Three accomplished writers have as editors acquired a collection of essays in The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders in which poets explore the way their journeys to foreign lands helped them add to literature’s great conversation. Susan Rich, one editor of the three, whose newest poetry collection Cloud Pharmacy is just out from White Pine Press, wrote to explore her time living in South Africa, far from her graduate school and teaching life in the Pacific Northwest. The Chicago Tribune describes the book as “a lovely meditation on dislocation,” something all poets are familiar with as a process by which one enters the deepest experiences of life. Susan’s essay is reprinted here with her permission. Above all else, it speaks to a poet’s maturation in being able ultimately to make the strange familiar.

Solitary: Spending a Fulbright Year in South Africa
by Susan Rich

I began working on my Fulbright application just three months after my father’s death and a year after my mother’s. My parents had just disappeared, and I had no idea how I would survive without them. I knew only that living one’s desires was the only thing that mattered. I had only one life. One. That’s not a very big number.

Fulbright: such an optimistic word. I imagined Ful and bright as an enlivened state of mind, hopeful and wildly idealistic. “Our future is not in the stars but in our own minds and hearts,” stated Senator J. William Fulbright when he introduced legislation to Congress. Begun shortly after World War II, the Fulbright Program started as a way to encourage mutual respect among countries through educational and cultural endeavors; the senator believed it was a crucial first step to creating an alternative to armed conflict. From one good idea came a global community of artists, scientists, and poets crisscrossing boundaries of ethnicity and race, economic and religious beliefs.

When the time came for me to apply for a fellowship, I felt as if I were writing a tired film noir instead of developing a plan that would enable me to cross cultural borders. Working on the Fulbright application almost overwhelmed me. My nonexistent personal ad would have read “Single woman, 37 years old; has little idea what she wants out of life.” I was lost.

Traveling to South Africa sounded exciting; it seemed as good a plan as any. Why not interview poets continents away? Why not study another culture’s poetry of commitment? The truth was I didn’t know what else to do. Two years earlier, I had quit my job with Amnesty International to pursue an MFA in poetry at the University of Oregon. I was still adjusting to the idea that my parents had just left me. For good. Now that I was going to receive my degree, there seemed no clear career path to follow. I had no set geography or sense of myself. A year in a new country and, I presumed, in a new skin, sounded right.

I had never won a fellowship of any kind. I had no fancy credentials other than a soon-to-be-completed MFA. I applied for the Fulbright Fellowship believing it was a long shot. And it was.

The University of Oregon made a point of assisting students with the Fulbright process. The folks in the Office of International Affairs emphasized the importance of a strong proposal that could realistically be enacted. The real over the fantastical, they reminded us. The advice paid off: University of Oregon students have often earned the most Fulbright awards in the Pacific Northwest. I’d learned this from the Creative Writing Program director before deciding to move across the country to Oregon from Massachusetts. He’d used the lure of a Fulbright year as a recruiting tool. The Office of International Affairs assigned an administrator to mentor me as I worked on my application. Every other Friday at four p.m., I met with Maggie Morris, assistant vice provost for research and graduate education, in her office, which smelled of oranges. I took a new draft of my essay, which often bore no resemblance to what I had shown her two weeks earlier. She was gentle with my fickleness, and I got the sense that she enjoyed finishing her week imagining South African poets with me.

It took me time to understand that creating grant proposals is by definition a kind of speculative writing. Though I researched every South African poet I could find and every South African university that might offer to sponsor me, my initial project of interviewing South African poets ultimately was going to succeed only if I could meet the writers and win their trust. Maggie Morris assured me that no one expected that the project would crystallize as I had planned it; the key was to design a good plan.

As with the Fulbright application, I wrote my proposal as if my life depended on it. That summer, as I took every book out of the library that made even a passing reference to African poetry, I honestly believed my very existence hinged on obtaining the fellowship. As contrary as this was to my life experience (I had never won so much as a ballpoint pen), I knew I needed to will this Fulbright year into existence.

After many weeks of not being able to write, the first paragraph of my proposal emerged fully formed. The words provided a map for where I needed to go:

Poetry is manna, is revolution, is lifeblood that pulses through the body to the pen, to the paper, through memory to metaphor, from a life to a community, from pain to redemption. Poetry is witness. Nelson Mandela writes, “Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok [whip], but it can bear witness to brutality—thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.” Writing poetry is a conscious act, an act of taking responsibility. It is neither political nor leftist propaganda to say poetry must be of this world.

