In one of the best-known elegies of the Romanian language, Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) expresses what many world travelers have felt at some point in their wanderings: “Mai am un singur dor: / În liniştea serii / Să mă lăsaţi să mor / La marginea mării” [“I have one more desire: / In the evening quiet / That you let me expire / By the edge of the sea”]. According to linguists, a unique feature common to English and Romanian is that the amount of borrowed words in the vocabulary is higher than in other languages (approximately 80%) making them the most hospitable in Europe.
While I did not attend the May 1st town hall meeting of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Kyle Hall’s op-edu prompted some thoughts on the name of our department, its culture, and our place in a university that has made great strides in attending to the bottom line following the staggering financial losses of 2008.
1: The Department of Romance Languages & Literatures
We offer courses in Catalan, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish. Many of us speak more than one language; few of us have total mastery over all five and even fewer of us can speak the “other” romance language, Romanian. We could perhaps call it the “secret” Romance language. Over the years I've been here (2002-2012) there has never once been a discussion of offering courses in Romanian (to my knowledge) despite the fact that there have been Harvard undergraduates and graduate students who want to study Romanian, there's a very active Harvard-MIT Romanian Student Association, and Romanian cinema is extremely popular and globally important. It seems that Harvard does not have money to hire one full-time Romanian professor, nor is there money in the budget to pay graduate students who could easily teach a seminar on Romanian language, literature, and culture. (Although, as I recently found out, a year or two before I arrived, fellow Romanian and RLL grad Dr. Adriana Chimu was hired to teach a course in Romanian language and literature that met three times a week, for which she was paid roughly $400/month.)
Before beginning my Ph.D. at Harvard, I was an undergraduate concentrator in the department of French and Italian at Emory University. In that department the Italian professors all spoke French; not all of the French professors, however, spoke Italian. This is a minor detail—indicative of biases and limitations particular to French studies—, and I mention it only to illustrate the kind of barriers that exist in the humanities, even between national languages that are all derived from Latin. What is important in a name, and here I pick up on what Kyle said, is a common vision about language learning and the value of a literary tradition. Over the years I've been to the defenses of many of my friends and colleagues, all of whom are now teaching in institutions across the country and around the world: beginning with Irit Kleiman, followed by Maggie Flinn, Patrick Bray, Lia Brozgal, Greg Cohen, Carmen Oquendo-Villar, Régine Jean-Charles, Christian Claesson, Felisa Reynolds, Sara Kippur, Bruno Carvalho, Vickie Tillson, Daniel Aguirre Oteiza, Martín Gaspar, Lauren Ravalico, and most recently, Stephanie Wooler. I have missed some very important ones, but when I went I took notes, asked questions, and mentally prepared for the day when I too would stand up in front of my peers and present my work. Over the years, however, I've noticed a few very bothersome things related to linguistic differences and spatial constraints: at Martín's defense I was the only non-Spanish speaking attendee—this didn't really matter because I knew enough about Martín's project to be able to formulate a question about translation-related issues in English (having only understood 80% of his presentation)—, and sadly, at another defense I was the only graduate student in attendance—it was me, the committee, the presenter, and a few outside guests. At a defense we are asked to present our work of four, five, six or more years, in a seminar room that holds at best 20-25 people. For many of us this is a chance to finally hear what our peers have been working on, the projects they've elaborated, the questions they've posed and answered, and to see how they present their work.
In my opinion these defenses should be more than a two-hour slot of time set aside for three or four committee members to sit around a table, pose questions, and sign a piece of paper, while others crowd around the outer edges of the room to watch what has taken years to build unfold in 30-45 minutes. As “defenses” they are entirely symbolic; as public ritual they are incredibly important. They are a chance to engage in a conversation with peers, faculty, and, quite importantly, an interested public. Why should paying hundreds of dollars to wear a crimson gown and walk across a stage be more important than sharing one's work? Why should we speak only to the members of our section when our work and interests cross boundaries not only between world literatures but also between disciplines like art history, film studies, philosophy, and performance studies? Why should we find out that one of our peers is working on something so fascinating when for years we only passed them in the halls of Boylston on the way to teaching a section or in Widener moving between reading rooms?
Defenses—if they are indeed a send off from Harvard into a wider academic life—should be celebrations of a great accomplishment. Post-defense celebrations with wine and cheese are wonderful, but there is no reason why we shouldn't also have a day of dissertation presentations modeled on the one the Undergraduate Tutorial Board in our department schedules every year. There's no reason why we can't combine the two in order to create a sense of community within RLL that goes beyond the hierarchy of rank. Time is precious, yes, but we should all have some idea of what this department “produces” in terms of theses, dissertations, etc. By supporting each other’s intellectual projects we will create a much broader awareness of contemporary scholarship in Romance Languages and Literatures.
