— was an important colleague to me, an important person for my daughters, and above all, a friend, and there are other reasons, too.

              Caring and community was especially important to Ms. G—. She was very transparent about what we need from each other. This became a real mission for her when we were in COVID school and our colleague Anne killed herself. Ms. G— started the Sunshine Club, where colleagues met on Zoom to enjoy each other, get to know each other, fill each other up, because Christine was clear: We had failed Anne. We failed her. We were not enough community: we did not see each other and care and play enough together. Anne was lonely and we made little room, and then we went into Zoom school, and she died. Ms. G— was fierce about community after that. You’d hear it in her concerts, in how she’d present before crowds, in books she read and podcasts she recommended, in what she told students, and in what she demanded from friends like me. If you went to a G— party, at some point, she’d make every single individual in the room speak an appreciation. At her 50^th birthday, she spoke about every single one of us in the house, and then we each spoke, no slipping out without speaking our appreciation of her. Because she was a big personality and hilarious and flying Italian hands and she was pushy like that: we were going to be inside the circle, loving, loved.

              And then she killed herself, leaving a seven-year-old son.

              And I am really fucking pissed at her. Because it was a supremely selfish thing to do.

              I told her. I told her. After Anne died, I cried in front of every one of my Zoom classes, and all these kids, in these tiny  broken little boxes on a screen, I yelled at them, because I wanted them to know, and so I’m telling you now, because it’s still true, that none of you, none of you gets to do what Ms. G— did. You are not allowed. You do not have my blessing. You are not permitted. Because I know that every one of you, each of you, has people who care about you, your friends, whoever you call your family, you are loved; and I know, I know, people who kill themselves just want the pain to end, and I understand that, it’s legitimate, it’s real, but you are loved. You are loved. You talk to someone. If you get low like that, you talk to someone, you reach out. You are not allowed to be alone. You are loved.

              And you are not allowed to do what she did.

              When Anne died, Christine organized a memorial a year later when we were back to sharing a building together, and five or six of us went with her to Magnuson, and I don’t remember what she said, but I know we talked about this.

              And I know Christine knew people cared about her. I know how caring she was. Almost any time I’d run into her in the halls, she’d gather a hug from me. She knew people cared about her, and we talked about this and what it does, and she just went did it, didn’t reach out to any of us whom she said she loved and who definitely loved her.

              I’m angry. It was selfish. It’s rent a hole in all of us who cared for her and were cared for by her.

              I adore this woman. She is a big, joyous, funny, bright personality, and she was always transparent that she was going through a lot and hurting, and even then, she worked to tie communities tight together in joy and appreciation and fierce caring. I loved going out with her, hearing her stories, being a part of the passion she’d wrap around everything she touched.

              I thank you for being so present together right now. It means a lot to our room, and to me. And I’m also grateful that we were able to discuss the book chapter and all its hard issues, because it’s allowed me to engage with my heart and mind and with you all in ways that are not this right now. But we are all carrying a lot today, whether you knew Ms. G— or not, and any way that you might be feeling or responding is the right way to feel or respond. The library is available all day for people who want to talk, in any way they want to talk.

Streams and Mountains without End

Streams and Mountains without End, handscroll on silk, 1100-1150, late Song-Jin dynasty Cleveland Art Museum. Inscription translation: “The creator has no intentions. Making mountains and streams from pure air.” Added, 1205.

Elizabeth Woody in Seven Hands, Seven Hearts describes her teacher Margaret guiding Woody past her anxieties weaving root bags. Woody is sure she is doing it wrong and disrespecting the traditions of her elders, disrespecting the tule reeds and cedar strands that have been gathered for these inexpert and uneven folds. She is grateful and feels her grandmothers through her hands but also, she’s doing it wrong. Margaret says, “Don’t worry—weave!” The strips pulled from marshes and tree bark stain her palms with a tang of the earth itself, and, she writes, she weaves in herself new pathways to thought.

In 1949 when the Communists drove the Kuomintang Party from power and out of China, the destabilized economy led to a fire sale of art and antiquities; private and temple collections became suddenly available. This was how Richard Hochstadter was able to acquire the twelfth century masterpiece watercolor Streams and Mountains without End, the scroll that now stretches across a wall of the Cleveland Art Museum. Hochstadter himself was in China when his homeland looted its own homes and seized precious art from Jews like Hochstadter, hanging bloodred banners from their museums. During the Cultural Revolution a couple decades later, Shanghai shielded art from Party purges of decadence. The CCP had their own banners to hang.

