Commencement Address by Nuruddin Farah: "A Fork in the Fork of the Footpath"

Nuruddin Farah—among the foremost of contemporary African writers, author of numerous novels including the trilogies Variations on the Theme of An African Dictatorship and Blood in the Sun, and recipient of the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature—delivered this year's English Department commencement address at the Greek Theatre on May 16. You'll find the text below the fold.

A Fork in the Fork of the Footpath

I will approach the topic at hand from the perspective of a Somali, born in Somalia and into the oral tradition. To this end, I take the liberty to seek out the wisdom of a fabulist named Sheeko-Xaiir - in Somali, the teller of silken tales.

A Somali fable has it that while the wordsmith and magician is on a soul-searching journey, Sheeko-Xariir comes to a road with several trajectories. Uncertain as to which fork in the road to follow, he lights upon a most original idea after giving the matter serious thought: he rolls up the other forks of the road into a very giant one and wears it like a belt as an Indian conjurer might wear a snake around his neck. He ventures forth, spurred by the creative courage that is of a piece with his commitment to going beyond the world known to his peers. He is eager to meet the people residing in other lands that are foreign to him in his desire to explore the unexplored, get to know the unknowable - unafraid.

He walks and walks and walks, bent on getting to the end of the road stretching before him. Whenever he comes to the end of one of the forks of the road, he unfolds the next giant fork on which he walks on and on. Motivated, in part, by the huge need to come to terms with the many-sidedness of his ambition, he is surprised that he ends up on the very spot from where he set off: in the land of his creative imagination. He reasons that all journeys start before the traveller has become aware of it; they begin in the mind.

I find this fable fascinating in its potential, because I believe that young people are fabulists too. Like a golden silk spider boasting a larger than usual body length, they too produce an elegance of a universal-wearable similar to the spider’s, ceaselessly dreaming into the future. The young imagine what it feels like to travel the silk route linking the world of the Orient to the world of the Occident, the route on which goods and ideas were ferried back and forth between two great civilisations. That the young graduates have, in their journey, taken the right forks in the footpath is implicit in the fable. After all, you have made your choices, in each of which you could have pursued different trajectories or followed dissimilar routes, with every fork likely to lead them to a different destination.

You have done a lot to get to where you are today – as graduates. This is the first of many of your ports of call to make of your life what will, a life by which you’ve done well so far. Now you’ve come to another fork in the footpath, where, after all the celebrations, you will look at your future, stare into it eyeball to eyeball and interrogate it. Dare I ask what you wish to do with your life – from today on? Dare I inquire how you think you have fared so far in your life? In what direction will you move? Where do you wish your journey to take you? I doubt I need to tell you that anyone who journeys will maintain the bright ardour burning in the eyes pursuing a vision in conformity with one’s ideals.

A word of congratulation is in order, because you’ve earned it. Measure it how you will, but you have done a great deal to get where you are today. Yours has been a long tedious journey, starting with nursery, through a school system, which many of you may not have found it inspiring enough, then through university – and we know what it is like: assignments to be submitted on their due dates; a calendar of academic commitments to meet; exams to sit. You are here today to harvests what you’ve sown, reap the benefits of the hard work you’ve put in. Every step you’ve taken from as far back as the first day when your finger was in the secure clasp of an adult taking you to your playschool, have been as important as learning to walk. Because every activity in which the young participate has something or other to do with learning: learning about the environment in which one is brought up; learning about one’s own potential and honing it, now with the help of one’s parents, now with that of one’s teachers, now with that of one’s peers, neighbours, and the larger community. Life has been made easier for you by dint of someone else’s hard labour, someone who has made sure there are no comforts lacking so you may perfect your inborn talent, supplementing it with the acquired book-based knowledge, which in and of itself is insufficient until one throws in the experience, that is to say, the act, the processes, which lead one ultimately to one knowing oneself a little more after one has studied oneself - the study of the world is the study of the person living in it, with the life of the person taken as the perimeter of our achievements and our failures, young and adult.