After two months of writing and rewriting my proposal, I was interviewed on an early October day. Professors of music, mathematics, biology, and business all convened. Most major universities have a local Fulbright committee, composed of faculty from across the disciplines, that meets with candidates and eventually ranks each one.

As the committee began its work, the director of the Office of International Affairs, Tom Mills, an exceptionally warm and astute man, immediately put me at ease. The committee’s questions ranged from the practical (Would I be able to manage on my own in a country I had never visited?) to the more project-based (How would my work with South African poets connect to my professional goals?). I read my poem “Nomadic Life” as part of the interview. Tom had suggested I take some of my poems along. He thought the committee might want to hear my work. It did. I read my poem honoring the Fulani nomads I had known during my time as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Niger (West Africa). Here’s what I learned during my interview: an element of surprise—catching one’s audience off guard, igniting imaginations—helps one’s project succeed. I’d been hesitant about reading my own poem, but Tom had insisted, reminding me that my work as a poet would inform my entire Fulbright experience.

The day I received the letter congratulating me on my acceptance, May 20, would have been my father’s seventy-fourth birthday. It seemed like a sign from the other side of the grave saying, “Go!” Nevertheless, how wrong it seemed not to telephone him to share the news.

****

As I slipped out of my life in Eugene, Oregon, I had two suitcases so big that I could have fit several bodies inside each of them. They were the height and depth of bags I had seen in airports, zipped up by families moving from one country to the next, taking only what they could wheel. My situation was similar. I left for South Africa with no notion of when or how I would return home because I had no home. My parents’ deaths had absolved me of belonging to any singular place. Home was a house in Brookline, Massachusetts, sold to the highest bidder, my permanent address gone in a storm of legalese.

I remember a freak hail storm in Portland that closed the airport. I remember learning that “act of God” was a legal term and that the airline wasn’t responsible for my two-day wait for the next plane to Cape Town. I remember a day in LAX, when, out of boredom, I dialed my high-school sweetheart’s phone number and talked briefly with his lonely wife.

Finally, I boarded a flight that took more hours (and days) than I could account for. This had something to do with crossing the international date line. I remember a twelve-hour stay in Kuala Lumpur, a beautiful city of dust and donkeys. I remember a five-star hotel scented with bougainvillea blossoms, thanks to a voucher from Malaysian Airlines. Oddly, this was the very cheapest fare one could buy. The route I chose was known as “the wrong way round” because it took an extra day. All this lent a heavy dose of surrealism to my journey.

My one South African friend, whom I had met in Boston a decade before, picked me up at the airport and drove me to my new home at Festival Court, which was festive only in the way that funerals are festive: not at all. I’d arranged to take over the one-bedroom unit complete with bed, sofa, two chairs, and kitchen table sight unseen. I had refused to buy the love seat, irking the former tenant, who sent multiple emails trying to convince me of its floral beauty. Because this was 1997, and smart-phones with digital cameras did not yet exist, I had taken the place on faith. What I found: two tiny rooms in white and tan. My flat looked onto Table Mountain—so close it seemed I could kiss the rock face from the bed. From my angle of vision, this seemed the largest and saddest peak I had ever seen.

In South Africa, place took on enormous meaning. One journalist explained to me in a confidential tone that South Africans have more attachment to the land than any other people. She said this as we climbed Lion’s Head, a small mountain in the center of Cape Town. She and I were not alone on our midnight pilgrimage. More than a hundred partiers were there, carrying picnic baskets and bottles of wine. There is a tradition of climbing Lion’s Head on nights when the moon is full. Even the set of hand chains drilled into the final rocks did not deter the crowd. In a city where people afraid of house burglars literally run from car to front door, a midnight mountain sojourn seemed almost supernatural.

The hikers helped one another transition from scree to mountaintop. Although the crowd of partiers was mostly white, mostly middle class, it was racially mixed. On top of Lion’s Head, I felt that the new South Africa might have a chance of success. At least for those who love to look at the moon.

****

In Cape Town, white people in my neighborhood rarely walked the streets. No warm evening strolls to the corner market, no walking the dog after dinner. The only South Africans I saw on my walks to and from the university were the black women who cooked, cleaned, and took care of the children of white families. Never before had I visited modest apartments that sparkled so! Never before had I had a lease that included rules governing the use of the storage locker—more often used as the servants’ quarters. Even after the end of apartheid, even with Nelson Mandela as president, some black workers lived behind the garage in a lower-middle-class apartment block. What did I condone as I signed my lease, paid my rent, walked past the men outside their storage units, drying their clothes on the same frayed line as my own?

