opinion: columns

In his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea, Langston Hughes described the Harlem Renaissance as the period when the “Negro was in vogue.” As I sit in my Harlem dorm room nearly a century after the Renaissance began, I have to say that the Negro is still in vogue.

As this is the last column that I will write, to me it only seems natural that I would address it to you. I knew from the first moment I opened a blank Word document in the tiny printer room on the sixth floor of Butler and searched for the right words to express my feelings that I would want to eventually write this to you. In the past semester of writing these ultra-honest pieces (that will be on the Internet forever!), I have learned a great deal about myself that I didn’t know before.

Writing this column for a year was just an elaborate ploy to get a Senior Wisdom, which I did not, in fact, get. Let’s unpack that.

When I first started writing in high school, words came easily. I’d be on a San Francisco bus, watching the light sear through the blurred plexiglass, and feel compelled to jot musings in the notes app of my phone; or I’d wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and enlivened, and spew my thoughts onto paper as if spurred by some extraterrestrial force. Back then, writing was an independent endeavor. It was something I engaged in when I felt moved to, or when I thought that translating my emotions into a journal might bring about clarity regarding a trivial aspect of my then-life.

When I was about four years old, I befriended a girl in my apartment complex named Myra. Our friendship was one that psychologists would fangirl over. Despite the fact that I could only understand Spanish and she could not understand any, we found a way to bond over our love for Barbies and play hide-and-seek. Both of our mothers were fascinated by our ability to communicate with each other in the face of the language barrier, in a manner they thought was remarkable.

When I was accepted to Barnard, I received my admitted student packet filled with several flyers, including an incomprehensible list of approved transfer credits, and a sleep mask with a note that said something along the lines of, “In the city that never sleeps, you’re going to need this.” It was both cute and ominous.

Consider these relatable make-believe interactions.

As a transfer student who has no problem airing my grievances about this institution, I have been asked a lot whether I regret accepting my offer of admission to Columbia.

Notre Dame had only smoldered for a day when news broke that the French government would move to dismantle a different cathedral, a metaphorical one that baptizes a well-connected elite.

At Columbia, the foremost sign of spring is the clattering of bleacher construction. Like cherry blossoms, they bloom almost overnight and disappear just as quickly; when they’re gone, an entire class of students goes with them. Like bleachers, students are part of the architecture until they aren’t. The removal of rebuildable architecture always takes something with it; grass needs to be resodded, pavements repaved. Some of campus escapes the need for rebuilding; it endures in brick, stone, and archive. But so much of Columbia—and I’m speaking quite literally now—is lost every spring.