You dwelled in an in-between time as you gained your education and worked your way through life’s experience until you became an adult in years and in ‘knowledge’ too. It was to this end that you apprenticed yourselves to those hired for the purpose of guiding you, your teachers, your tutors, your instructors, and your professors – many of whom have also admittedly learnt many things from you. The teachers helped you learn about the world in a more organized way, different to a large degree from the way you were taught things at home. In a manner of speaking, the purpose of learning is to master your way out of crises and into solutions – via texts, literary or linguistic appreciations, through the act of training your rhetorical powers, through writing, reading and researching.

As graduates, and because you’ve now attained your degrees, this is the first of many stations at which you will call, each visit bound to expose you to demands unlike the ones with which you have been familiar, each demand defining you and your place in society, on occasion assessing how well you’ve coped with the challenges you face each step of the way – from choosing your profession and succeeding in it, putting into a practice the things you’ve learnt at school and university to charting your own route to professional success - in short, meeting the new challenges that you will perforce face. There are a series of stations at which you will bivouac, even if briefly beginning with one in which you will play a subordinate roll to some someone who is possibly senior to you in age and rank, and therefore experience. How you deal with the status of being subordinate to someone not equal in terms of education; someone of a different colour, someone of a different gender, someone, whom you think, is less intelligent than yourself: these will act as markers of your character, and whether you can make claim of belonging to UC Berkeley, a noble institution, which prides itself in being the lighthouse meant to penetrate the impenetrable entanglements of every villainous act known to humankind. You will come to a series of forks in the footpath. In fact, it is from the vantage point of being at the first fork of a crossroad that will prove one of the great challenges of your life.

But wait a minute. I keep talking about your life, making assumptions and I asking you questions about your life, as though your life is yours to do with it what you please. In all seriousness, however, let me wonder aloud and put this question to you: how much of a young person’s life is his or hers - to do with it what they please and let the rest be damned? Has it ever occurred to you that your life is as much yours as the bank in which you deposit your pay checks, your savings and pension will have made that bank yours, just because you entrust your earnings and all your savings to its vaults? Have you ever considered that you are a mere custodian of your life and that it belongs to many other persons, in fact, it belongs, in part, to those who have invested in it: your parents, your guardians, your relations, your peers, those of whom you’re enamoured and to whom you’ve committed yourself; it belongs to anyone who has invested in your well-being from the instant you opened your lungs at the moment of birth, broke into the groans of a mother moaning out pain, to the moment when as a grownup, you are self-sufficient.

What of the matrix of our neuroses born out of our uncertainties, considering the labyrinths at hand, for the journey continues, and you continue walking until you reach another cul-de-sac, with no more road to negotiate. You may think wrongly that you’ve done everything required of you now that you’ve graduated. Happily but also sadly, you are nowhere near that status. All you have done is migrate between different stations of your life, with the reality of a classroom situation replaced by another life-station at which you either join the work force in some capacity or pursue a life-long ambition – to register for another course at this or another institution.

You are at crossroads, ready to brave the unpredictable nature of the unknown, the untried. There is no need for you to fear, however, no need to close one of your eyes to enjoy a depth perception. You know there is a wrong and a right way of looking into a binocular - in one, you hardly see what you want to see; in the other, which is the correct way, you view things in their proper perspective from the proper distance which you select. A correct binocular vision points one to a life in an imagined land, a land marked out with a continuous filament within the cocoon. The fabled silk route then beckons yet again and one journeys forth. There is something exciting about embarking, unafraid and unperturbed, on your new journey past many life’s crossroads, along an unexamined road leading to an unknown destination, with you not knowing what is in store for you or where you may end up or what you may find.

You are lucky to be where you are, young, with a degree, your life of possibilities ahead of you, and so many crossroads waiting for you.

