Geoffrey Philp

May 12, 2011

Guyana Folk Festival 2011 Symposium: Aal bady, waan bady

Aal bady, waan bady

Guyana Folk Festival 2011 Symposium

“Arrivals, Encounters, and Exchanges”

Saturday, September 3, 2011

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

On the 10^th anniversary of GCA and the Guyana Folk Festival, the annual symposium will focus and the on-going process of (aal bady) becoming (waan bady)—Guyanese.

MISSION

There is a tendency among the dominant discourses on Guyanese life and society to emphasize differences among Guyanese root heritages. This nurtures mistrust and diverts attention from the cultural similarities, common experiences and traditions of solidarity and friendship that are evident in contemporary Guyanese culture.

The organizers of the 2011 symposium believe that the appreciation and the celebration of cultural similarities and common experiences among Guyana’s ethnic communities—at home and in the diaspora—are necessities in contemporary Guyanese life and society.

To this end, the symposium’s goal is to explore contemporary ideas about the state of Guyanese culture. To encourage this, the symposium has the following objectives:

· To share and encourage new knowledge related to the people of Guyana—Arrivals;

· To share and encourage new knowledge related to the conditions and contexts of the encounters and contacts in the peopling of Guyana [and its diaspora]—Encounters;

· To share and encourage new knowledge about the resulting cultural exchanges that emerged from the arrivals and encounters of our ancestors in Guyana and the current roles and future viability of those cultural developments—Exchanges.

Arrivals

To share new knowledge related to the peopling of Guyana.

Archeological and other scientific evidence indicate the populating of this region of the Americas can be traced back to between 9,000 and 12.000 years. The first peoples of this era were parts of a wider civilization that had developed hybrids such as corn (maize) and potato—two globally important foods. Dr. Denis Williams’ Prehistoric Guyana and Dr. George Mentore’s Of Passionate Curves and Desirable Cadences: Themes on Waiwai Social Being and Dr. Desrey Caesar-Fox’s dissertation Variants of Akawaio Spoken at Waramadong have been valuable contributions to the understanding of our Amerindian ancestors’ engagement with life in Amazonia.

Through expanding access to international archives, new databases, and the application of more robust research designs interdisciplinary researchers, including Guyanese historiographers, are now offering sharper descriptions of the other people who have populated Guyana since Columbus’s encounter with the Americas in 1492. These new works are beginning to humanize our ancestors who came from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East by giving them voice and context.

Publications such as Alvin Thompson’s Unprofitable Servants: Crown Slaves in Berbice, Guyana 1803 - 1831; McGowan, Rose and Grainer’s Themes in African Guyanese History; Maureen Walker-Lewis’s Central Africa in the Caribbean; Clem Seecharran’s Sweetening Bitter Sugar; Trevor Sue-A-Quan’s Cane Reapers and Cane Ripples; and Sister Mary Noel’s The Portuguese of Guyana: A Study in Culture and Conflict, among others are valuable sources of evidence about the arrivals of our ancestors.

To share and encourage new knowledge related to the conditions and contexts of the encounters and contacts in the peopling of Guyana [and its diaspora]—

Encounters

Recent scholarship by Guyanese academics has been providing increasing specificity and texture about the sites of and the nature of the encounters associated with the peopling of Guyana. Dr. Brenda Josiah has been doing pioneering work on the post-emancipation African Village movement and the pork-knocking heritage. Dr. Juanita DeBarros’ Order and Place in a Colonial City: Patterns of Struggle and Resistance on Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889 - 1924 is a ground-breaking exploration of the intersection of public health, and the exercise of colonial power in Georgetown.

The encounters of our ancestors have continued to inform the Guyanese literary imagination. These encounters are explored in multiple genres—including autobiography, biography, poetry, song, and science fiction. Contemporary exemplars of this tradition include Grace Agard’s I’se a Long Memoried Woman; Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton Spice; Dr. Brenda Do Harris’s Calabash Parkway; Marina Budhos’s Ask Me No Questions; and Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber.

Exchanges

To share and encourage new knowledge about the resulting cultural exchanges that emerged from the arrivals and encounters of our ancestors in Guyana and the current roles and future viability of those cultural developments.