One of the things about living in a country that is not one’s own is the constant state of not knowing. Each day, I carried with me a basket of ever-shifting questions—painful to ask and even more impossible to answer. Was it better to hire someone to scrub my two rooms and help alleviate the high unemployment rate, or was it best not to participate in a corrupt vestige from the past regime? Was it morally complicated to go hiking in the mountains if the National Party had constructed the overnight huts and long pathways under the apartheid system? Was I guilty by virtue of the air I breathed? I muddled my way through these questions as I walked past poinsettia and oleander trees to my university office. And on some visceral level, I believed I was guilty. Although I still enjoyed the delicate trees.

At least once a day, in the early morning as I climbed the hill to the campus or at dusk when I returned home, I passed a quiet young man who lived under the eaves of the corner market. Often, he greeted me with a rock-star smile, his eyes soft and appealing. At other times, he was entrenched in his own world, singing or weeping under his breath. Over the course of several months of daily walks, I often thought about this man, wondering why he chose to spread his blue blanket near my house instead of in one of the townships, where most black citizens still lived. How did he endure his solitude day after day? I identified deeply with this man whose name I never learned.

With few exceptions, the poems I wrote during my time in Cape Town focused on the men, women, and children who lived on the busy streets and roundabouts of the city. Although I had previously lived in Zinder, Niger, and Cambridge, Massachusetts—both places where street people were ever present in my daily life—in Cape Town, the stark contrast of rich and poor struck a harsher note. Young children no more than six or seven years old were sent into the street to knock on car windows, their mothers standing in the shadows. And in the celebration of the new idealistic and democratic South Africa, the legions of homeless people at red lights, shopping centers, restaurants, apartment blocks, bars, and beaches showed up the facts of a different South African narrative.

And the beautiful man I saw each evening? His presence took up a larger-than-life residence in my interior world. As a woman who had just been orphaned, who no longer had a home, I of course connected to this man. Something I could barely put into words. In a country where the idea of transformation was ubiquitous, this man still lived on the street alone. The truth was that for the majority of black South Africans, life did not improve economically in the first years after the dismantling of apartheid. My poem for him, “Change,” ends with

This man who nests
underneath the café eaves
tonight looks up and almost
nods to me—to me, not the stranger
from a distant country.

I still picture him in my mind’s eye, bedding down for the night as I walk past with my carton of milk and bottles of ginger beer. What might have happened if I had done something more than pour a few coins into his cupped hands? What if I’d learned his name?

As an outsider in a country that had had very few “cultural” visitors in the decades since the United Nations had called for a cultural boycott requesting that all academic and cultural institutions terminate ties to South Africa, I was in a strange position socially. The English faculty was certainly kind to me, if from a distance. My colleagues were happy enough to take me to a movie or a play, but they rarely moved beyond the one obligatory date. This was understandable in a country the outside world often condemned.

****

During my Fulbright year in South Africa, political poetry took front and center stage in my life. I met with men and women who had been jailed for their beliefs. I met poets who had gone to prison for their poetry, professors who had been jailed for doing nothing more than writing a pamphlet, editing a speech. One such poet and former philosophy professor I met, Jeremy Cronin, a man who had once contemplated the priesthood, now works for the South African government as deputy minister for transportation.

In a 2001 interview with Irish scholar Dr. Helena Sheehan, Cronin mentioned the odd trajectory that had led him to move from his position as a University of Cape Town lecturer in philosophy to political prisoner. His lack of political activism before imprisonment is a common enough story but in his case struck me as extreme. Cronin stated, “So I ended up in prison as an ANC/SACP [African National Congress/ South African Communist Party] prisoner, but I’d never been to an ANC meeting in my life. I’d never seen an ANC flag. I’d never sung an ANC song, not that I can sing….”

During some of the toughest years (1976–1983) of the apartheid struggle, Cronin was imprisoned, spending a portion of his time in solitary confinement. He was arrested under the Terrorism and Internal Security Act and tried in Cape Town Superior Court. At the beginning of his seven-year term, his young wife, Anne Marie, died of a brain hemorrhage. Now his love poems to her are taught to schoolchildren across the nation.

A man in his middle years, Cronin retains schoolboy good looks. His brown eyes smile at the edges; his hair looks thick and well combed. A pinstriped shirt and worn sports jacket are casual reminders of his years lecturing in college classrooms. Cronin told me that for his first book, Inside, he composed the poems inside a cell—literally. He needed to memorize his work and then write the poems down, revising them only after his release from prison.

