30 Years in America

I am an American, Nairobi born. Thirty years ago today as a small child I arrived in the United States of America. I came with my mother and two older brothers to join my father here. As with many who came before us, we didn’t come to America because of its past. We came because of its future. A future teeming with potential, yet still unwritten, which we thought we could have a hand in writing. Though I had no say in the decision, it’s one of the defining moments of my life. Years later, when I graduated high school, as class president I had the honor of delivering a speech to my wonderful classmates and their families; I chose to speak about our voyage to America and some lessons it taught me that I thought broadly helpful. Today I’d like to share those words and the gratitude and love in them as I celebrate my American birthday because all these years later they still ring true:

June 13, 2003
Amherst Regional High School Graduation
Mullins Center at the University of Massachusetts

My name is Godfrey Bakuli, and I’m the class president and the boy voted Most Likely to Succeed—meaning that I’m the unlucky soul who the class thought would be fine with loads of pressure to be successful. Yikes. But what does this all mean, all my nifty little nametags.

Do I know something about life that others in the class don’t? No, definitely not. I am no guru, I have no crystal ball. And when I need advice, I look to the same divine source of counsel that you and millions in this devout nation certainly all call upon: I watch Oprah.

Nevertheless, we are experiencing this glorious time in our lives in similar ways, feeling the same anxiety, eagerness, and doubt.

I can only tell you about what I have learned in my life because it is the only life I can speak most candidly about. Hopefully, this will resonate with you, but if it does not then that is alright, because you can sit tight. Our graduation speaker tonight will inspire you, make you laugh, make you cry, and at times make you wonder how a woman of her age could be so shockingly hip.

But back to my speech.

Recently, a friend of mine told me explicitly and rather harshly that she would never speak to me again if my speech was melodramatic. My teachers have implied that they would disavow any knowledge of my formal education at Amherst Regional High School if I came across as pretentious. My mother told me that I should make sure to thank the audience when I was done speaking. She said, “Don’t make them think I’ve raised you with a foot in the gutters.”

And just recently, coming to understand that those closest to me see me as a flashy, overdramatic, and ungrateful person, I laid down, rolled up into the fetal position, and willed myself into a midlife crisis at the unripe age of 17 and started to think about my life.

I’ve had a lot of free time the past few months, and I’ve been thinking about a lot of choice subjects. Well, I haven’t really had much free time, but there’s this thing called senioritis and it makes you think you have a lot of free time to sit and stare at the wall or play with a ball of yarn somewhere in the corner of a room when you’ve got a term paper due the next day.

And so I thought about a lot of things.

In my youth—OK, fine, two weeks ago—I was reclined in my bedroom, and thought about a situation that happened many years ago.

I remember one dark autumn night, when I witnessed first-hand a little boy, walking with his family in tow, trip over a curb and skin his knee. By the parents’ thick foreign accents, I assumed that they were an immigrant family and probably new to the United States.

The boy cried long and hard about returning to where he and his family had come from. The boy’s parents implored the boy to stop crying. Well, they didn’t actually say anything, but in their silent actions it seemed that they implied that with a lot of passion, a little inspiration, and a lot of dedication that little boys like him could leap over the troublesome curbs in American life.

I can relate to the boy because I too am an immigrant, hailing from Kenya, having touched down in the United States on August 22, 1988. However, there is something outside of the immigrant aspect of the story that interests me all the more in this time of our lives.

Ruminating on the experience made me realize something I had gradually and then suddenly realized.

On many occasions in my life, I had in times of great passion and anger told my parents that everything I had or would accomplish in life was because of my self-motivation and feelings that I was the only person concerned with my life. Wow.

My parents made sacrifices when they came here. They sacrificed the comfort of their familiar, native environment and intimacy of their relationships with family and friends so that their kids could attain something far more important and magnificent than any clichéd, popular notions of the American dream. 

But enough of my confessional. This is not a speech intended to teach you about loving your family.

It is intended to show you that the storyline that is one’s life has no beginning, no middle, and no end. The decisions we make, big and small, resound forever in the storylines of others. They made a decision and a sacrifice fifteen years ago and it resonates to this day and beyond.

They have never belated me with stories of their sacrifices to bring our family here, but what they have done, and what I now realize is, they inspired me to do great things.

And in all this pensive procrastination senior year, I learned of a beautiful truth: We too can inspire others to do great things.

In their moving of a family, I saw them moving a mountain—laying the foundation for something that with the right attitude, a lot of passion, a little inspiration, and a lot of dedication, I could construct to reach glorious heights.

We must relish life. We must enjoy every moment for its inconsequentiality or its fatefulness. It can be cruel, it can be unfair, but it can also be joyous and magnificent. We have only one life to live, so we must live it right. We must engage and pursue the life we want because every moment of our lives is important to us individually, to the people we come into contact with, and to the society we live in.

Do you remember that young immigrant boy that skinned his knee tripping over a curb? I was that young boy. That’s my first memory of the United States.

And so, mom, I won’t come across as ungrateful. Thank you both for picking me up that evening, and thank you for inspiring me to see that my classmates and I, with the little things, like curbs and a helping hand, and the big things, like leaving our homes, Are Moving Mountains Every Moment of OUR Lives.

Thank you.

Now I’d like you to welcome to the podium this year’s graduation speaker, storyteller, grandmother, and Dean of Students at Amherst College—the admirable Onawumi Jean Moss.

Language Lessons

“All living is listening for a throat to open. The length of its silence shaping lives.” - Claudia Rankine

Five days after my older brother George passed away in spring 2014, my dad and I drove to New York from our family home in Massachusetts to collect George’s belongings from his apartment. It was not my first time in his apartment but it was my first time looking through his personal stuff since maybe we were kids. I noticed something surprising. I noticed how organized he was. His suits and dress shirts on the same type of hangars, all in the same direction. His other clothes folded neatly and put away tightly in drawers. In his many books, the notes he wrote on the margins of the pages were so clean and so legible. And then I realized something. I was only surprised to see this because society had lied to me. And it lied to you. And it continues to lie to us. And that lie matters. We are often told to believe that someone who is mentally ill is someone who appears in shambles and by appearances “Doesn’t have their life together”. Yet here was the opposite.

There is an invisible tapestry we all have a role in sowing that describes what mental illness looks like. You see it in jokes that make light of mental illness or death by suicide, or the way in which almost everyone uses words like “crazy”, “batshit”, or “insane” to describe a negative person or situation. We think we’re being colorful. We think we’re describing something accurately. I’ve seen my smartest friends and acquaintances do it. I too have done it. But all it does is quietly but firmly make someone who questions how they’re feeling, feel like they can’t talk about it, like they can’t seek help. We think nothing of it, but all the while sow another thread into that invisible tapestry. And if you haven’t been paying attention, you should because that tapestry might be invisible but it is not light. And it doesn’t discriminate. It can weigh as heavy as a sheet of steel, and it doesn’t care what your gender, race, or age is. That you’re a beloved chef, a loving and loyal brother, a devoted mother and fashion icon, or a favorite boss. It doesn’t care how much money you have, how good you look, or how easily you cross international borders. Yet we add to it when we fail to consider what we do to make it stronger and continue to stigmatize mental health.

I love George and think about him every single day; I am eternally thankful for him and for the positive influence he continues to have in my life. He taught me to love myself without reservations. He taught me to speak up, to apologize, to laugh, and to heal. And he taught me to fight for my life, tooth and nail if I had to—which he did too, first by seeking therapy. He would be 34 years old today. Every ounce of me wishes he were still alive. And I know had he not fallen into the altered state of mind that sadly took him from us, he would too.