Op-ed: Mama knows best

As I held my grandmother Ivy’s aging hands during my last visit home, her melodious Kriol voice filled her bedroom on the south side of Chicago with its characteristic Caribbean warmth. Speaking with her is always a pleasure that I thoroughly indulge in because she has always fed me with so much rich history about her home and my family in Belize that I have leftovers to carry with me to Medford. Like a good oxtail or stew chicken dinner, I long to eat up her every word, savoring its many flavors and the images of home it conjures up. Our family matriarch has seen a lot during her long life in the Americas, and since immigrating to the United States, her wise perspective has continued to shape my family’s dynamic and positive trajectory for generations. The former school teacher and nurse has made it a habit of encouraging all of my family members and me to pursue our dreams, however diverse they may be and because of her teachings, we can. I listen intently from the edge of her bed as our conversation begins to focus on my grandfather Calvin: the sailor, the handyman, the inventor and the businessman I didn’t get to meet past my infancy. She tells me, “Camie yuh haf fi be like yuh granddad. Be a jack of all trade.”

My grandfather had big hands, perhaps that’s why he was able to juggle as many things as he did during his lifetime. Sometimes I find myself staring at my own hands, tracing the maps my ancestors left on them while thinking about how much I’ve achieved with their strength and support in my 22 years of life. I am becoming “di jack of all trade” my grandmother tells me to be, working ceaselessly to do and learn as many things as possible during my time in and outside of school. When I got to Tufts in 2012, however, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what particular major or plan of study I wanted to pursue, but I could talk to you for hours about my love for the complexity of language and its power through art and music to create social change. I came in thinking I would do international relations and econ like most students, only to realize I was missing the socially conscious and critical outlook of fields like American studies, sociology and linguistics. I switched to these fields but got fed up at times with the lack of thoughtfulness on the particular issues faced by Black and African people in the system, as the news continued to publish more reports about black people being killed by the police (inter)nationally.

It was in these moments of frustration that I found myself thinking back to my family and the many lessons I learned from my multiethnic and multilinguistic Black household. As a child I was always fascinated by my father’s command and usage of Belizean Kriol, Black English and American English language. His polyglotism demonstrated the various nuances of his identity as an immigrant from Belize to Chicago and allowed him to successfully navigate many different cultural and linguistic spaces globally. Hearing my father codeswitch between these languages, I began to understand the deep connections between language, identity and culture as well as the politics of language, and I developed a working understanding of the diversity of identity within the African diaspora. It was because of the multicultural dimension added to my life by my father’s family that sparked my interest and love for Black language and culture that I sought to understand academically. My personal language acquisition and development paired with my academic coursework and interests in the fields of linguistics, sociology and Africana studies allowed me to better reconnect myself with the African diaspora. My personal life and history informed my interests at school and the academics I wanted to study were those that recognized, celebrated and deconstructed that fact. With this in my mind and the support of different faculty advisors, I was pushed to successfully create my own interdisciplinary major: Discourses of the Diaspora, Pan-African Sociolinguistics and Ethnomusicology Studies.

Contained in the major are so many of my various academic interests: discourse analysis, diaspora studies, Africana studies, linguistics, ethnomusicology, with elements of sociology, anthropology, psychology and philosophy. Needless to say, my major is a major of all trades allowing me to study all of my various interests as an aspiring rapper, social activist and entrepreneur. I’ve never been more satisfied with my academic direction, and I am so grateful for the opportunity the CIS Department has provided me to reclaim my education and radically transform my area of study to reflect my own dynamic interests and diverse upbringing. I am studying myself, my family, my community and my world from a perspective that is entirely my own, and created out of the connections I’ve made between many different disciplines. It’s an empowering feeling to control what you learn; I’d argue that it is of the utmost necessity that people of color around the world be able to study that world from their own perspectives. The process of creating a major has it’s own share of difficulties and costs, but to be di jack of all trade nah come easy. Though it does bring about a lot of pressure and stress to be completely in control of one’s academic and perhaps professional future, I know that through the academic support I’ve received thus far from my faculty advisors, Chip Gidney, H. Adlai Murdoch and Stephan Pennington, as well as from my family’s rich history and strong diasporic roots, “every little ting is going to be alright.” I just can’t wait for my next conversation with grandma after commencement in May when I can explain to her just how much I followed her advice; because it’s true what they say, Mama knows best.

Editor’s note: If you would like to send your response or make an Op-Ed contribution to the Opinion section, please email us at tuftsdailyoped@gmail.com. The Opinion section looks forward to hearing from you.