One signature poem, “Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho Babang,” details a communication between two prisoners who can see each other only in the reflection of one handheld mirror. This seems an apt metaphor for how difficult it is to look at any life except indirectly. The poem’s title references a common African concept: ubuntu, a belief in a healthy community as central to society; the individual is not as crucial, culturally, as in Western belief systems.

Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho Babang
(A Person Is a Person Because of Other People)

By holding my mirror out of the window I see
Clear to the end of the passage.
There’s a person down there.
A prisoner polishing a doorhandle.
In the mirror I see him see
My face in the mirror,
I see the fingertips of his free hand
Bunch together, as if to make
An object the size of a badge
Which travels up to his forehead
The place of an imaginary cap.
(This means: A warder.)

Two fingers are extended in a vee
And wiggle like two antennae.
(He’s being watched.)
A finger of his free hand makes a watch-hand’s arc
On the wrist of his polishing arm without
Disrupting the slow-slow rhythm of his work.
(Later. Maybe, later we can speak.)
Hey! Wat maak jy daar?
          —a voice from around the corner.
No. Just polishing baas.
He turns his back to me, now watch
His free hand, the talkative one,
Slips quietly behind
—Strength brother, it says,
In my mirror,
A black fist.

I’ve read this poem with groups of students from Buffalo to San Diego, each time asking everyone to shout out together this universal African saying: Motho ke motho ka batho babang. The cinematic feel of the piece, the unspooling of sound and meaning until readers are left with the iconic symbol of the black fist, makes real the human connection across prison cell and color line.

When Cronin and I met at an outdoor restaurant outside Johannesburg, Even the Dead had just been released, and the cover art featured an extreme close-up of his handsome face. The publisher had made this picture a prerequisite for publishing Cronin’s collection of poems. As a deputy minister in the new South African government, Cronin was well known. As a poet, well, no one was really known for writing poetry in South Africa. Instead, the country was in love with its new political and social freedoms; poetry had yet to find its place.

What gripped the public consciousness during my time in South Africa were the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings (TRC) happening in different locations across the country. The TRC was a court- appointed body that focused on uncovering the victims of gross human rights violations and provided a legally sanctioned forum for people to tell their stories. Perpetrators of crimes could also come forward and recount their stories in exchange for amnesty, meaning they could not be charged for their crimes later. As with most human rights commissions, the system was complex and, by its very nature, imperfect.

I attended hearings outside Cape Town and watched Special Report, the Sunday-night television show that provided TRC updates each week. In South Africa, the name of the game was a visual and often disingenuous view of forgiveness. Grieving mothers met with the Afrikaner men who had tortured their sons and were expected to accept the mise-en-scène of apology. It went something like this: a thick-necked white man rides through the village that he terrorized as a soldier in the South African army, only now he’s on the back of a flatbed truck, waving and smiling to the people. Eventually, the truck and the gang of South African Broadcasting Channel (SABC) cameramen pause on key, and the man (these white men do look alike) delivers a speech that covers three points: I am sorry for what I did; I hope you can forgive me; I have no money or anything of value for the community except a few moments on TV. Oddly, many people did seem to feel that a TV crew’s filming in the village was payment enough—but not everyone.

From “Special Reports”

With a lopsided stride, she finds her way
to the visitor, steps up proudly, fires

saliva spitting dead
straight in the eyes of forgiveness;

one widow fine-boned and lean,
bows to the cameras of the SABC.

—Susan Rich

My poem ends with this woman’s interrupting the narrative of the all-forgiving mother. But as with many of the poems I wrote about my time in South Africa, the work feels weak when compared with the complexities of its subject. South Africa didn’t fit neatly into file boxes; I needed a new vocabulary for my experiences, and I’m not sure I ever exactly found it.

****

Teaching at the University of Cape Town afforded me opportunities to interact with South African students and faculty. I sat in my little room at Festival Court with the big view of Table Mountain, composing lesson plans for creative writing in the first term and American poetry in the second. It was in South Africa that I first taught the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Yusef Komunyakaa. It was in South Africa that I attended my first MLA-style academic conference and published my first (and only!) academic paper.

I met Mazisi Kunene, a former Angeleno who taught for nearly twenty years at UCLA, at the same conference. He left South Africa in 1959 to help lead the antiapartheid movement in the UK. A member of the ANC, he became its main representative in Europe. In his long life, he worked as an academic and a political activist.

