Dear Blue,
Some of you take The Bible or The Quran as your sacred text. Hamlet is mine.
Even if that does not offend you, you have reason to be suspicious of Shakespeare in general. I don’t know, for example, if King Leopold of Belgium cared about Shakespeare or not, but Shakespeare was preformed in Belgium while he was alive, and Shakespeare helped produce the culture that produced Africa’s colonizers.
Of course, it is not my intention to offend you on any subject or with any expression. But where words and ideas cause umbrage is tough to gauge, especially if the people exchanging them are from different parts of the world, different generations and so forth. And no matter where we are from, we all have thoughts or feelings we want to guard, as well as thoughts and feelings we guard too closely. (In one sense, you might say, education and life are about figuring out what part of yourself you no longer need to protect and what part you must always protect. Many people believe they should always protect their faith and not become someone who has no relationship to god. Yet we all know we cannot always act as we did whe we were, say, five years old. As cute and adorbale as we were back then, if we never permitted new ideas about how we poop or cry or talk into the part of ourselves we guard, we would never become the person we want to be.
Between who we were, are, must always be, and might become is territory we can look at via Hamlet. It is ground we all walk, wherever we end up on this side or that side of a particular boundary or border. Since, to some degree, it is the nature of that territory and the substance of those boundaries Hamlet helps us navigate, discussing them will no doubt lead me to transgress your border somewhere or another, as I likely have already.
Still, as I sometimes said in class, we must be able to disagree, even disagree vehemently, and then eat lunch together. History and today’s news demonstrate that not everyone believes this, but I do, and Hamlet helps underpin my belief. Thus, to put it another way, if I am not trying to offend you, neither am I trying to protect you from what I think and why I think the play useful in a fashion you could almost call “sacred.”
Besides, if you expect my stuff about Hamlet to be blasphemy, don’t worry, you are far more likely to get bored by anything that follows than to have your fear confirmed.
This is to say it takes a long time to get to where I am going with these posts. Even though I “only” write about the first seven lines of the play (though, mostly the first five), these posts go on and on both because they act as meditations for me and, because the argument is hard to make.
And what is the argument? It is that Hamlet transforms us—-you, the African student, and me, the American teacher, as well as anyone from anywhere too—-into the black at the back of the glass. In the reflection that results, we can see what the play tells us: God is the metaphor that won’t die.
If we can see Hamlet this way then we can use it as a map back from tragedy, including the tragedies located in race and gender, Africa vs. not Africa, your faith vs. someone else’s and so on.
All that said, I hope you will not mind that I have written these meditations thinking of you as the audience. That helped me get more out of the meditations and shape what I wrote. Thank you for this.
You should also know that I have used some of your names as a rhetorical device, and trust that you will find that fun, rather than alarming.
Thank you for what you taught me and hilarity you showed me. And, well, sorry for being such an iffy teacher. You were more deserving.
With love,
–Mr. Ted
P.S.
Let us say that what follows is for Khesa.