Interest in Guyanese heritage accelerated in the post-independence years. Out of the research on this aspect of Guyanese life piloted by John Rickford, Walter Edwards, Peter Kempadoo, Marc Mathews, Diazal Samad, Sister Rose Magdalene, Lakshmi Kalicharran, Kean Gibson, Desrey Fox, Brian Moore, Roy Brummel, Alan Fenty, and others, it is now possible to identity and celebrate several areas of cultural similarity—in language, cuisine, fashion, music, dance, spirituality, and aspirations, to name a few.

The Objectives

The objectives of the 2011 Symposium are to:

·        Provide a platform for sharing recent academic knowledge on Guyanese life and society
·        Offer an opportunity to explore the nature of the arrivals, encounters, and exchanges associated with the making of the modern Guyanese nation;
·         Explore the expressive culture that have emerged as a result of the exchanges associated with the making of the modern Guyanese nation;
·         Contribute to the eradication of persistent negative racial and ethnic stereotypes in Guyanese society;
·         Contribute to the building of trust among Guyanese
·         Contribute to the reinforcement of the bonds of solidarity and friendships,
·         Encourage and sustain creativity and achievement;
·         Support the visualization of contemporary Guyaneseness; and
·         Facilitate the collecting of materials for dissemination in Guyana Folk magazine and the academic press; to support scholarly research, for depositing in the Guyana Collection, Ohio University Library, Caribbean Collection of the University of Guyana, and Guyana’s National Library; and for immediate use in radio, television and on-line programming in the United States and Guyana.

Rationale

The symposium organizers invites paper proposals and panels to examine the cultural exchanges that have emerged in Guyana as a result to the arrivals and encounters among our multiple ancestors. Starting with our Amerindian ancestors who arrived almost 12,000 years ago and since the early 15^th century, our ancestors from Europe, African, Asia, the Americas and the Caribbean.

Potential topics include but are not limited to:

Arrivals

Shipmates and Jhaji Bhais

Sociological/psychological effects of arrival

Neo-arrivants and the creation of the Guyanese diaspora

Encounters

Encountering nature

Religious encounters

Business encounters

Solidarity and friendships

Rituals and identity

Education resolutions

Exchanges

Name Changing

Literature

Food

Fashion/Clothes

Festivals

Music

Dance

Marriage—Kwe Kwe and Dig Dutty

Spirituality

Ethnic enclaves and global Guyana

THE PROCESS

Persons interested in submitting papers are invited to register by proposing a provisional topic by May 30, 2011. Paper abstracts are due by June 30, 2011. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words in length and should be sent in electronic form or hard copy to Dr. Vibert C. Cambridge cambridg@ohio.edu or School of Media Arts and Studies, RTVC 213, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701.

This symposium is scheduled for Saturday, September 3, 2011 at EdZone, Teacher’s College/Columbia University, New York, NY.

***

May 11, 2011

Happy Birthday, Kamau Brathwaite (2011)

Wordle of "Bread" by Kamau Brathwaite

Source: Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan University Press, 2005)

About Kamau Brathwaite:

Born in Barbados, Caribbean poet and scholar Edward Kamau Brathwaite was educated at Harrison College in Barbados and Pembroke College in Cambridge. He earned his PhD in philosophy from the University of Sussex.

Using “nation language” as well as linguistic and typographic innovation, Brathwaite composes poems that deftly parse the connected strands of postcolonial, historical, and personal inquiry. As Publishers Weekly noted in a review of Slow Horses (2005), Brathwaite’s work is “omnivorously synthetic, insistently local, sinuously syncopated and consistently exciting.”

Co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement, Brathwaite is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Elegguas (2010), the Griffin International Poetry Prize winner Born to Slow Horses (2005), Ancestors (2001), Middle Passages (1992), and Black + Blues (1976). His first three collections, Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), andIslands (1969), have been gathered into The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973). He is also the author of Our Ancestral Heritage: A Bibliography of the Roots of Culture in the English-speaking Caribbean (1976) and Barbados Poetry: A Checklist: Slavery to the Present (1979).

Brathwaite’s honors include the Casa de las Americas Prize for Literary Criticism, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, and the Charity Randall Prize for Performance and Written Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Brathwaite has worked in Ghana’s Ministry of Education, as well as teaching at Harvard University, the University of the West Indies, and New York University.

He lives in Barbados and New York City.

Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kamau-brathwaite

***

May 10, 2011

New Film: The Island of Derek Walcott

Synopsis

Central to this documentary are two selected poems of Derek Walcott’s work. These poems are the guiding texts to Walcott’s thoughts and feelings about his life and his heritage as a Caribbean man. Firstly, there is the world famous poem entitled ‘Love after Love’. By focusing on this poem, we aim to be detailed on ‘the sense of belonging’ of the poet. It relates perfectly to our intentions of reflecting on the long life of our protagonist as an artist, twin brother, migrant, and island-child. The film will contain unique footage of Mr. Walcott in his personal ambience and showing us places that were meaningful for him growing up as the son of a single mother, after his father died at an early age. Secondly, a lesser known poem will take us to Amsterdam and the city of Delft in Holland where Walcott reflects on his ‘Dutch Heritage’.

About the Director

Ida Does, director of the documentary, is dedicated to Caribbean stories and fascinated by the history of this region. Mr. Walcott has proven that, being born on a tiny Caribbean island can be the starting point of tremendous achievements in literature and theatre. The aim will be to film him now, in the eve of his days, looking back on his struggles and work. Also aiming to explore his Dutch ancestors and what it means to him.

Sales/Screening Contact

Name: Ida Does

Email address: idadoes@hotmail.com

***

May 9, 2011

New Caribbean Literary Prizes

© George Lamming/For use only with OES article. Saltwater Collection

George Lamming awarded in Cuba; Derek Walcott wins in Trinidad;

Earl Lovelace leads in Guadeloupe

GREAT BAY, St. Martin (May 9, 2011)—In less than one month in 2011, it appears that an unprecedented number of literary prizes were awarded to major Caribbean writers in their own region.

On May 6, the distinguished author George Lamming was awarded the Caribbean Hibiscus Prize in Cuba, said his HNP publisher here on Monday, May 9.

The Association of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC) awarded Lamming the prize, which “acknowledges the lifetime’s work of Caribbean writers, artists and groups,” said HNP publisher Lasana M. Sekou.

The Barbadian writer “expressed his appreciation for the honors received in Cuba, because the concept of culture on the island is not decorative like in most countries of the region, since Cubans believe that culture is a weapon to defend the Revolution,” reported ACN news service.

In addition to its regional significance, UNEAC president Miguel Barnet said the prize aims at spreading more awareness about Cuban culture and the institution’s work.

During the award ceremony, Cuban poet Nancy Morejon pointed out that the Hibiscus Prize is named after a flower common to Caribbean nations, and that “Lamming was selected to receive this first edition of the prize because when you read his works you can understand Nature and the regional spirit better,” reported RCA radio (FM 105.3). Culture Minister Abel Prieto attended the ceremony, held at the UNEAC.

Long hailed as one of the “adamic fathers” of Caribbean Literature, Lamming’s newest book of essays, Sovereignty of the Imagination, was published in St. Martin by HNP, said Sekou. Sovereignty and Lamming’s Western Education & The Caribbean Intellectual, also from HNP, are available at Van Dorp and other bookstores and libraries in the region, www.amazon.com and other online stores.

On April 29, it was the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott who was honored. The acclaimed St. Lucian author, whose mother’s family hails from St. Martin, received the first edition of the OCM Bocas Prize in Trinidad for White Egrets, his latest poetry collection. The volume has already won the prestigious TS Eliot Prize.

The Bocas Prize to Walcott included an award of US$10,000. Tiphanie Yanique won the Bocas Fiction category for her debut novel, How To Escape From a Leper Colony. The much-celebrated Edwidge Danticat won the Non-Fiction category.

In a year with what appears to be an unprecedented appearance of literary prizes with regional projection, Guadeloupe took center stage from April 6 - 9, with its 2^nd International Congress of Caribbean Writers.

The first edition of the congress’s Grand Prize of Caribbean Literature went to the Trinidadian Earl Lovelace for his new novel, Is Just a Movie. The prize included a financial award of Euros 10,000, probably the highest monetary prize for literature in the region to date.

The oldest and most prestigious award for literature in the region remains the Casa de Las Americas prize.

Caption1: In this rare photo two legendary Caribbean authors (L-R) George Lamming and Derek Walcott. (© George Lamming/For use only with OES article. Saltwater Collection)

Contact

Lasana M. Sekou

nehesi@sintmaarten.net

P.O. Box 460

Philipsburg, St. Martin

Caribbean

Tel (599) 554-7089

E-mail: Offshoreediting@hotmail.com

***

New Book: This Strange Land by Shara McCallum

This Strange Land
by

Shara McCallum

"These are poems of ruin and rebirth, of the joys and damage a mother knows...This is a marvelous collection filled with a lovely and evocative music. Highly recommended."