In conclusion, I’ll quote a poem by the great Greek poet in full, because I feel as though Cavafy wrote it with journeyers like you in mind. Here it is:

As you set out for Ithaka
Hope your road is a long one,
Full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
Angry Poseidon – Do not be afraid of them:
You will never find things like that on your way
As long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
As long as a rare excitement
Stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
Wild Poseidon – you will not encounter them
Unless you bring them along inside your soul,
Unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when
With what pleasure, what joy.
You enter harbours you’re seeing for the first time

May you stop at Phoenician trading stations
To buy fine things
Mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony
Sensual perfume of every kind
As many sensual perfumes as you can
And may you visit many Egyptian cities
To learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind
Arriving there is what you’re destined for
But don’t hurry the journey at all
Better if it lasts for years
So you are old by the time you reach the island,
Wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way
Not expecting Ithaka to make you rich

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey
Without her you wouldn’t set out
She has nothing left to give you now.

If you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you have become, so full of experience,
You will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean. Read full post....

Literary Blogging

What does it mean to be a public intellectual in 21st century America? And to what extent does the often intensely private work of an academic speak to larger issues in today’s world?

Aaron Bady blogs at zunguzungu.wordpress.com.

Two fifth-year English PhD candidates, Aaron Bady and Paul Kerschen, think often about these questions. Both Aaron and Paul are active bloggers – though with somewhat divergent styles and objectives – and they see the forum of the blog as a way to redefine the border between the private work of the academic and the public role of the intellectual.

Aaron’s blogging practices seem to exhibit this redefinition of boundaries most explicitly. He is present online in three different venues: his personal blog, the history group blog Cliopatra and the literary studies group blog The Valve. He started his personal blog during an extended trip to Tanzania –the blog’s name “zunguzungu” is a combination of the Swahili word for white person and for “dizziness,” especially the disorientation of love. From the reportage of his African travels, Aaron developed an online voice blending personal reflections with the more academic concerns which have led him to participate in more explicitly academic blogs. He reports that the practice of presenting intellectual ideas to a wide audience of educated readers has made him consider the practical terms of academic communication; the difficulties of writing between multiple audiences has forced him to rethink the assumptions and information he takes for granted that might prevent his readers (wherever they might be) from following his writing. In this sense, Aaron sees his blogging practice as an exercise in a radical interdisciplinarity – not just between discourses of History and Literature, but between the academy and the world beyond. Indeed, Aaron is particularly successful at bridging these boundaries: we are delighted to announce that his personal blog recently received Cliopatra’s “Best Writer” award for history blogging. As a result of this award, Aaron decided to “come out” as the writer of his personal blog, which he had been previously been writing under a pseudonym.

Paul Kerschen’s involvement with blogs participates in another kind of interdisciplinarity. As an English major at Stanford in the late 90s with an interest in computers and web design, Paul took a summer internship with IBM in the summer of 1998.

Paul Kerschen blogs at www.metameat.net.

He reports that he helped to maintain a number of internal websites for the company, but that his skills in writing proved even more useful when the computer scientists needed to write a technical manual or press release. He also notes that, since summer internships like this often involve long stretches of idleness, he got the chance to read and puzzle over novels like James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (Since both Joyce and Faulkner figure prominently in Paul's dissertation project, one might say that IBM is responsible for his intellectual development in more ways than one.) Paul started blogging at http://www.metameat.net/ in 2000, when blogs were scarcer than today and often took more personal and idiosyncratic turns. He reports that his writing over the years has consistently taken advantage of the mediation provided by an online persona, which offers various sorts of protection or veiling, and therefore also a testing ground for his favorite modernists' theories of the relation between author and text. Paul's interest in veiling corresponds, in fact, to his role on this blog, since he is the technical wizard "behind the curtain" whose computer skills are responsible for the blog's elegant appearance and smooth operation.

Given the potential for new kinds of connections and sociability which blogs make possible, Paul and Aaron note the rise of the “institutionalized” blog – newspapers, university presses and magazines have all begun an online blog component – but observe that literary studies is trailing fields like history and anthropology in this respect. Yet the English Department at Berkeley, whose faculty and students often write or think about media theory as an extension of the study of literature, seems an ideal place to explore the medium of the blog more explicitly. Because the literature taught in the English department in many cases predates not only the electronic medium and blog form but also the printing press itself, the writers we teach often meditate on the changing technology and new media responsible for the dissemination of their words. (Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, wrote a poem to the scribe who copied The Canterbury Tales.) Our own blog is thus also an exercise in this kind of meditation. Aaron has agreed to join Paul on the department’s blogging team and will be posting a weekly collection of interesting and relevant literary links, so that the UC Berkeley English department’s foray into the online sphere will contribute to the fullest extent possible to the public mission of the nation’s premiere public university.

