Dear Blue,
Dear, Marubini, Sefa, Kamel, Nduta, Jimcale, Keabetswe, Ladouce, Fred, Fadekemi, Ayomide, Samkelo, Umar, Numay, Zeinab, Ashna, Temi, Amina, Sean, Melanie, Michelle, Sizo, Tomisin , Eniola, Jonathan and Lucas:
Did any of our class include Hamlet? Did I smuggle in a half an hour about the play’s first line? If so, how would anyone distinguish it from the rest of the ridiculousness I heaped on you?
“Mr. Ted is very, very . . . I don’t know.”
Those few of you who remember me will know the accuracy of this, my favorite teacher review ever.
Not as far as I recall. As this is but one reason writing to you here must seem odd, I should say why I am doing that in these “meditations–if that is what they are–on the first few lines of the play.
To begin with it helps any writer to have an audience in mind as they write and while at first it was just fun to think of writing to you, it quickly had a determining impact on what I wanted to say.
Indeed, almost as soon as I thought, “Hmm it would be fun to write to Blue about this” my arguments shifted. I started to wonder how Hamlet could be read as a map back from tragedy, including the tragedies located in race and gender, Africa vs. not Africa, one’s own faith vs. someone else’ faith, the history any of us inherits and the history.
No doubt my looking into this will expose how an old, white, American guy like me cannot speak to young Africans without demonstrating ignorance and, inevitably, saying offensive things.
If you worry about that, though, you should know that as I started to write something happened which, I believe, has nothing to do with you as my audience and would have happened no matter who I had thought of in the first row.
What happened was that I kept putting ideas into the middle.
(For readers who are wondering, at African Leadership Academy, the class schedule is arranged by color–Orange, Yellow, Red, etc. Among others, I taught the “Blue,” class of senior writers.)
Also, so that you have all the facts, I taught three Blue classes and other color classes too. So while, yes, the first Blue class has the advantage of primacy, l I hope my ALA students will believe I am writing to them too.
Come to think of it, I hope all my students will think of my writing to them. Admittedly, I don’t expect most, if any of those, African or not. A as a less than useful teacher, I’d like to think I’ve been equally useless regardless of which continent I was teaching.
Another tragedy to find our way back from, Blue, one obviously less important than the ones I mentioned before, is how a piece of writing that was meant to be an attempt became writing that needed to convince a reader of something, to be, in its way, certain.
What I mean is that all this got longer and longer without ever going anywhere. I had a first page and a thought about that map back from tragedy as a theme or conlusion set for page seven or eight or so and then found myself adding, as it were to pages two and three and four. Now the argument I wanted to make kept getting pushed off. This, in part, is why i think of these writings as meditations. Avoiding so rigorously any thesis means this is no essay, except in the way Montaigne, who invented the form, used the French word “Essai” as a title to his book of short pieces of writing. “These,” he was saying” are attempts.”
(Rescuing the essay was impossible even when we just lived in the age of Google and hyper competitive college admission. Now, with AI upon us, I do not know what value any writing has let alone writing meant to keep us out of a post-truth world. But, as I have suggested, this writing is not much of an argument anyway.)
In any case, while it is anything but my intent to transgress decency, as I suggested I might just because I am who I am writing to you and you are who you are, I am also not trying to protect you from why I see Hamlet as “sacred” in something like the fashion some of you may see The Bible or The Quran. And while a few of my other ideas (that words are arrows, that we live always in what I call a “drama of recognition”) are just locations on the map I want to chart, they not likely to upset anyone’s belief (even if they never excite you), I also want to say God is the metaphor that own’t die. Like everything else here, this is hardly my own idea, but faith is always a tricky subject. In the world, as it was in class, God and religion are and can be unsurprisingly divisive. Chances are, then, that what I say, as well as how long it takes me to say it, will push us away from each other even as I am trying to find a way to do the opposite.
(As a side-note, it was not until I was teaching my last time at ALA [not a Blue class] in which it felt important to say that we must be able to disagree, even disagree vehemently, and then eat lunch together. [That class was more divided than most by issues of gender and politics.] I said that, but this is a “democratic ideal” which, while I think Shakespear helps us with, is hardly one everyone agrees with and everyone gets tested on at one time or another.
Oh yes, there is another key idea I want to get to which is that we are all the black at the back of the glass. Black here has nothing to do with skin color nor whether we sit in the first row or the last. But yes, words are arrows and this means, in part, that they do not always hit their mark and even the would be innocent use of a word can expose the shooters carelessness or inflame a wound of the target.
But more on that as we go along.
If I was the teacher who was “very “I don’t know,’ I wish I could say my obliquness can in the service of mysterious wisdom but “I don’t know” is also how I would answer any question about what I ever tried to do in the classroom.
The same is true here, a truth I can express by saying that while you are who I am writing too, I am also in the audience. I don;t mean that I am watching what I am writing hoping it won’t be too embarasing, I am also writing for myself. That make it all the more shameful, but working on it has made me happy, and in so far as I am nowhere near done, it still does.
The last thing to say, perhaps more for anyone else whose wandered in here than for you is that if any of these meditations offend you for reasons of what they say about God, don’t worry, anyone who knows Shakespeare well will find what I have to say scandalous in terms of scholarship. Sure, I’ve read the play a few times, seen it a few too, but I know almost nothing about it beyond that. For those who do, shouting from the audience “what are you talking about?” will be an act of restraint. But I am anything but a scholar.
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.
Finally, let us say this is for Khesa.
With love,
—Mr. Ted
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