I write to note that I was in the 5 Year B.A. class of ’69-’70, and took that time to work on an agricultural scheme in the Copper Belt, growing vegetables for a truck farming project for a variety of different small farmers brought from hither and yon in Zambia, and then, for six months, to teach Math and Chemistry in French at a High School in the Center of what is now Congo-Kinshasa.
At the time, I “dropped out” for a year, to be able to then, “drop back in” to what Kingman Brewster typified as the “lock step” conundrum of spending one’s time, dutifully earning the merit badges of our society, to become “productive” consumers, and affluent members of our American society: to earn enough to produce more fodder for the conveyor belt (and “Hamster Cage,” if you will) to rise to the heights of material success and social approval of hardworking, intelligent Middle Class America.
Enamored of Sid Mintz, full of wanderlust, and curious, estranged by the politics of that moment, but reinvigorated from my 15 month interlude in Africa from Yale College, I finished Yale in Anthropology, and continued my escalator ride to law school, and work – with a short cut, I thought, at the time, to return to Africa, as a lawyer and entrepreneur, in Africa. Where I still am, now, 38 years later.
Nine years following graduation at Yale, which I did not attend, (as I was too busy learning the art of becoming a Hod Carrier in Columbus, Ohio), I, too, remembered the vague offers of the Five Year B.A. being able to return to Yale within 10 years of graduation, and, despite the total ignorance of the administration at Yale in 1979/1980, I did more than remember those promises, I invoked them to force my return to New Haven in 1979, and my way back to school, this time, to “drop in” and study, again, “subjects of interest” after a 9 year hiatus, chasing Conrad into “The Heart of Darkness.”
I parked on the beach of East Haven, hooked up with “Sir Lawrence of Baluchistan,” Larry Lifschultz, and proceeded to jump into the delightful, time honored experience of registering for classes, buying books, and looking for which classes to attend (and as my genes would prevail, not attend, in the great 1960’s tradition of dropping out, which I learned so well).
In 1980, taking a ride, again, on the Carnegie education “train” I chose a Comparative Law class in the Law School, an accounting class in the School of Management, a Portuguese language course, for the not-then too distant future when the Angola war would end and I might be called to service there, and I took not one but two classes of my guru, Bob Thompson´s courses on African Art, Mambo, and the aesthetic of watching and describing the origin and movement of African art and mores move across the Atlantic and into our culture, despite the ignorance and insensitivity of most, both Black and White in North America. Truth be told, my academic interests hadn´t changed a whit in the intervening nine years.
I do remember my reactions to being on the beach in New Haven, to being back at school after my 3 years of law school and 4 years of work “practicing law” in Kinshasa, that one lawless of all places on the planet.
I remember, vividly, what I thought was the shallowness of the then Yale Law prof, in Comparative Law, who had never negotiated an oil exploration permit in the Heart of Darkness, who had never arranged financing for a 3,000 mile long DC volt power line from the largest hydro site on earth, who had never defended Muhammed Ali’s Business Manager after being defrauded following the “Rumble in the Jungle,” and who had never attempted to get clients out of the Makala (Charcoal) prison jail in Kinshasa, not for breaking the law, but for doing business with the President’s wife, when the President was slipping poison into the morning milk of his wife.
I remember being somewhat exasperated in that return to school, both with the shallowness of many of the faculty I met, and with many of the students.
I also remember, vividly, the joy of being back with old friends, and having the deep, profound pleasure of time to sit and to talk and to share experiences, and insight.
Instead of staying at New Haven, I recharged my batteries, and went back to work, this time for an oil and shipping company, working on oil and shipping matters across Africa.
I remember being impatient, in a hurry, and determined to get back to the place I had grown to love and to respect.
And here we are, planning our get together to share notes, after a lifetime of being “elsewhere.”
And you know what? this reunion could not be more timely, nor more certain, of giving us all a short moment to reflect upon whatever it is that we think we thought we wanted to accomplish those 40 odd years ago, what we did accomplish, and what we may yet still want to do.
My own appreciation at this time is that time is moving faster than ever, and that the need to “connect” to our peers is greater than I would ever have thought possible.
Watching and feeling the polar caps melt, seeing the unbridled misery of so many, among the repulsive arrogance and almost criminal greed of what we thought was our bountiful American “goodness” and morality, turn into the opposite in recent years.
We all are in need of a review of ourselves, and of our connections to others. And, most importantly, how can we articulate immediate objectives, and DEMAND their realization by our oh-so-sleazy “Leadership.”
Picking up recently a copy of Goleman’s “Social Intelligence,” I can’t help but feel the profound need to speculate with others in this long distance conversation and reunion preparation if this awareness of our need to connect is not just a mere “social” occasion, but a “right on” moment to test new “waters” of communication to help us all trace a very difficult tomorrow, by looking together at our now, not so distant past, with the wonders of collective, immediate communication, almost as fast as our God given Amygdala, which, our scientists now believe to be our so-efficient antennae connecting to the spirit world of the rest of the world. If the science of psychology is “true,” then it only confirms what our Kabbalah masters have been teaching us for thousands of years: the inner “light” in us all, is connected to that in everyone else, by our God given antennae, linking us not only to our physical selves on the “low road” but to the spiritual, on the “higher road.”
Heavy stuff. Maybe not appropriate for either this forum or this soon gathering.
I feel otherwise.
I am trying to say that I did take up the Carnegie offer to go back to Yale, now, 28 years ago.
Coming back to Yale this forthcoming October weekend is another homecoming, and likely one of the most important, since I now understand in ways I never did back in 1967 or 1969 or 1980 or even in 2006, when I attended my first 1971 class reunion, of just how important our “joint communion” may yet become, as we all face the melt down of our planet, together.
This October weekend may very well be an enjoyable “memory” of the past.
For me, it is to be a shining light of accomplishment and hope, to understand how many of you are coping with the coming traumas, and to see how our renewed connection may be able to make yet more impact upon our society, which has gotten out of control and so damaging to us all.
Kim Barkan Five Year B.A. ’69 -’70, class of ’71