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The MLA Tourist, 2008

In what follows, fifth-year graduate student Matthew Sergi reflects on his experience “visiting” the Modern Language Association convention that recently took place in San Francisco. This is a somewhat condensed version of Matthew’s more colorful account which can be found on his own personal blog.

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MLA members are the custodians of language, and language is at the heart of virtually all disciplines (at least the humanistic ones).– Rosemary Feal, MLA Executive Director

The thirty thousand scholars of language and literature who form the Modern Language Association convene annually in late December. In a different city every year, we critique each other's research, compare notes on teaching and evaluate the current state of humanities education. We also hold preliminary interviews for the majority of academic jobs available in the humanities.

Graduate students' futures are set in motion at this conference. Which is why, well before entering the job market as interviewees, some Cal graduate students attended this year's San Francisco MLA as tourists: to adjust ahead of time to the gravitational pull of a conference so massive. To see and not be seen, and to learn tips and tricks about the profession.

As overwhelmed as I was by the sheer size of MLA, I found my way to some truly memorable panels, particularly on the second day of the conference. In "Public Shakespeares," after Bryn Mawr's Katherine A. Rowe deftly analyzed three virtual Globe theaters on Second Life (one with a paid "acting company"), Harvard's Marjorie Garber presented her talk on "Shakespeare's Brand." With clever insights on branding in Sonnet 111 and in twenty-first-century advertising, Garber argued that American education in Shakespeare, which had once been representative of broad literacy, now threatens to overshadow and replace broad literacy. The National Endowment for the Arts, according to Garber, supports Shakespeare programs to the exclusion of other literature; its new Shakespeare in American Communities initiative, whose logo features the Bard's bust before a rippling American flag, appeared immediately after the White House cut back much of its funding for contemporary American poets, many of whom were protesting war efforts.

"Liturgy, Literacy, and the Literary: Katherine Zieman's Singing the New Song" came next for me. Well-respected medievalists gathered at this session to present responses to Cal English alum Zieman's 2008 debut book. Andrew Galloway (another Cal English alum) discussed, via Zieman, the importance of "unanalyzable utterances" in understanding the words of the medieval liturgy, and cautioned literary scholars that too much attention to the meaning of words can eclipse the use of words. Then our own Steven Justice, shrugging off his narrower pre-planned topic, embarked on a relentless and at times unforgiving evaluation of Zieman's arguments, including examples of "unnecessary scaffolding" in her language which, when removed, would truly reveal the groundbreaking impact of the book. After the session, Zieman stood up, and was given only ten minutes (!) to respond to the respondents: extempore, Zieman summoned up a poised and very effective counter-counterpoint. Go Bears, indeed. The direct, aggressive (though never disrespectful) debate was representative of the kind of "big league" mentality that I loved about MLA.

At the conference, however, job anxiety weighed heavily on the sessions, the talkbacks, the informal conversations, straight through to Executive Director Rosemary Feal's convention blog: "Between the decline of available positions this year and the erosion of full-time tenure-track positions in the academic workforce overall, we are facing a situation that demands our advocacy and action." The California Report on NPR has even done a feature on the subject. When I ran into the fabulous Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe, though, she assured me that an English Ph.D. from Cal, even in this market, was a powerful thing. And this helped quell my anxiety a bit.

Leaving Professor O’Brien O’Keeffe, I shuffled into "Publish and Flourish: A Roundtable on Academic Publishing for Graduate Students," hosted by the MLA Graduate Student Caucus. The Caucus had invited six professors to advise nervous grads like myself on when and how to publish, and how it would affect our job searches. But (to the Caucus leader’s surprise, I think) the first speaker, Stanford English Professor Franco Moretti, vehemently discouraged graduate students from publishing at all. Publishing before the dissertation, he said, potentially allows “external signs” of professionalism to distract from the kind of "profoundly serious, deep, even religious commitment to a subject" that was characteristic of academics only decades ago. Moretti lamented that the profession itself has "lost its fire. It's boring. It's not about the ideas anymore.” Berkeley’s own Charles Altieri rejected the implicit premise of the session: that any scholar (grad or not) should approach academic discourse as a means of résumé-padding. He pointed out that sessions which offer standardized rules for a profession that should focus on the insight of individuals only “tend to create, rather than allay, anxiety.” His advice, instead: “You submit [your article] when you have something to say. That’s the time when you should try to publish something… once you believe in it.”

