Hopkins Celebrates Heritage Day

The next piece of the program was a special video created by Avi Bhaya ’18 that captures members of the Hopkins community talking about their heritage. Students were asked: How do you define the word “heritage?” How would you would describe your heritage? What are you most proud of? What do you want people to know? How does your heritage impact your daily life? Please see the full video which is attached to this news story.

The next presentation was by Sasha Starovoitov ’18, who spoke about her Russian heritage, and read the poem “Broadway” by Mayakovsky in Russian. (Click here to read Sasha’s address.)

The final presentation of the morning was from Alexander Florian ’16 who spoke about his Iranian and Italian-American heritage, and influential Persian poets. He also read an excerpt from a poem by Saadi. (Click here to read Alex’s address below).

“Walk By” - Chrisshara Robinson

To the man who called me Mufasa,
Thank you.

Because now I know
you are
boldly boycotting progression
by making a teenage girl
the target of your aggression.
I was anxious on the walk-by
but took strides with my head high;
Though my heartbeat accelerated
I refused to aerate an already inflated
ego.

Thank you.
Because it never dawned on me
that my hair could be distracting
that a smaller sized curl
could be heavily detracting
from my civil credibility
disrupting the tranquility
of a respectable, reputable,
wholly indisputable
nation.

So to the man who called me Mufasa,
thank you.
I love being reduced to nothing
more than a fictional feline
in a children’s animation
who dies within the first ten minutes.

 

As many of you know from AC1, the Quakers originated in England in the 1600s. They believed that the light of God abides in everyone, that everyone can speak the word of God, and that no one is inherently better than anyone else--a belief that contributed to their pacifism. It also meant that Quakers welcomed the spoken contributions of men and women. In a place and time when gender and social position at birth determined much of a person’s life, the Quakers stood apart in treating everyone with relative and quite remarkable equality. In this country, Quakers lived and worked with the Indians as neighbors. They were also among the earliest abolitionists and social reformers, and, later, they risked their lives to open schools for freed slaves after the Civil War. For their radical behavior, many Quakers were imprisoned or killed or driven away.

It is this radical legacy that I want to talk about, particularly as it relates to my Quaker grandmother. My grandmother would not strike you as radical. As a child, I recognized that she dressed simply, as many modern Quakers do, with her beautiful, thick hair pulled back into a bun. She was gracious and gentle. She never raised her voice. She was also, like modern Quakers, a pacifist, though she supported the Second World War against Hitler while her brothers served actively in the Navy.

But my grandmother was neither timid nor naïve in her pacifism—something I came to see more clearly the older I got. Indeed, even while she worked to discern the light in everyone, she also looked squarely into the very real darkness of humankind. She did not shrink from troubles or from the injustice and evil she saw in the world. The Quakers have a phrase for this: they call it “bearing witness.” By bearing witness, they attempt to tell the truth about an experience or an issue by confronting it head-on.

As an adult, I began to consider this practice of bearing witness, and I came to see the fierceness in my grandmother that had not been apparent to me earlier. Partially as a result of her Quaker heritage, she never doubted that it was her place as a woman to have strong opinions, to speak publicly, to question authority. She read widely and spoke knowledgeably about the issues that were important to her. In the aftermath of World War II, she bore witness to the suffering of civilians on all fronts and participated in recovery efforts. During the civil rights movement, she developed a deep admiration for Martin Luther King, whose work to bring justice through passive resistance she supported by speaking publicly in her community where King was not always appreciated. Likewise, she admired and supported Ghandi and Nelson Mandela and Rachel Carson, among others, for their efforts to bring justice through protest and education and passive resistance. She wrote letters to the editor and letters to government leaders. And she marched on behalf of justice, protesting U.S. actions in Vietnam and organizing against the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the destruction of our environment. She was fierce in her pacifism.

It was partially a result of her example that in 1996, I had the chance to bear witness myself, though I did not think of it that way at the time. Under the aegis of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, I traveled to Bosnia shortly after the Bosnian war ended with a group that included many Quakers who had worked to help bring Muslim children to this country to escape the terrible wartime conditions in Bosnia. During my time in Bosnia, I saw the aftermath of ethnic cleansing: the physical and emotional devastation, the battle lines, the cemeteries, the real ghosts of those killed. I saw the work of evil for the first time in my life. I also witnessed the extraordinary resilience of humankind.

