These days at Harvard, storytelling has stepped out of the printed pages and become a live art
Going up to the ticket window at Harvard Square, I ask for reservations for a day trip to Newport in Rhode Island. Robert, the clerk asks for my photo ID and I give him my driver’s license. He looks at it and then looks at my face. “Harvard this summer aged me,” I tell him voluntarily in case he thinks I am an impersonator. He takes some more time alternating between studying me and the face on the license. He looks serious. I look serious too: does he take me for a terrorist or what? These days you never know the reaction your colour of skin, a foreign sounding name, even your non-American accent may draw. After the London bombings last month, Americans around Harvard University cast a suspicious look at Pakistanis. He gently breaks into a smile. “Cool it, I was just kidding,” he says. And I relax.
“It’s a pleasure to talk to someone like you who has a sense of humour,” I finally pipe in, “people one deals with here are expressionless and unfriendly.” Robert wants to tell me something, and since I have an hour to catch my bus, I put my bags down, make myself comfortable, and press my ear closer to the glass window that separates us. “Because Americans lack spirituality,” he tells me, “we are so wrought up with materialism ... we are only pleasant when it is in our interest, otherwise we don’t believe in wasting our time.”
America is a nation that has everything and yet most look unhappy, he continues. It does not treat people of colour well: “And this will be its downfall ... my grandmother used to say, ‘those who are first will be last, and those who are last, will be first on Earth.’”
Robert is black. “Oh, I have so many stories inside me that I can write a book.” He says he’s been stereotyped and boxed in: prevented from promotions and career progression because his bosses have a bias against African-Americans. “I concentrate on my spirit. In the end that’s what will go to the next level, everything else will remain behind, get destroyed. These people who run after wealth and success don’t realize that one day they will have to leave all of it back. America doesn’t realize it either, this will be its downfall.”
When will the downfall begin? I ask Robert, waiting for him to predict a timeframe. “Soon enough ... remember my words.”
As a Harvard employee, he’s angry how the university treats African-Americans who refuse to toe the Caucasian line — the rules laid down by the whites. Harvard Corporation is the most influential seven-member body that runs the affairs of this university with $23 billion at its disposal. These “Boston Brahmins” tolerate one black on their board and no woman. And now that black has resigned too. Angered by University President Lawrence Summers’ negative comments on women and minorities, Conrad Harper, resigned recently after a dispute over Summers’ salary which had been raised to over half-a-million annually.
“In my judgment, your 2004-05 conduct, implicating, as it does, profound issues of temperament and judgment, merits no increase whatsoever,” Harper wrote to Summers. The prominent black attorney said he “saw a pattern” in Summers’ public remarks on women and minorities, citing his 2002 feud with former black Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West and his now infamous remarks on women in science at the MIT in January 2005.
“Your statements demeaned those who are under-represented at the top levels of major research universities,” Harper wrote in his resignation letter.
Robert may just be a clerk sitting all day behind a glass window, but he is alert to the campus politics and has an informed view on issues ranging from race to global supremacy. “We have Pakistanis here at Harvard who are brilliant, as are the Indians and the Chinese. The day is not far when the whites at Harvard will be in minority; they will be the last in the finish line, the Asians will beat them at their own game.” I wish Robert well, saying he has told me more truth than my professors this summer.
What he has also told me about his country is how it has “let down” Pakistan by making a deal with India that opens the door to the nuclear club without the Indians having to sign the NPT. “I know that Pakistan made big sacrifices to side with us in the war against terror and now I sympathize with you for being stabbed in the back by America.”
My God. This man should be the secretary of state instead of that Rice woman, I say to myself. She may be black as is Robert, but the clerk has more sense than her.
Heading towards Adams House, my abode for the semester, I see five police cars parked on my street, where my room is. With windows open (we don’t have air-conditioning), I hear everything going on. Last night was particularly rough. A shouting spat between two women and a man was underway. Shouts and abuses ratcheted across. “You two-timing rat,” said one voice. “I am going to beat the sh** out of you,” said another. Suddenly every thing went dead and we went back to our nocturnal dreams.