—Library Journal, starred review

“Jean Rhys could be the presiding spirit of this moving collection, which mines deep veins of loss and displacement. The personal and the political converge in new ways in these finely crafted poems, and readers should be prepared for unexpected turns and genuine surprises.”
—Lorna Goodison

“This Strange Land is a remarkably accomplished book, ranging from childhood to parenthood, Jamaica to America, in a way that feels integrated and organic. With mature hindsight, Shara McCallum revisits early experience with a piercing clarity (even in dialect, as in the wonderful 'Miss Sally' poems), exposing its undercurrents in the present. Intimate, serious, and beautifully crafted, these poems scrutinize the griefs and beauties of familial life and memorialize them with meticulous care.”
—Chase Twichell

“Chinua Achebe spoke of a literature of the future in which the ‘horizon extends to include all the world.’ Shara McCallum's dazzling new work brings that oceanic sky-line close. Exploring the specifics of a marginalized culture, she challenges and deepens the idea of the universal. She has the poet's gift to complicate your stance towards your own language and times. This Strange Land might turn out to be home after all—McCallum's creation is not just an overwhelmingly real place, but a confrontation with history, an exploration of the maelstrom of the family, and a poetics of extraordinary lyricism and urgency.”
—D. Nurkse

Psalm for Kingston

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem

—Psalm 137

City of Jack Mandora—mi nuh choose none—of Anancy
    prevailing over Mongoose, Breda Rat, Puss, and Dog, Anancy
        saved by his wits in the midst of chaos and against all odds;
    of bawdy Big Boy stories told by peacock-strutting boys, hush-hush
but loud enough to be heard by anyone passing by the yard.

City of market women at Half-Way-Tree with baskets
    atop their heads or planted in front of their laps, squatting or standing
        with arms akimbo, susuing with one another, clucking
    their tongues, calling in voices of pure sugar, come dou-dou: see
the pretty bag I have for you, then kissing their teeth when you saunter off.

City of school children in uniforms playing dandy shandy
    and brown girl in the ring—tra-la-la-la-la—
        eating bun and cheese and bulla and mangoes,
    juice sticky and running down their chins, bodies arced
in laughter, mouths agape, heads thrown back.

City of old men with rheumy eyes, crouched in doorways,
    on verandahs, paring knives in hand, carving wood pipes
        or peeling sugar cane, of younger men pushing carts
    of roasted peanuts and oranges, calling out as they walk the streets
and night draws near, of coconut vendors with machetes in hand.

City where power cuts left everyone in sudden dark,
    where the kerosene lamp’s blue flame wavered on kitchen walls,
        where empty bellies could not be filled,
    where no eggs, no milk, no beef today echoed
in shantytowns, around corners, down alleyways.

City where Marley sang, Jah would never give the power to a baldhead
    while the baldheads reigned, where my parents chanted
        down Babylon—Fire! Burn! Jah! Rastafari! Selassie I!—

where they paid weekly dues, saving for our passages back to Africa,
while in their beds my grandparents slept fitfully, dreaming of America.

City that lives under a long-memoried sun,
    where the gunmen of my childhood have been replaced
        by dons that rule neighbourhoods as fiefdoms, where violence
    and beauty still lie down together. City of my birth—
if I forget thee, who will I be, singing the Lord’s song in this strange land?

Published by Alice James Books

Price: $19.95 (paperback w/ CD)

ISBN: 978-1-882295-86-9

http://www.alicejamesbooks.org/pages/book_page.php?bookID=158

About Shara McCallum

Shara McCallum was born in Jamaica to Afro-Jamaican and Venezuelan parents and moved to the U.S. at the age of nine. She earned a B.A. from the University of Miami, an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and African American and Caribbean Literature from Binghamton University in New York.

Her books of poetry include Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003) and The Water Between Us (1999), winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her poems have won a college prize from The Academy of American Poets, been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and appeared in several journals, including The Antioch Review,Chelsea, The Iowa Review, and Verse. McCallum's poems have been anthologized in The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (ed. Michael Collier, 2000) and Beyond the Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century. She is the recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant in Literature and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. McCallum lives in Pennsylvania and teaches and directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. She is also on the faculty of the Stonecoast Low Residency MFA program.

