Since I graduated my summer days have become indistinguishable. I spend them lackadaisically: looking half-heartedly for a job, checking off another must-read from the interminable list, struggling to cull meaning out of the squiggles of Arabic, watching the news as the world kamikazes into itself, and then ending the day with an hour of Seinfeld—a fitting show for this state of limbo.
I was fortunate enough to graduate right as the virus began its rampage across the West. It was strange to graduate from my bedroom, to wake up one day and not have the obligations of lectures, of papers, of remembering when I scheduled my aide to meet me at the cafeteria. This former sense of obligation was balanced out by the fact that, for the first time in my life, I was living independently and doing it successfully. I had achieved “the college experience”: the close friends, the parties, and the self-discovery allowed by a liberal arts education. Specifically, I had discovered my love of writing and language, and towards the end of university, I couldn’t wait to graduate so that I could finally “do what I want.” Unfortunately, being free at last from the shackles of whatever one thinks is holding her back, finally being flooded with that boundless sea of creativity is all bullshit. The shackles are replaced with fetters, and the boundless sea is still facilitated by an unpredictable faucet.
It came as a surprise that my writing hadn’t increased after graduation (whether it had decreased is hard to say). It had, in my estimate, remained constant—that same rickety pace of a writer who is continuously interrupted by his survival. In my privileged case, this survival isn’t a matter of homelessness or starvation but of independence, the ability to sustain myself using all the tools society offers me, a pressing matter for someone with “unconventional” needs. The task of organizing an “unconventional” system of support on which to build the rest of one’s life is as consuming (if not, more consuming) than the task of writing a research paper on the contemporary uses of Game Design Documents or designing an assignment-posting website. The task for a disabled person to acquire a job, a house, home healthcare, and an acceptable social life isn’t difficult due to the amount of effort it requires but the ambiguity of its progress.
Since May, I have been waiting, for the right job listing, for an employer to say “yes,” for a waiver to be approved, for a social worker to return my call, for a doctor‘s signature, for an HR person to answer my questions, for an interviewer to call me back. It seems I always lack something: not enough experience, not willing to relocate, not having this paperwork over that one, not asking the right person for the right thing. And over the phone, I’m beginning to wonder whether the slur and sudden breaks in my speech help curry my luck away from me. No matter how much effort I put in, no matter the case I present for myself, no matter how eager or uneager I am for the position, the immediate experience is a demotivating wait, which is compounded by an underlying nihilistic indifference, shared by so many of my millennial brothers and sisters, especially in this unprecedented time of uncertainty.
It could be that I’m not as proactive as I should be, that I’m doing a lot of waiting and not a lot of doing. But the issue remains, the same issue that I thought would resolve itself after graduation, the issue of doing what I want. I don’t think I’ve carefully considered what I wanted, and it’s unrealistic that I figure that out now, but over the past four years, I’ve been consistently hung up on the same few things: programming, foreign languages, reading, and writing. In general, I’m hung up creating: creating meaningful applications, creating sentences from strange words, creating meaning from pages, creating the pages from which others can create meaning.
I built Teranga House to ground myself as a creator, as a programmer, as an internationalist, as a perpetual student, and as a frustrated poet (a state which is required for poetry). This site is a direct lifeline to my work, available to whomever it intrigues.
The word teranga is a reminder of a trip I took to Dakar, where in my family’s house as I stood in the doorway, leaning desperately on my older brother, my cousin (around eight years old at the time) rushed to take off my shoes. I never met this child before, and he had never met me; we were strangers by everything except blood, but he—without any words, without any knowledge of or apprehension towards my strangeness—interpreted what I was looking for and provided it without any expectation. I was told much later that there was a word for that, a word that describes that unique warmth and openness: teranga, which is Wolof for “hospitality.”
I hope to recreate a place like that house in Dakar, home to many, who lounge in the open courtyard, sitting on ornate rugs as chicken sizzles in oil and old fingers grasp at beads. I hope to create a place where anyone can come devour things made by humble hands and dance to things uttered by careful tongues.