2: Departmental culture
It has been my impression over the years that few people enjoy being in Boylston Hall. Perhaps professors like to be in their offices to meet with students for 2+ hours a week, perhaps they like to welcome the occasional visitor, perhaps grad students like to cross paths in the computer lab where printing is freely available and conversations tend to slide from English to French to Spanish to Portuguese to Italian, perhaps we like to be reminded of classes we enjoyed when passing 403 or 334, perhaps we recall with fondness meetings with course heads who have since left this place; memory is kind, so we usually forget the days that were not so bright, not so cheerful. I know that there is one office to which I return without fail no matter how frustrated or energized I feel—the office I first set foot in when I visited Harvard as a prospective student, one of the many offices where the door is always open, where hospitality is a rule: Frannie Lindsay's office. It lies to the left of Susan Fuerst's office, which is to the left of Kathy Coviello's office, which are all within sight of Walter Hryshko's office, and which are just down the hall from Katherine Killough's office, Andréa Kupski-Keane's office and Mike Holmes's office. This is the heart of our department: the 4th floor lounge. We enter as first years, get our photo taken and posted on a board (I still have my Polaroid tucked away in a box), and it's the place we leave once we've defended.
But hospitality is not a twice-in-a-lifetime, once-a-semester kind of thing, it's a day-to-day interaction with the people who make up a family (however dysfunctional). We refer to each other as grad students, staff members, preceptors, junior faculty, senior faculty, undergraduate concentrators (who many of us don't even know); we live divided lives because in the end what Harvard offers is a generous financial package, access to a great library, an abundance of incredibly accomplished professors and peers, and a revolving roster of visitors, an intellectual fervor that takes one's breath away, but also makes it hard to breathe, and in the end, in RLL, events that compete with each other, that take us from Boylston to the Humanities Center to the Carpenter Center to the Center for European Studies. And when we return to Boylston Hall, the shadowed building to the right of Widener library, we go into Ticknor Lounge to meet with students, or ask Liz to make photocopies on the mezzanine, or stop a minute in the computer lab to print an article, or take five minutes to say hello to a professor we wanted to have coffee with last semester but never did, and we pass through, maybe checking our mailboxes on the way: no one comes to Boylston Hall to stay.
To inhabit a place, you have to find it “habitable”—to dwell there, you have to want to stay long enough to leave more than you brought.
Some people say Boylston Hall is an ugly grey building. I’ve never felt that way about it, but I have never felt truly “at home” there. I do think, however, that it could be a more hospitable dwelling place for languages—a “house of être”—with Women & Gender Studies on the ground floor, public spaces like the Fong and Ticknor lounge on the first floor, an informal meeting spot for students, TA’s and TF’s on the mezzanine, Classics on the second floor, Linguistics (& RLL) on the third floor, the department seat of RLL on the fourth floor, and in the attic, the fifth floor, a space that could be a hidden treasure. Let's not throw away all those old books, let's not hire movers to haul them away, let's just make it a little library of books we want to look at, books full of black and white photographs of cities we all love, a few old journals, but also new key texts of literary criticism, along with worn out copies of Balzac, Svevo, Pessoa, Marquez, and who knows, even some Eminescu; let's make it a place were there can be silence, but also laughter and conversation.
These are all very grand ideas, I know, but they come from a very deep sense of sadness about what Boylston Hall is not, about what RLL is not, and about what it means that as graduate students we spend 7+ years of our lives striving to read enough and think enough and be happy enough with all the wonderful opportunities, and when we are about to leave, we all say that we'll miss Widener.
3: The University
In an effort to reinvent itself Harvard lets go of the people it should value most: the library upheavals are only the most recent example. At our spring departmental party on May 1 we applauded the tremendous contribution of Mary Beth Clack, a research librarian with a passion for romance languages who has toiled for everyone in this department—single-handedly she has created research guides for multiple courses, invited graduate students to coffee, dinner, her own home, and has opened up the mysterious ways of research for so many of us—and in return we offered her, yes, a standing-ovation and a lovely cake; but then, for less than five minutes we listened to her talk about how difficult the last three years have been, how she will write to everyone individually, how she will not stop working, but cannot officially work at Widener for a year, and we collectively acknowledged that this is happening because Harvard has offered her a “buy-out.” The very fact that an early retirement offer could be conceived of in this light is upsetting. I would like to think that hospitality is a part of all Romance Language cultures, but I begin to wonder whether the culture of the Harvard bureaucracy has not infiltrated our department when we are happy to applaud Mary Beth’s contribution and wish her well in her future pursuits without taking the time to engage in a discussion of the personal repercussions of the University’s efforts to upgrade its services. What hope is there for Harvard if it lets go of scores of its most loyal and talented employees? What hope is there for a world-class institution of higher learning if it is nothing more than a talent farm, a collection of beautiful old buildings, a library as perilously rich as the Titanic, and a Yard that is a gated space with revolving doors?
I don't know what the future holds for the Humanities, but I am not sure that we are going to find out at this institution of higher learning. I write this with honesty, sincerity, and goodwill, and with great appreciation for all that Harvard and RLL have offered me, and most importantly, without any desire to slight or offend anyone, least of all in this department, because I know that we've all felt frustrations with the limitations of the system.
In Romanian, good-bye is la revedere, which literally means “until we see each other again,”—but I am not sure that I like what I see these days. There is always sadness in saying “farewell,” but I know that despite my mixed feelings, after I graduate in November, it will be impossible for me not to want to return to Widener, Houghton, the Carpenter Center, the Harvard Film Archive, the Harvard museums, and paths I’ve walked many times across Harvard Yard. I hope, however, that when I come back to Boylston Hall years after being away, I will find a Department of Romance Languages and Literatures transformed by the collective efforts of its members. A department and space that is more hospitable in all senses of the word.