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Sixth Former Gerrard Hanly addressed the student body at Church Assembly on Thursday, January 22. Gerrard spoke of the dichotomy he experienced between home life and school life as a first-generation American, especially when he arrived at Portsmouth Abbey.
Following is the transcript of Gerrard's talk.
I'm the first American in my family. My mother is South African, my father is Zimbabwean. People always ask me if he's white or not. Nobody thinks twice about mom being from South Africa, but as soon as I mention dad's Zimbabwean, it's always, "Oh, what tribe is he from?"
The two of them moved from Africa, the Dark Continent, to Georgia, the Dark Side of the Mason-Dixon Line. They did this so my father could finish his medical training and get set up with a job quickly. Along the way, they fell in love with America, and then I was born. Well, they keep telling me it happened in that order, at least. Whatever the circumstances of my birth may be, I was born nonetheless, a second-generation immigrant with parents from a place nobody's heard of. What's more American than that?
The two hemispheres of my life, home and school, foreign parents and American friends, have been mismatched from the very start. Somewhere among all the funny accents and colloquialisms I didn't understand, I found myself feeling like I didn't belong in the very culture I grew up in. Back in elementary school, I was too young to let that get to me. My class of 20 or so became an extended family. I was comfortable around them because, as time went by, they gave me the same security that my parents did: the feeling that they had always been there, and that they always would be. That they were an unconditional part of my life.
For most of the students of Saint Francis Xavier's eighth grade class of 2011, this implicit promise was true, because they all went to the same public high school. It was not true for me, because I was accepted into a Catholic boarding school in Rhode Island.
I'm not going to insult you by saying I'm the only person here who felt out of place as an adolescent, but in my Third and Fourth Form years, I took a lot of things personally.
To sum up two years of confusion and teenage angst in one sentence: I was very awkward and insecure for a long time.
I had come from the South, the land of milk and honey and disproportionately low standardized test scores that I had lived in the entirety of my life, to New England. The last time I changed schools, the last time I made new friends, was when I was five years old.
As I walked the cobbled paths of the Abbey, I felt that I knew what my forefathers must have felt as they first ventured into the Heart of Darkness to carve out a living for themselves. So that alone should tip you off as to how clueless I was back then. I had ancestors who died in the potato famine and fought in the Boer War, and there I was saying "Your pain echoes in me, grandfather," because I sat alone at breakfast a few times.
Even though I spent two years feeling hard done by the cosmos, at the wrong end of a particularly raw deal, and generally just being sorry for myself, the one thing I never did about my misfortune was cry.
No, the only time I cried was Fifth Form year.
It was a little less than a year ago, one of the many inhospitable winter afternoons I spent huddled away with a computer. But unlike recent years, I wasn't keeping to myself. I was sitting on the dilapidated ruin that Ryan Conroy kept in his room last year and referred to as a "couch." The room was filled with people, and the sound of their laughter. It was during that beautiful crescendo right after you tell a joke, when you get to ride a smooth tide of mirth with a wry smile and a slight blush to your cheeks. Moments like this were becoming increasingly common for me.
Conroy himself was sitting sidesaddle on his standard-issue wooden rocking chair, across the room from me.
"Gerrard," he said, the tempo of the jiggling slowing, "I don't think you realize that you're the funniest kid at this school."
George, from his perch at the other end of the couch, chimed in with agreement. So did Hugh, the hip Korean who was the other proprietor of the room I had begun to bide most of my time in.
All of them, alongside me, constituted what we had tentatively started referring to as "The Squad." They were all glad to have me with them but, more than that, they all expected me to be with them. I realized then that over the past few months, we had all become incorrigible parts of one another's lives. We hadn't always been with each other, and we wouldn't always be, but we were now, and that was enough.
They were all laughing, and I was crying. Like a little girl.
I gave a muttered excuse and slipped out the door, a comedian disappearing backstage now that his set's over. If they saw me crying, they'd have words for me that I can't repeat here in a church.
Thinking about it now, that wouldn't really have happened. The real reason I left was the simple fact that, for the first time in a long time, I was perfectly fine with being alone for a while.
Because I knew I didn't have to be alone if I didn't want to be.
In order to be fulfilled and functional, every man needs a hunting group. When I say "hunting," I'm merely referring to where this phenomenon got its start. When we were more animal than man, all we had was to survive, to push ourselves infinitesimally closer to what we are now with each generation. You could only survive if you hunted, and hunters could only succeed through collaboration. Ages later, we've escaped the bondage of natural selection. Nowadays, weak, genetic dead-ends like me and the Squad can unite under any of a wide spectrum of banners. In our case, it's Japanese cartoons.
For anyone listening to this who's the same way I was in my pre-Squad days, rest easy with the knowledge that the pretext is insignificant. All that's important is that you use it to find, to cite a proverb from my halycon days in Georgia, "people you're willing to bleed for."
Just as my Neanderthal progenitors had their hunting groups, just as Charlemagne had his paladins, I have the Squad.
Thank you.
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King and the many men, women and young adults who stood against government authorities in their determined, yet non-violent, efforts to end racial segregation and discrimination.Excerpts were shown of a documentary about Dr. King's life, the March on Washington, Bloody Sunday and the 1964-64 Montgomery Bus Boycott. Students spoke of sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and King's famed "I Have a Dream" and "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speeches. They also included remembrances of people who helped define the Civil Rights Movement and the rights of all, including Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and the Tuskegee Airmen.
CAAP participants (performers and stage crew) included: Kai Smith '15; Frank Loughran '15; Dean Bessey '15; Lily Ross '18; Ella Souvannavong '18; Rajahnah Matra '16; Yufeng Wu '15; Andrew Fonts '17; Lauryn Harper '18; Sophia Diodati '15; Victor Florescu '15; and Fen Billings '15.
