Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,29

Union to my friend, seemed to have a more accurate read on me than I did. I started to see myself in a kaleidoscope, dividing and doubling, going in and out of focus. Had I gotten in because of who I was or had I gotten in because of my blackness? And if I’d gotten in because of my blackness, was it an issue that I couldn’t figure out how to define my blackness or engage with it? Was it a problem that I didn’t really know who I was, black or otherwise, anymore?

When I started college, I carried with me the good wishes and hopes of the community that I came from, some who knew what an opportunity like Columbia could provide, and others—like many members of our church—who had never heard of the school before but had a blind faith that I was headed toward something extraordinary. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the way the world that I knew seemed to constantly take on new definitions and features. Sometimes piece by piece, sometimes all at once. I think the simplest way of putting it is that nothing I’d arrived thinking felt true anymore. But, I suspected, if I simply tried to ignore the shifting understanding of blackness and its connection to my sense of worth, if I never actually acknowledged this feeling, I might never have to look it or myself in the face.

Turns out I was wrong. College revealed me, suddenly, like the villain at the end of an episode of Scooby-Doo. I would have gotten away with it, if only it hadn’t been for those meddling kids in the Black Student Union.

Disorientation

I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life as the Columbia University 1999–2000 course catalog. A thick, printed brick of possibility, it provided a blueprint for getting a degree. More important, to a new student laying eyes on it for the first time, it seemed like a Cheesecake Factory menu of potential knowledge. When you go to the Cheesecake Factory, you know that you can’t eat everything, but for a brief halcyon moment, as you peruse the Bang Bang Chicken and Shrimp, you believe you could. Electives, it turns out, were my Bang Bang Chicken and Shrimp. Sure, you’re supposed to complete your requirements first, but, like an eighteen-year-old Bartleby the Scrivener, I announced, “I elect not to.” The possibilities were too alluring to wait. In my first year at Columbia, I was repeatedly drawn to electives that focused on Latin American history and postcolonial literature, texts concerned with the aftermath of imperialism, particularly British imperialism. What I know now but couldn’t have articulated then was that I was searching for an understanding of Otherness outside of the context in which I existed, which I found in postcolonial studies. Surprisingly, I also found literature and histories that centered on people who had been othered inside their own narratives, despite what a Eurocentric perspective might suggest. I drank it up.

Some of these texts also challenged heteronormativity in the same way that they challenged Eurocentricity, which I was not expecting. I kept stumbling across ideas that sparked foreign feelings in, say, an essay about Orientalism and homoerotics, or a Native American fable about a two-spirit person, or Maurice, a British queer love story by E. M. Forster. What I’m trying to tell you is that postcolonialism turned me gay.

My memories from that time come in flashes, scenes. Like the one Latin American history professor who regularly gave us updates on her gay brother who was also her psychic. I wasn’t sure how this would help me in a future career, but I found it endlessly fascinating. In another class, we read and dissected Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. I’d never read Rushdie before and would stay up late into the night, poring over the unruly sentences again and again in awe. The novel is a wild, sexy gloss on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, set to a rock beat and framed by a collision between Eastern and Western cultures. It spoke about intersection and Otherness and love in a way that felt more powerful than anything I’d ever read before. Bits and snatches of the novel buried themselves inside me, like the pithy refrain that pops up over and over again in the text: “Disorientation. Loss of the East.” It was a literal definition of a term, as well as an invocation of a state of being