As I am about to enter my door, I see Ben, 50, my buddy from Alabama sitting on the doorsteps watching the drama being enacted from across the street. He resolves the last night’s brouhaha by giving me a firsthand account of what happened. David meanwhile has his back to the wall as he’s being grilled by police sergeants wearing long leather boots.
David was dating a girl from Alabama and a girl from Texas at the same time. With the help of his cell phone, he was able to schedule a sex session with both, without each knowing what he was up to. “He was washing his bed linen every day, to make sure that he didn’t get caught out,” Ben tells me.
It is only when David tried picking up a third girl and confided to Ben about his plans, that he was exposed. Ben told the girls. “I just couldn’t help it. I’m friendly with both and they would come tell me what a great guy David was,” Ben says in his defence for snitching. He didn’t want the girls “getting into trouble ... they are so intelligent and have great plans once they graduate from here.” David was having “unprotected sex with both and I didn’t want him to infect them if he had sex with yet one more woman,” says Ben. The girls turned up in his room and confronted him.
David is a marine who served overseas. He wants to be the president of the United States one day. So impressed was Harvard’s admissions office with his essay describing his presidential trajectory to the Oval Office at the White House, that David was invited to become a student. He arrived. His progression was already in place: after he graduates, he moves to JFK School of Government and then on to his dreams ... except now there’s this slight problem of getting the police involved.
Lisa, the girl from Texas, beat up David early this morning. The marine called the police to save him. David for days hid behind his baseball cap and dark glasses. He was screening his bruises, chain-smoking and reading while even walking to the dining hall for his meals. Once I saw him read a book about the FBI. With his presidential ambitions intact; his face battered; his ego is now repaired and he’s dating a girl from New Hampshire and another from New Jersey, hoping he has better luck this time. But his friends at Adams House have plenty of stories to spread around, including him having STD (sexually transmitted disease).
Everybody loves a good story and while studies here are gruelling, the gossip around the campus is brewing tales each day to be told and retold. What once was the domain of the written word gilded in fiction and non-fiction genres, storytelling today has stepped out of the printed pages and become a live art, loved and lived at Harvard, from professors to bus drivers; from students to store owners; from proctors to toilet cleaners ... all have a story within them, provided you have the ears to listen.
Going up to the ticket window at Harvard Square, I ask for reservations for a day trip to Newport in Rhode Island. Robert, the clerk asks for my photo ID and I give him my driver’s license. He looks at it and then looks at my face. “Harvard this summer aged me,” I tell him voluntarily in case he thinks I am an impersonator. He takes some more time alternating between studying me and the face on the license. He looks serious. I look serious too: does he take me for a terrorist or what? These days you never know the reaction your colour of skin, a foreign sounding name, even your non-American accent may draw. After the London bombings last month, Americans around Harvard University cast a suspicious look at Pakistanis. He gently breaks into a smile. “Cool it, I was just kidding,” he says. And I relax.
“It’s a pleasure to talk to someone like you who has a sense of humour,” I finally pipe in, “people one deals with here are expressionless and unfriendly.” Robert wants to tell me something, and since I have an hour to catch my bus, I put my bags down, make myself comfortable, and press my ear closer to the glass window that separates us. “Because Americans lack spirituality,” he tells me, “we are so wrought up with materialism ... we are only pleasant when it is in our interest, otherwise we don’t believe in wasting our time.”
Robert is black. “Oh, I have so many stories inside me that I can write a book.” He says he’s been stereotyped and boxed in: prevented from promotions and career progression because his bosses have a bias against African-Americans. “I concentrate on my spirit. In the end that’s what will go to the next level, everything else will remain behind, get destroyed. These people who run after wealth and success don’t realize that one day they will have to leave all of it back. America doesn’t realize it either, this will be its downfall.”
“Your statements demeaned those who are under-represented at the top levels of major research universities,” Harper wrote in his resignation letter.
As I am about to enter my door, I see Ben, 50, my buddy from Alabama sitting on the doorsteps watching the drama being enacted from across the street. He resolves the last night’s brouhaha by giving me a firsthand account of what happened. David meanwhile has his back to the wall as he’s being grilled by police sergeants wearing long leather boots.
