Make Something Beautiful
A poem for the Faculty of Arts graduates of 2023
In celebration of those who graduated from the Faculty of Arts on Tuesday 12 December, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Faculty of Arts Poet in Residence, composed and delivered the following poem as the guest speaker at the 10am ceremony.
In the early-morning dusk
of the tiny kitchen
of his house in Tottenham,
my grandfather murmured
as he passed:
You know, education
is the only thing
they cannot take
from you.
Remember that.
A five foot six burly man
with proud aubergine skin
and a voice
like thunder, rolling.
He was always spouting
advice like this:
dispensing wisdom
like a morning yawn.
They can never take it,
he said, your education.
Once it is yours,
it is yours forever.
There is not another thing
that I can think of
for which that’s true.
I was around nineteen:
visiting, from Australia,
for what both of us knew
would be the very last time.
My grandfather,
he always wanted to be an engineer.
His father died young,
and at fourteen,
to support his family,
he quit the schoolroom that he loved
and walked into the fields of Jamaica
to cut cane.
Back-breaking work:
bent double
day after day,
under the hot Caribbean sun.
Sweating, under the whip
of circumstance,
just like his ancestors
had done.
They can never take it, he said.
He knew a lot
about folks just walking in
and taking things
that didn’t belong to them.
Like how they took us
from the west coast of Africa,
through our kin.
Taking things
changed the trajectory
of our family
forever.
And as we all know, this
taking things
has never ceased.
My grandfolks aren’t those
you’d usually speak of
on occasions like these:
each of the four
the great or double-great
grandchildren of the enslaved
who could have lost their lives
for having the audacity
to learn to read.
Because once you know it,
they cannot take it from you.
That is why it is kept
from so many,
still.
And now, it’s yours.
This privilege.
However you arrived
in this moment,
at this place.
If you went hungry:
if you queued for food relief
across the well-fed university lawns.
If every moment was a fight.
If you shot your nerves,
your doubts,
your bank account.
If you got
that scholarship.
If you just cruised through,
and spent most of your time
at the unibar.
It's yours too.
If you’re the first in your family,
or street, or suburb –
your community or town.
If it’s no thing.
If you’re legacy:
like your mother,
and her father,
and his father before.
It’s yours.
If you almost didn’t make it
(we all know how dark
this world can sometime turn)
It’s yours.
If, along
with
the qualification that
you’re granted,
the very lands
on which this building stands
rightfully belong
to you.
It’s yours.
When I graduated,
my grandmother,
said two things:
that accent, lilted, singing
down the line.
Congratulations.
Now.
What are you going
to do with it.
A double major
in poetry and law:
when I started out, she knew
I meant to save the world.
So when Nan asked:
what are you going
to do with it,
the air between us filled with silence.
I did not want to disappoint.
I’m going to write poetry.
Nan paused,
for a moment,
then replied:
Don’t ever let anyone tell you
we don’t need that too.
Go ahead.
Make something beautiful.
Make something
that makes folks see
the wonder that we are,
make something that moves them.
There is a reason they come
for the poets first.
So today,
I invoke
this challenge.
for you.
Make
something
beautiful.
They say
the humanities are dying.
They’ll say
you’re fiddling
while the house is burning:
plucking harp strings
while white phosphorus
rains from the sky;
while innocents bleed;
while war rages
and tiny children
are killed in their sleep.
You might ask yourself why,
as the temperature warms
another degree
and angry tsunami’s
roll back seas.
As coastlines erode
and fault-lines spider.
While the cost of living rises,and yet another family
hitches postcode to their car,
or sleeps
under
bridges,
their potential,
flattened cardboard boxes,
the poverty line,
their dreams,
why make
something beautiful.
They’ll say:
you’re fiddling
while the house is burning.
Trawling oceans
for extant language
and obsessing over translation;
navel-gazing
as you contemplate
some turn of phrase.
While the meds folks
get to stitching wounds,
and scientists toil in lab-coats,
bleary-eyed, as ambulances queue
the wailing lockdown streets.
But there is a reason
they come
for historians.
A reason they come
for the artists.
A reason the humanities
are ridiculed
and slashed:
pushed out of reach.
They’re feared.
They preserve,
and they interrogate.
They move hearts,
and in moving hearts
they move the world.
Make something beautiful.
By song.
By stanza.
By history.
By choice.
By a language, kept, and revived,
so all can recognise its beauty.
Make a way
for someone else
who never had the chance.
For the granddaughters
of cane-cutters
who dreamt of being engineers.
Make something beautiful.A discovery.
An aria.
A score.
A poem.
A policy change.
A protest.
A law.
A life-unusual,
or a life in service
A life that’s
beautiful,
and brave.
Take this thing
they cannot take.
Take this privilege.
And in your own
small way,
go on,
and move
the world.
Maxine Beneba Clarke
December, 2023.