Letter from the Editor: (Un)settling
Even though my grandmother passed away nearly eight years ago next month, I’ve spoken to her more in the last year than I ever have. She was a faithful, white-gloved usher at the White Rose Church of God In Christ in Long Beach, California and the most God-fearing person I’ve ever known. Despite her conservative congregation, she believed in the freedom of thought and expression. She allowed her three daughters to wear pants at home and even allowed a TV in the house when they could afford it.
There’s so much about Grandma that I don’t know but wish I could ask her.
I want to know what it was like growing up in the state where Emmitt Till was murdered (buried 68 years ago this week) only to move to the city where he should have grown old. I want to know how living through such events changed her faith and would have liked to ask her about the question of theodicy (suffering) or her take on theory versus praxis.
But it’s likely that whatever I was learning about at that fancy school in New York, regardless if she understood it or if I could explain it, she would have been proud of me. And a lot of my conversations with her since I started at Union have been about trying to decipher whether or not these ideas and concepts take hold in her reality, or perhaps the reality I would want for her.
Despite feeling a degree of whiplash upon returning to a place I’m still trying to figure out, I’m excited to get to know it again. And more so, to welcome the ways that new and returning students, faculty, and administration will decorate its halls with questions, perspectives, and wisdom that will contribute to yet another year of deciphering.
In her speech to the incoming students, Dean Su Yon Pak remarked on the various meanings of the word “settle.” Settling can mean compromise, especially when our efforts to actualize our goals and dreams become crowded by the clutter of life. Or, settling can mean to eventually and circuitously decide on an outcome, like a marble orbiting a funnel before it settles into the hole at its center. Or, apt for the incoming class, settling can mean getting acquainted and comfortable with, and finding some sort of footing—a new home perhaps.
As a member of the Orientation team, it felt strange to be tasked with helping incoming students settle into their Union experience when I’m not sure I fully grasped it to begin with. Returning to campus after spending two months abroad felt like I was returning to the house where my parents had moved while I was away at school. While I love it because of those who live there, it is not altogether familiar to me. I still don't know where everything goes or how everything works, nor do I know how to open that one back door into the quad.
What familiarity offers is the feeling of safety and stability. No matter if the changes are for the better, rearranging the furniture in one’s life can be destabilizing and disconcerting. One might even pass through a wave of grief to eventually settle into a new way of being.
But as the dust collects on the ground over the fallen leaves and the rhythm of life here picks up, flattens out, and becomes our familiar, I invite us to carry a semblance of the unfamiliar, unsettled thing with us. As much as the familiar holds us, it can also hold us down. While familiarity keeps the strange dangers at bay, it also keeps us in routines closed off from possibility.
Familiarity is the devil we know. And that devil often keeps us from seeing each other beyond our own perceptions. That familiar devil keeps us entrenched in cycles of half-listening to each other and assuming we already know the outcomes. It also keeps us embittered with the status quo, yet resigned to “the way it is.”
As much as the familiar holds us, it can also hold us down.
“This is America,” or “That’s New York for you,” or “Harlem is gonna Harlem,” or even, “Welcome to Union!”
Beneath each of these usually negative, throwaway responses to something associated with each place is also a tacit resignation to how things are, and the sooner we understand it, the better. My goal for The Heretic this year is that it is one of the places where students challenge that notion and refuse familiarity at the expense of imagination.
As we embark on a new semester, we invite you to chart your unsettling with poetry, essays, art work, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, interviews, op-eds, and news. Ask the impossible, unknowable question. Put language to the unspeakable. Lean into unknowing as a possible outcome for your work. Yes, critique and deconstruct, but more importantly, build, build, build.
There are already so many barriers in academia that are all too familiar to us since we began our schooling – the segmenting of peers based on intellect, the stigmatization of neurodivergence, and the privileging of certain learning and behavior types. The Heretic is a space, as much as it can be called a space, to let that go.
My hope for the Union community (as broad as that circle can be drawn) is that we practice varying degrees of unfamiliarity.
My hope is that we unsettle ourselves from the status quo. That we unknow how things have been done especially if those things only got us to a place of wanting in the first place. This does not necessarily mean to throw away tradition or ancient wisdom or to silence our ancestors. On the contrary, this is an opportunity to invite the unfamiliar, forgotten, quieted voices into these spaces with us. It’s unsettling to take a leap into the unknown, but as much as we can bear it, unsettling ourselves might be what it takes to build something new, maybe even a home.