A former ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, is now the head of The Kennedy Center for the Arts. In his theater box hangs an enormous portrait of himself with the President. Shows are no longer woke, no more drag, the President bragged. The man in charge of programming staff was overheard praising a musical recently staged at the Center: so good “they could be on a cruise ship.” While ticket sales have sagged, the new head of the communications is correct to attribute the drop in revenues to “liberal intolerance.” Meanwhile, Grenell insists on being called The Ambassador. This is the current embassy of American culture.

I hiked this summer to Vesper Peak off the Mountain Loop Highway. The day was moist and fogged, and the mountains towered over me through a thick mist, every sharp crag, rigid and bleak but softened into folds of a weighty cotton. It was a gray monochrome, and I was similarly enfolded against a dry-brush Chinese watercolor, Vesper Peak, watercolored, my own existence against the towering ridge breaks folded in a mystery artists in China beheld in quiet awe a millennium before.

Recognition from the World Affairs Council

Last night, an organization called the World Affairs Council recognized me with their World Educator 2025 award. They honored me, I think, for much of what is reflected on this blog. Below are my remarks at the event.

              Thank you to the friends and students who have honored me by showing up tonight, to Evangeline for nominating me, and to the World Affairs Council, for being about the kind of connections and community that I am so happy to celebrate in accepting the World Educator award tonight. 

               I want to take this opportunity to speak to what I think we are valuing here together when you’ve recognized my contributions in particular. As a public high school English teacher, my job is to transmit skills, take attendance and answer emails, attend meetings, and pass my students. As long as I do that, I don’t hear from school leadership. But what’s most meaningful to me in our work with children is their sense of self and world, their emotional power to hurt and heal and grow community and understanding.

               I have had the fortune to work with institutions and educators that honor such experiences: The Fulbright Teacher Exchange brought my family to Hungary in a life and culture swap. Hands for a Bridge has built enduring relationships in South Africa, Northern Ireland, and Washington state, stepping across difference towards sharpened appreciations of political, historical, and cultural contexts. Margins and Centers, a course that investigates power with an eye towards empowerment, justice, and joy, is built on collaborations guided by one of the wisest, most creative instructors I’ve ever met, Anu Taranath. She exemplifies the kind of open-eyed, open-hearted teaching I most want to embrace.

               What these programs have in common is an understanding that education involves not just the mind but the heart—a hungry curiosity, a generosity of spirit. We can learn skills and pass tests and follow rules; but if we want to learn more than obedience or self-promotion, then we celebrate the communal nature of the classroom; we step outside comfort zones and look beyond schoolhouse walls; we acknowledge and interrogate and honor our emotional reactions to events and ideas outside of us.

               Any time we can elevate students from habituated contexts and ideas, we can do this.

               Consider an afternoon that American students experienced in Cape Town, side-by-side with their Xhosa and Afrikaner friends: We’d read a novel about a fraught moment towards the end of Apartheid when a young American was killed by a mob in the township of Gugulethu. We stood where she was killed, meditating on both the anger of the moment and the truth and reconciliation work that later stared into it and allowed a measure of healing. Our guide grieved the vandalism and decay on the monument before us: important history was either not being taught or not being appreciated. And then we sang, bringing ourselves into a personal mournfulness of the shared experience.

               Later, we would write and talk. The cracked, vandalized monument and Siya’s words made us think about memorials, heroes, shared history when it’s communally remembered: such history and heroes help us understand others and energize around common values. Without these, those most marginalized stay divided; and bigotry is left undisturbed.

               It was the specificity of this moment, this place, these specific cracks, surrounded by these people, wrapped in this song and these ideas, and the unflinching group dialogue that followed, that deepened our thinking about history, our collectivity in it, and above all, our invested feeling in it.

               Again, it’s getting students out of their habitual contexts that accelerates such heart-work. Group travel can do this. Field trips can do it. Eleven p.m. talking circles can do it. But you don’t need to travel across the world or even across the city to do this. Any group experience that students understand as bigger than a classroom and bigger than an assignment for a grade does the same work: We’re already a community—thinking and experiencing, together, in a classroom—and that gets us a lot of the way there. From that collectivity, a learning and cultural encounter that expands a person, both in mind and heart, has the potential for joy and for support from a world outside of our own close needs and interests.