The MLA lesson seemed to be the following: the professorial career is not built on anxious, generalized rules, or on ways to game the job market, but only on a solid corpus of solid work. Seeing my friends nervously prepare for their job interviews reminded me that, in order to study the humanities, you have to be human: not just a functional conglomeration of "external" signs of professionalism. Only humans, with room for failure and not paralyzed by fear, can maintain the kind of productive, active debate like the professors of the Zieman session did. I do not wish to belittle job panic, only to draw attention to the negative effects that it can have on the work we do, by skewing our attitudes about our work. We cannot address the situation with CV-padding and small fixes, but only by, as Feal put it, direct "advocacy and action" (if you're looking for a place to start, click here). But in the meantime, for me, the time for tips and tricks and tourism is over: it is time to get to work, and if I get my dream job in the process, all the better.

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Passed from one mouth to another

PASSED FROM ONE MOUTH TO ANOTHER.*

(a poetry event featuring UCB grad students)

Cecil Giscombe’s English 243 class presents an evening of poetry and song along with food prepared by the poets.

Graduate students Anthony Bello, Rachel Carden, Rebecca Gaydos, Nikhil Govind, Mariah Hamilton, Charity Ketz, Gillian Osborne, Samia Rahimtoola, Robert Reyes, and Rachel Wamsley will read, sing, and recite.

Monday, 8 December • 7 pm • English Department Lounge (Wheeler 330)

(*from “Anthem” by Samia Rahimtoola) Read full post....

Distinguished Alumni Series Kicks Off: Peter Chernin

Peter Chernin (BA, English, 1974) serves as President and Chief Operating Officer of News Corporation, and Chairman and CEO of the Fox Group. He has overseen Fox’s tremendous growth in sports, cable, and entertainment programming, and gained a reputation as an executive with a unique mastery of the creative side of the business. Mr. Chernin is also Chairman of Malaria No More, a non-profit dedicated to ending deaths due to malaria. Please come to hear him in conversation with incoming Chair Sam Otter and Professor Bob Hass this coming Monday!

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Welcome to the English Department Online!

In an article in the September 7 issue of The New York Times Magazine, entitled “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” Clive Thompson discusses the way that a rise in social networking applications is (unsurprisingly) changing the kinds of relationships we are having. He points out that web applications like Facebook and Twitter explodes the number of “weak ties” – the term sociologists use for loose acquaintances with whom one is more or less friendly – a person is able to cultivate and maintain. Any member of a networking site like Facebook has had the experience of reading all about someone with whom they haven’t spoken in years. It’s both exhilarating and disorienting, but whatever it is, it is redefining what it means to be part of a “community.”

It is our hope, here at the Berkeley English Department, that this blog will help to increase and strengthen the “weak ties” that the alumni and friends maintain with us. For those of you who aren’t local, we hope this blog will be a way for you to keep in better touch about a place where you once spent some formative time. For those of you who are local, we hope it will reveal a different side of the Department, one that is impossible to show in formal events which the Department sponsors. Indeed, a blog seems like a great way to foster a sense of academic community for those off and even on campus, since the nature of intellectual pursuits sometimes inhibits close personal interactions. (It is never harder to make friends than when one has one's nose stuck in a book.)

So, check back to this site for announcements of on-campus happenings like lectures, events and readings, for everyday mundane anecdotes of goings-on in Wheeler Hall, for reports of the amazing achievements of our students and faculty, for updates on our continuing fundraising process. We hope that it eases the difficulty of staying in touch and makes you feel a part (however technologically mediated) of our community.

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