Graduating: Day 1: Children of the Days

by Lucy S.

I’ve been trying to write some thoughts about what it means to me to graduate with a Master’s of Arts in English Literature, and the task of expressing it feels so monumental that I can’t figure out how to wrap my words around it. Inspired as I am by a gift my advisor gave me, I will try to instead begin to take textual steps into this effort.

My advisor gave me Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, the newest book by Eduardo Galeano, one of my favorite writers. Galeano spoke about it on Democracy Now (the first time I’d ever heard him in an interview.) http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/8/eduardo_galeano_chronicler_of_latin_americas  Galeano, from Uruguay, is an extremely renowned writer. I have several of his books. Now I am reading this one each day. It is arranged with a reading for each date. I began May 22, the day my advisor gave it to me at the gathering for our MA essay presentations.

On that day, I and nine others graduating each got up to talk at the podium about our projects. I spoke for about eight minutes. I began by saying that I could get up there and say that as a nontraditional, working-class student who went back to school to finish my BA in 2009 at the local public university and then was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to continue my education at the master’s level at this smaller university, that if you just believe and you try hard enough, that you can overcome all the obstacles and make your dreams come true!  But, I said, I have just finished a master’s essay that critiques those claims. I said that stories which depend on the idea of beating the odds always reveal that there are odds to beat. They always show deep inequalities in our society. I talked about how capitalism depends on the pyramid shape, with a majority of laborers or potential laborers (the unemployed) at its broad base, a much smaller group of professionals and managers in its narrowing middle region, and an elite at the top. I read an excerpt from my essay which talked about how the logic of capitalism affects care-labor. Because the Jimenez family was paid so poorly, so that their employer could maximize profits to then send products into a marketplace demanding the most for the cheapest price, they had to rely on Francisco, who was not even in elementary school yet, to care for his baby brother in their old car all day while they and his older brother (about nine or ten at the time) worked in the fields picking cotton. The structure and logic of capitalism always pushes this way.

Others spoke about their own excellent projects that night. In particular, I was moved by one about Hmong-American women and the tensions amongst which they navigate as they sometimes challenge traditional roles and rules for women, such as the requirement that women eat the remains after men have first eaten at the table. I had read my fellow grad student’s essay earlier in the week (she did a magnificent job), so hearing her talk about it and read an excerpt meant even more to me. The poem and her essay remind us that we cannot rigidify ourselves into one way of doing things that came into being because of a particular set of conditions and beliefs at a particular time – conditions which no longer exist – and at the same time, that it is we who are living those particularities who most have the right and capacity to determine what must change and how.

Here are some of my thoughts, as a first-generation, working-class, nontraditional graduate and unpaid care-laborer (mother). Most of us are excluded from education in so many ways. Early on, in K-12, the sorting mechanisms begin, deciding who is ‘college material’ and who is not. That sorting is always bound to class. Even the exceptions prove the rule. Later, we work in our lousy, low-wage jobs, or even jobs that pay better, but we nonetheless work at the ‘base’ of our society’s pyramid structure, and our work often leaves us little time for education. Moreover, we may have already accepted an idea of ourselves by then as ‘not smart enough’ or ‘not the intellectual type.’  And we may have caregiver responsibilities – difficulties finding childcare. Furthermore, college is becoming prohibitively expensive. When classes cost hundreds or thousands of dollars each, we begin to feel that we must justify the expense as a means to a job.

But education is not a thing you can get hold of. It moves and flows; it is a relationship. The most meaningful aspects of my education have been my relationships with professors, students, and others as well as my relationships with stories and other readings and my relationships with my own words on the page or those of others whose work I read. These cannot be made to justify themselves by means of profit logic without being altered and horribly diminished in the process. Can you imagine if we had to pay a state or private entity thousands of dollars per year to carry on our own relationships with one another?  These too would then have to somehow justify themselves by means of profit logic.  Friendships would cease to be friendships as we know them.  This is why we must fight hard to let education be what it must be: relationships with one another, our own selves, knowledge, and skills.

I couldn’t continue my education for years because I was raising kids and because of a multitude of material and other educational realities bound to that work. But no – it wasn’t because I was raising kids. It was because our society creates college classes that have to function like business boardrooms. Or they are an extension of the K-12 model, where students, of course, would not have kids. (Thus, those who do have kids while in their teens must be segregated to learn elsewhere; schools are not willing to let them learn amongst the ‘regular’ students, let alone allow their babies to be present.) We have normalized the idea that children can almost never be present when adults come together to learn. And that means their caregivers can’t be present. This comes from certain traditions. One is that college education used to be only for men, and that men, particularly men from the classes who would receive a college education, would certainly not have childcare responsibilities. Another is that education occurs in a certain order, and that people would complete college before having kids – again, especially those people of the classes who would be college-educated.

Why do we continue to ‘eat the remains’ – to draw on the poem and essay about the Hmong-American women – of the generations who came before us and who excluded so many from education? And why do we continue to see education as an object to ‘get’ rather than the lifelong process that it can and should be if we are to move beyond exploiting and excluding so many of us?

***

In the interview between Amy Goodman and Eduardo Galeano, she asks him about the title of his book. He says that “in a Mayan community, somebody said, ‘We are children of the days. We are sons and daughters of time.’ … Each day has a story that deserves to be told, because we are made of stories.”

Rather than sorting stories into categorizations of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ – ‘uplifting’ or ‘depressing’ – I believe it is important to learn what our stories have to tell us.

I did go to my presentation, though I was nervous, and it was a wonderful experience. I’m so glad I went. I did not go to my actual graduation, though I’d planned to, because I somehow did not realize that I needed to pick up the cap and gown during the week at the bookstore. For some reason, I imagined them giving these out before the ceremony began. I have no idea how I came up with that or why I didn’t check ahead of time to be sure. I am usually a person who double-checks so many things. But when I found out, it was Friday evening; the bookstore was closed, and would not be open the next day (yesterday – day of the graduation ceremony). I emailed the head of our program in embarrassment, and she said there might be extras, so I decided I would go. But I realized that the clothes I’d planned to wear were also wrong, after I read the website, and I let my insecurities and memories of certain bad experiences overwhelm me until I couldn’t think about any of it rationally. I became more and more afraid of feeling ashamed and embarrassed to go rushing in there without the gown and wearing the wrong colors. I felt so upset. And I felt sick. I was already in pain from some work and picketing the day before (the pain coming from me having been too sedentary in recent months). Finally, I didn’t go to the ceremony.

I don’t want to try to frame that any particular way right now. I could say that the main thing is to be glad that I have completed a master’s degree and participated in the wonderful presentations. Or I could talk about how hard it is to shake all the traces of particular shame and hurt that we carry, traces that can erupt from dormant to active when certain circumstances stir them into flaming up. But I am still trying to understand how I let that any of that happen.

That was yesterday. Today, I meet a friend who is moving from here to somewhere more than 1,000 miles away.

Galeano begins his book with this passage:

And the days began to walk.

And they, the days, made us.

And thus we were born,

the children of the days,

the discoverers,

life’s searchers.

– Genesis, according to the Mayas.