Source: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/438
Image: http://www.bucknell.edu/x3695.xml

***

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May 6, 2011

One Bright Morning

One bright morning they’ll lower my body into the earth.

& from my bones a sturdy bougainvillea will flower

with bright thorns to blind those who'd harm my sisters,
necklace them with fears about their worth,
but even in Ginen, my name will provide shelter.

One bright morning they’ll lower my body into the earth,

& I will release the pain in my bones since birth,

return to the light from which I now whisper:

“Don’t cry. I am at peace, my brothers.

One bright morning they’ll lower my body into the earth.

***

Image: Ian Gage

May 5, 2011

Derek Walcott Wins 2011 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

From Trinidad Express:

White Egrets, his collection of poetry that has already won the TS Eliot Prize and was judged the winner of the OCM Bocas Prize poetry category, was chosen for the US$10,000 award last night, seeing off competition from the fiction and non-fiction winners.

The judges in their citation commented upon the "seemingly effortless flow of the language and imagery despite the poet's stated premonitions of the loss of poetic power and inspiration…. Walcott is still writing great poetry, lovely cadences, beautiful images".

They considered the book-length poem that is divided into separate poems and is an exploration of bereavement and grief in one's advanced years to be, "a book that tells of a period of life more usually talked at and talked about than heard from or listened to, which makes it a very important work".

For more information, please follow this link:

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/news/Derek_Walcott_wins_OCM_Bocas_Prize-121040233.html

***

May 4, 2011

Mum mum mum mah, P-P-P-Poker Face: Barack Obama

President Obama @ Miami Dade College

Okay, I was wrong about the President Obama’s poker skills.

He ordered the "hit" on Osama bin Laden on Friday morning, toured Alabama, gave our commencement speech at Miami Dade College, and a day later, he was cracking jokes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

This one, aimed at Donald Trump, was especially telling:

But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example -- no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice -- at the steakhouse, the men's cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn't blame Lil' Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.

His name isn’t Barack Hussein Obama. It’s Barack “Corleone” Obama.

***

May 2, 2011

Author Event: Christine Craig @ Dania Beach Public Library

Christine Craig

There was a distinct womanist tone in Christine Craig’s’ reading from Poems: All Things Bright & Quadrille for Tigers at the Dania Beach Public Library on April 30, 2011. Whether she was reading “Portland Morning” or the heartbreaking “Ofrenda,” the precision of her Ms. Craig’s craft was always evident.

Nadine Bradley-Taylor

It was also a surprise to hear Nadine Bradley-Taylor read “St. Ann Morning” and “Elsa’s Version,” with the necessary abandon that these poems deserve. Christine is a naturally reticent person so it was a brilliant choice to have Ms. Bradley-Taylor read these poems, especially “Elsa’s Version, which confronts the hypocrisy of the patriarchal politics:

All dem big talk:

“Women are our natural resources

Women are the back bone

of the country”

with the frank rebuttal:

You rass man

stop put we down

in dutty song or

high-up editorial

And just as the intensity of the voice in the poem raised the stakes vocally, Ms. Bradley-Taylor matched the ending with the perfect pitch:

Till day day come

Lef me alone

an me modda

an me sista

an me gal-pickney.

The reading ended (after three encores) with several moving tributes by Jean Lowrie-Chin and Karl “Jerry” Craig both of whom urged Ms. Craig to “stop holding back” in publicizing her work.

I couldn't agree more.

Jean Lowrie-Chin

***

April 30, 2011

Barack Obama & the American Dream

Barack Obama would be a terrible poker player. He has certain “tells” that reveal his emotional status, especially when he is feeling nostalgic. I discovered one “tell” during his commencement speech for Miami Dade College at the James L. Knight Center on Friday, April 29, 2011. It was a “highly personal commencement speech” and I guess he couldn’t help but get emotional because he was talking about the American Dream.

Of course, President Obama came prepared with the usual facts and figures about Miami Dade College:

It is such a thrill to be at one of the largest, most diverse institutions of higher learning in America -- one that just this week was named one of the top community colleges in the nation. (Applause.) More than 170,000 students study across your eight campuses. You come from 181 countries, represented by the flags that just marched across this stage. You speak 94 languages. About 90 percent of you are minorities. And because more than 90 percent of you find a job in your field of study, it’s fitting that your motto is “Opportunity changes everything.”