Kunene and I met at an academic conference of English professors, at which the number of carjackings tallied during the week was often the key subject during the Q & A. For a few mornings in a leafy suburb of Johannesburg, we sat together talking poetry over eggs and coffee. Together with the Shakespearean scholar David Schalkwyk, we created a multicultural society of three. Kunene seemed amused by the fact that Schalkwyk came to the table each morning with a poem he’d worked on throughout the night. Fifteen years have passed since those generous mornings of breakfast and combustible laughter, but my sense of the quiet utopia we created there has not diminished.

A decade after our meeting, Kunene became Africa’s (and South Africa’s) first poet laureate. A year later, in 2006, he was dead at seventy-six.

From “Tribute to Mshongweni”

Your dreams shall invade our earth
Creating an endless line of horizons
We too shall follow the song of the night-bird to the hill
The whole earth shall see the falling star

 —Mazisi Kunene

I am glad to have known him, if only across the breakfast table. I keep this small table in my mind’s eye as another reminder that South Africa might transform into a place where poets, scholars, and even young Americans can come together.

****

In South Africa, poets were granted little attention. Especially young poets. In 1997 there was only one graduate degree program in creative writing and just a handful of annual literary events. However, I met one poet whose work I admired very much: Mxolisi Nyezwa, a man from Port Elizabeth. When we were introduced, because he was very shy and I was very shy, not much—if any—conversation took place. We stared at each other. I smiled; he looked down. Still, I found his poetry compelling. He had started the bilingual magazine Kotaz while living in the township where he had been born. I took this as a good omen for South African poetry; if Nyezwa was staying in the township, it meant he was making a commitment to live and document the new South Africa. Later, I sent him poems and was very thankful that he published them. Through letters, we were able to correspond. Today Kotaz is still going strong, and Nyezwa has published three collections of poems: Song Trials, New Country, and Malikhanye. A participant at the Poetry Africa festival sponsored by the University of KwaZulu Natal, Nyezwa wrote,

“Poetry is a simple way to remind us of our humanity. It guards against placing blind faith in the sciences, which are constricting to the human spirit. In poetry we discover our basic selves.”

Nyezwa’s style of poetry is deceptively simple. His images and obsessions contain echoes of Pablo Neruda’s work. It makes sense to me that when living in extremity, in conditions that the human heart can barely comprehend, a poetry of the surreal becomes necessary.

From “I Cannot Think of All the Pains”

i cannot think of all the pains that have come
and gone, pains in men’s waists
and in men’s shoes—
i cannot have relief proper, wearing a neat tie.

But it was Ingrid de Kok, a South African poet who had gone into self-imposed exile in Canada and whose poems I had discovered while I was at the University of Oregon, whose work most compelled me. In a speech she gave at Northwestern University, de Kok explained the double bind South African poets find themselves in. “It’s impossible to write poetry in South Africa without confronting the experience people have had of language and the expectations they therefore have of writers, whose ambiguous function is to undo the word while using the word.” I found de Kok’s questioning of her “right” to write a lyric of South Africa central to the question of poetry in South Africa: “Why do I write, what may I write, and for whom do I write?” she asks herself. In “Mending,” de Kok imagines a woman sewing as a metaphor for the new South Africa— the scene is damaged, with a “trail of red” and “a histogram of welts and weals.”

Mending

In and out, behind, across.
The formal gesture binds the cloth.
The stitchery’s a surgeon’s rhyme,
a Chinese stamp, a pantomime

of print. Then spoor. Then trail of red.
Scabs rise, stigmata from the thread.
A cotton chronicle congealed.
A histogram of welts and weals.

The woman plies her ancient art.
Her needle sutures as it darts,
scoring, scripting, scarring, stitching
the invisible mending of the heart.

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” lives quietly underneath this poem. The poems share a similar sense of loss in the face of history—whether personal or political. Both pieces require a formal vessel to contain the enormity of emotion. And, as de Kok told me in conversation, the poem is telling not only the story of South Africa but also the story of a woman struggling with the loss of her lover. Perhaps this poem answers, in part, de Kok’s question of how to write a South African poetry—a poetry that contends with both personal and national urgencies.

De Kok was the reason I chose South Africa as the country for my Fulbright. I was just as intrigued with her as a person as I had been with her poems. She took a great interest in my life and work—in a way no one had done before. She treated me as a fellow poet and, in time, we became close friends.

