Beloved guests,
I want to thank you for not only being here today, but for being in my life. If you’re watching this ceremony, it means that you are one of the many reasons that I am standing before you today, ready to graduate from Northstar Preparatory Academy and begin undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University. If you’re watching, you probably also know that I am a poet. Over the past year I’ve been asked my friends, employers, interviewers, and admissions personnel alike how I became interested in poetry. I usually tell them the abbreviated version of the winding river that was my journey to actually enjoying the perplexing practice of poetry. The “too long, didn’t read” version, if you will. I’ve always enjoyed knowing things and being known.
As a young child, I would approach complete and total strangers in the supermarket and tell them “Hi, my name’s Yasmine. I live near here. My daddy’s not here. He’s deployed.” I wanted to know people’s names and I wanted them to know mine. In elementary school, my “understanding the weather” kick was inspired by learning about tsunamis. I was relentless in my quest to learn more about how stormclouds form, how to recognize a funnel cloud and the potential for a tornado, and gather all I could about the mysterious ‘Bermuda Triangle.’ By middle school, I cherished the time I spent listening to the National Public Radio on the way to school. I had so many answers to all of the questions my little brain could come up with and it was exhilarating.
But as I entered high school, I began having a bit of an identity crisis. In my college admissions essay, I wrote about how in that time, for me “The dash between African and American in my African-American identity was more of an erased period of history than a cohesive link.” I had so many questions: who was I and where could I belong in my mosaic wholeness? How could I respond to those who always wanted me to turn my drowning into a hopeful song of drinking gourds and dreams? What was I to do with all of the thoughts trying to organize themselves on a tongue not ready to take them places beyond my mind? I had far more questions than I had answers.
That’s where poetry came in. My very first published poems were all about the questions I was too scared to speak aloud and the places and people that encouraged me to ask them anyway. Sometimes, writing these poems led me to the answers I wanted so badly- even if it was in a roundabout kind of way. And sometimes they straight up didn’t. But I learned that the places and people that honored my many, many questions and constant desire to pursue their answers where the ones worth keeping and cultivating.
The Be the Bridge Youth Community, led by the incomparable Jordan Walker and supported immensely by the amazing Ava Brown-Button, held space for me in my questions fueled by grief, rage, and hope. They taught me how to communally dream in the face of societal issues that seem insurmountable. The Homefield Advantage team taught me that the community in which you will belong will be the community that you help create. That the place in which your quest for knowledge that you can bring back is supported is one of the purest forms of love there is. It was my many chosen aunts, family elders, and theater instructors, who over the years, have slowly been giving me the answers, or rather been modeling the options, of what kind of person I could become. You know who you are.
And come to think of it, it was my parents who taught me to keep asking questions. That my refusal to accept what is for what must be is a blessing and a revolution instead of a nuisance. It was my father who played NPR on the way to co’op and who would indulge me in conversations about politics, languages and cultures, and more. It was my mother who not only homeschooled me from middle school forward but was also the first person to suggest I even put my poetry out into the world and the first to offer up a platform on which to publicize it. She was the first person to show me that my words were needed, and I mean that in every way it could be read. It was the Lord who formed such wonders for me to even ask questions about and who guided me in my community-making so that those questions would have somewhere to go.
So, reflecting on that, I realize that while so much has changed in my eighteen years of life, my four years of high school, and my year living in this pandemic-shapen world, I am returning to the girl who wanted to study how the formidable stormcloud is formed from thousands of soft, liquid bodies. To my fellow graduates and to those who are on the verge of graduating, I urge you to do the same. Carve out a space for your wondering and thirst for knowledge and water that space. Your garden will grow stronger and greener in company so find people who are trying to grow in every which way with their questions and quests and quirks, too. That way, your trees can talk with someone else’s trees. That way, you can grow snug into a pattern of “I know you” and “I am known by you.” As I graduate and am surrounded suddenly by new faces and new possible futures and what seems like brand new everythings, I return to the little girl in the supermarket with wide eyes and so many questions. I return to the little girl who just wants to grow.