But I don’t think he was prepared for the physical evidence in the faces of our students, many of whom reminded him of his father’s struggles to come to America:

I didn’t know him well, my father -- and he lived a troubled life. But I know that when he was around your age, he dreamed of something more than his lot in life. He dreamed of that magical place; he dreamed of coming to study in America.

And when I was around your age, I traveled back to his home country of Kenya for the first time to learn his story. And I went to a tiny village called Alego, where his stepmother still lives in the house where he grew up, and I visited his grave. And I asked her if there was anything left for me to know him by. And she opened a trunk, and she took out a stack of letters -- and this is an elderly woman who doesn’t read or write -- but she had saved these letters, more than 30 of them, written in his hand and addressed to colleges and universities all across America.

They weren’t that different from the letters that I wrote when I was trying to get into college, or the ones that you wrote when you were hoping to come here. They were written in the simple, sometimes awkward, sometimes grammatically incorrect, unmistakably hopeful voice of somebody who is just desperate for a chance -- just desperate to live his unlikely dream.

And somebody at the University of Hawaii -- halfway around the world -- chose to give him that chance. And because that person gave a young man a chance, he met a young woman from Kansas; they had a son in the land where all things are possible.

And then, came the “tell.” He bowed his head and used his left index finger to scratch his left nostril. I would never have noticed his "tell" until he did it a second time.

The second “tell” was during his discussion of his earliest memories of space exploration, as “a little brown boy sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders":

And one of my earliest memories from growing up in Hawaii, is of sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders to see the astronauts from one of the Apollo space missions come ashore after a successful splashdown. You remember that no matter how young you are as a child. It’s one of those unforgettable moments when you first realize the miracle that is what this country is capable of. And I remember waving a little American flag on top of my grandfather’s shoulders, thinking about those astronauts, and thinking about space.

And today, on this day, more than 40 years later, I took my daughters to the Kennedy Space Center. And even though we didn’t get to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour launch, we met some of the astronauts, and we toured the Space Shuttle Atlantis. And looking at my daughters, I thought of how things come full circle. I thought of all that we’ve achieved as a nation since I was their age, a little brown boy sitting on my grandfather’s shoulders -- and I thought about all I want us to achieve by the time they have children of their own.

President Obama saw the proof of the American Dream in the struggles of our students, even as he renewed his commitment to the DREAM Act and gave our students a lesson in American history and democracy:

Changing our laws means doing the hard work of changing minds and changing votes, one by one. And I am convinced we can change the laws, because we should all be able to agree that it makes no sense to expel talented young people from our country. They grew up as Americans. They pledge allegiance to our flag. And if they are trying to serve in our military or earn a degree, they are contributing to our future -- and we welcome those contributions. (Applause.)

The climax for me, however, came when spoke about what it means to be an American (something that I have been trying teaching my students for as long as I’ve been at MDC), but President Obama said it best about what it means to be an American:

We didn’t raise the Statue of Liberty with its back to the world; we raised it with its light to the world. (Applause.) Whether your ancestors came here on the Mayflower or a slave ship; whether they signed in at Ellis Island or they crossed the Rio Grande -- we are one people. We need one another. Our patriotism is not rooted in ethnicity, but in a shared belief of the enduring and permanent promise of this country. (Applause.)

The American Dream is alive in the students at Miami Dade College and President Obama saw that. His physical reactions told us that without him resorting to phrases such as, “I feel your pain.”

I also learned something else that was vitally important. President Obama is a teacher believes in intellectual debate in order to bring about change. He teaches by his actions and his encouragement of intellectual debate to bring about solutions. But we have to watch keenly and listen carefully to Obama's words and actions:

Like all of this country’s movements towards justice, it will be difficult and it will take time. I know some here wish that I could just bypass Congress and change the law myself. (Applause.) But that’s not how democracy works. See, democracy is hard. But it’s right.

He may make a terrible poker player, but as a leader who urged our students to “carry the dream forward,” with a combination of optimism and compassion, President Obama embodies the American Dream.

***

Here's the video of the "tell"...wait for it:

Sources:

Remarks by the President at Miami Dade College Commencement:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/04/29/remarks-president-miami-dade-college-commencement

Obama's commencement speech: More dreams from his father

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2011/04/obamas-commencement-speech-more-dreams-from-his-father/1

Image:
http://www.heraldonline.com/2011/04/29/3028535/obama-pledges-help-for-illegal.html

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