****

Many young writers keep journals while traveling, and I was no different. As I wrote, I often worried about whether my experience was authentic enough. Was I seeing the real South Africa? Did I spend enough time in the churches, the museums, the bars? I wrote about the electrical sockets in the country—that they too were undergoing a transition—the old table lamps unusable with the newfangled three-pronged outlets. I wrote about the color of lemons—that they were a mottled green, never ripe enough.

Looking back at these journals, I understand the difficulty of being in a place and time shot through with contradictions. The poetry of South Africa was changing and in the immediate aftermath of apartheid, it was perhaps too early to tell what change might mean for the country, let alone for poetry. Writers, business people, and arts educators were all searching for new ways to tell the nation’s stories—and to lay the foundation for creating new ones.

****

Every person who worked at the South African Museum—from museum guard to secretary, kitchen staffer to executive director—chose a favorite piece for this inclusive exhibit and wrote a curatorial note concerning why it was the piece he or she related to most. Ingrid de Kok took me to the museum in Cape Town early on in my stay; she insisted that I examine each piece in the show. I now suspect she wanted me to understand how South Africa was changing, that soon black men would not live behind apartment blocks in storage units, that a new democracy was forming. It was at this same museum, downstairs in the tearoom, that I first interviewed de Kok. My tape recorder captured her intense voice: a woman with confidence, committed to a changing nation. In some ways, my time in South Africa paralleled that art exhibit. I recall a series of experiences—midnight climbs, street people, Truth and Reconciliation Commission rallies, classes at the university—that were “chosen” by the various selves at work in me at the time.

In the year leading up to my Fulbright Fellowship, grief and change permeated each interaction, every space that opened to me. The dislocation of losing parents is not analogous to a country’s gaining its freedom, but in an illogical way, the experiences matched up. South Africa underwent a total sea change in the 1990s; Nelson Mandela, once the world’s most famous political prisoner, became the first black president of a country where, because of his skin color, he formerly had not been legally allowed to vote. The new South African constitution, compiled by working groups of lawyers, nongovernmental organizations, and community groups, became a model for progressives everywhere.

After my Fulbright year ended, I stayed on in South Africa for six more months, working for the United States Information Service and teaching at another South African university. Then suddenly I knew it was time to go home. I packed up my Festival Court apartment—passing it on to the next American, an African-American sociologist from Indiana—and returned to my old Toyota station wagon parked in the lot of my neighbor’s auto-repair business in Eugene, Oregon.

****

It must sound like living in South Africa was a struggle—and it was. Triple locks on the doors and a telephone that rarely rang. But struggle is where I discovered what I could endure; struggle is how I learned to trust my instincts and push beyond my self-imposed boundaries. What I have not stressed enough about my time in South Africa are the close friends I made, the experiences I wouldn’t trade away. The long walks home with Rustum, who suggested the title of my first book, the spiraling talks with Lisa as we tried to unpack the nature of our lives, everything enlivened by the newness of another continent.

My connection to Africa, if not strictly South Africa, remains alive in the poems I write and the students I teach. I am on the faculty at Highline Community College, which has the most diverse student population in Washington State. Sometimes international students join my classes having left their homes in Cameroon or Kenya five days earlier.

To better understand their sense of dislocation, it helps that I know firsthand what it is like to be seen as “other” by everyone around me and at the same time to have my own expectations of who I am shift as if I were standing on tectonic plates. Only in a country not my own would I be interviewed as an “American writer” on national radio or be invited to teach “American poetry” at a prestigious university. I was a recent MFA graduate without a book, and these opportunities were not available to me at home. Yet this dislocation, this insecurity bred from never understanding the expectations of those around me, made these experiences otherworldly. I suspect my African students have similar feelings when they are expected to share their ideas in front of the class or are required to write a five-page critical analysis of New American Cinema.

Today, time alone comes to me infrequently. An hour after midnight with a book or an afternoon working on a poem amplifies the moments I can keep to myself. Small crumbs compared to a Fulbright year. Some- times I wish I could return to that year, to days spent in solitary, more aware now of how crucial the time was for my development as a writer and as a person. Who was that young woman who was curious enough to dive headfirst into the experience of otherness? I’ve come up with more questions than answers. Questions of authenticity and dislocation, of dealing with grief and transformation, most of all of learning what it is to travel this one curious life as a writer, a Fulbrighter who stays suspended in an enlivened state of mind—singing or perhaps weeping under her breath.