               Tonight, I want to reaffirm what is most joyous, challenging, and human in this work and play of learning, and that’s in the connections and relationships we make to the world beyond the comfort of what we already know and experience. When we step together as communities towards other communities—in reading, in imagination, or in body—we grow, we fortify, we deepen our own humanity. We strengthen our world.

               Thank you.

Bastard Out of Carolina: Why I read a devastating book with young students

               Today my eleventh graders discussed the scene in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina when a stepfather rapes its twelve-year-old narrator, the mother arriving in time to witness the unthinkable abuse held secret for so long and raging at him before, shockingly, comforting him, choosing him, if only to stop the abject beating of his own bloody face. Student anger is always steepest for the mother, betraying her daughter in the hour of her greatest need in the very moment Anney can finally understand and see her daughter fully.

               How does Anney get so bent that she chooses that man over her daughter? Can daddy issues really account for Glen’s disturbed sexual anger? What will it take for Bone, our young narrator, to heal from the years of abuse and the secrecy that curdles them into self-loathing and shame and bitter wrath, and now, this crushing day of annihilation and abandonment?

              In discussing chapters preceding this one, I don’t foreshadow Anney’s devastating choice of husband over daughter. Instead, I highlight the ferocity of her protectiveness towards her children out in the world, and I also point to the tenderness towards what is so hurt and insecure in her husband. And today, when students express revulsion for Anney and also wonder if she will regret this moment, I return them to the many signals of deep regret even in the moment it’s happening; and, most provocatively, I take them back to one of the dedications of the book, For Mama, a dedication to a book written within two years of Dorothy Allison’s mother’s death. 

              Will Bone ever be able to love her mother after this? Is healing possible? 

              This book, though it ends soon after and Bone stays so hurt, broken, and sour, is its own answer. It is brave and raw and honest, and it finds its way to this moment. To tell so baldly of all the fierce mothering that comes to such betrayal may seem a way to justify a continued and hardened anger. But it may well be the way back to love. There is so much generosity in this book—for the rambunctious uncles, the hard and wise Boatwright aunts, even for Glen, who is made so small by his cruel family, for Anney in all her fighting spirit and confused tenderness, and most of all, for Bone, the narrator herself, the child and author’s child within, blistering in rage and shame, who wants to protect her mother and who leans in to her family’s defiant spirit but also her own creative searching and sporadically tended brokenness. One aunt teaches her witness and honesty. Another teaches her empathy and generosity of spirit. And her mother tries and tries and tries to be a good mother, this woman barely older than Bone when she’s conceived, tries, and in this chapter, deeply fails—but even then, trying, tragically and urgently. Bone will find a way to love her mother again and, above all, love herself, two things that I believe are knit together, and she will do so largely through the empathetic powers of writing, where she can understand, recognize, and see and find the dignity and devotion amid the horrors and betrayals. 

              Last week, a student finished the book early; and she is such a sensitive kid, I saw her open face, looking small. She said it was the hardest book she’s ever read, but she’s glad she read it. I told her, I’ve taught this book so many times and every time it shreds me: it takes so much emotional energy to be in that space with good young people day after day. Then why do you do it? she asked. 

              This book does something for a class that no other book I’ve taught has been able to do. The vulnerability it takes to be in conversation together, but also the generosity of spirit and minutely honest portrayal of pain, shame, and confusion, teach lessons in the power of speaking in healing, the power of witness in healing, the power of community in healing, lessons in our power of understanding that makes monsters into men and evil into humanity however broken; and that humanity in its pain and its expansive power is what allows hurt people to come again to love, and to forgive a self, and to welcome and be good to others. In reading this book together, the humanity possible and the humanity demanded is large. 

              When we read The Bastard Out of Carolina, those of us who see themselves in Bone have a sister and are not so alone, and can externalize the poisons. And when we read it, those who feel compassion for Bone learn how to understand her meanness and love her anyway. And when we read it together, as a group of people suddenly soul-to-soul with the sensitive and yearning hearts of others, exposed to each other because we know what they have just read, give grace to what they might be thinking about or feeling or remembering; and when I talk them through the many jagged ways we love and are loved and need to be seen and fight our way from darkness, we learn the importance of opening our hearts, of witnessing, of asking, of making space for pain—our own and our neighbors’—and of growing the welcome of love.