When I returned, my grandmother wanted to know what I had seen and heard and thought. I told her everything I could, but I also told her that I could never be a pacifist after experiencing Bosnia, that I fully supported the United States for the airstrikes that helped force a peace. She accepted my declaration in her quiet way, without contest, knowing, I think, that justice and pacifism are often impossibly hard to reconcile. But she encouraged me to keep talking and writing about what I experienced.

Two weeks before she died in late 2002, my grandmother’s final letter to the editor was printed in the Boston Globe decrying our government’s actions in Iraq. Right to the end, she was fierce in her protection of the light in each of us and fierce in her pursuit of justice. It is a legacy that I cherish.

Post-war America has not been kind to Russia and Russian culture. It is hard to be proud of a country which is strongly homophobic, corrupt, and poor-- especially when that is all the media portrays about it. Mayakovsky's "Broadway" is an example of the values which my education taught me were comical; socialism and Russia's failed attempts at creating a communist union were portrayed as desperate and feeble. However, the political differences between my two cultural backgrounds do not diminish the rich art and literature which came out of the Soviet Union. I accept that the views portrayed by this culture are not "correct", nor are they admirable or exemplary. My pride in my country does not mean I support the antiquated political and societal values of Russia. My pride is my way of acknowledging the struggles of these people, the beauty and the flaws in a system which my parents left behind, and my tribute to thousands of people before me who have created, discovered, and suffered for their beliefs.  

“Бродвей” (Mayakovsky, 1957)	“Broadway” (Mayakovsky, 1957)
Асфальт - стекло.                 Иду и звеню. Леса и травинки -                 сбриты. На север        с юга              идут авеню, на запад с востока -                    стриты. А между -         (куда их строитель завез!) - дома     невозможной длины. Одни дома         длиной до звезд, другие -        длиной до луны. Янки    подошвами шлепать                     ленив: простой       и курьерский лифт. В 7 часов         человечий прилив, В 17 часов          - отлив. Скрежещет механика,                   звон и гам, а люди замелдяют                жевать чуингам, чтоб бросить:             "Мек моней?" Мамаша      грудь           ребенку дала. Ребенок       с каплями из носу, сосет     как будто              не грудь, а доллар - занят     серьезным              бизнесом. Работа окончена.                Тело обвей в сплошной          электрический ветер. Хочешь под землю -                  бери собвей, на небо -         бери элевейтер. Вагоны      едут          и дымам под рост, и в пятках          домовьих                  трутся, и вынесут         хвост              на Бруклинский мост, и спрячут         в норы               под Гудзон. Тебя ослепило,              ты осовел. Но,   как барабанная дробь, из тьмы       по темени:                 "Кофе Максвел гуд   ту ди ласт дроп". А лампы       как станут                 ночь копать, ну, я доложу вам -                  пламечко! Налево посмотришь -                    мамочка мать! Направо -          мать моя мамочка! Есть что поглядеть московской братве. И за день                в конец не дойдут. Это Нью-Йорк.             Это Бродвей. Гау ду ю ду! Я в восторге            от Нью-Йорка города. Но  кепчонку          не сдерну с виска. У советски          собственная гордость: на буржуев          смотрим свысока.	Asphalt- glass I step and clink the forests and grass- shaved off To the north from the south go avenues to the west form the east- streets in between- (where the builder put them!) homes of impossible length some homes that reach the stars others- the moon Yankees slap the soles of their shoes; lazy: simple the courier's lift. At seven o'clock the people's arrival at five o'clock -the departure the metals clash in the hands of the mechanic the people slow to chew "chewing gum" to throw: "make money?" Mother feeds her children Child with snot in it's nose suckles, as if she is the dollar dealing with serious business. Work is over. Cloak your body in electrical wind. You want underground- take "subway" to the sky- take "elevator" Wagons go grow into smoke rubbing in the heels of homes, taking it's tail on the Brooklyn Bridge and hide in the holes in the Hudson. It blinds you, you're groggy. But, like a drummer's bullet from the fog to the evening: "Maxwell's Coffee: Good to the last drop" And the lamps stand to dig into the night, Well, I'll tell you- flames! look to the left- "My god!" look to the right- "God of mine!" There's something to look at, for the Moscow brotherhood. In a day, they won't reach the end. This is New York. This is Broadway. "How do you do?" I'm ecstatic from this city, New York. But my hat I wont take from my head. For the soviet self-confidence, on the bourgeouise, we look down from above.