Doing More with Less: An Ode to HBCUs

By Tiffany Pennamon

Alas, it is HBCU Homecoming season and I’m feeling much pride and a bit of nostalgia for the days I walked the grounds of my undergraduate institution, thee illustrious Spelman College. This nostalgia is sitting on my spirit particularly because the place where I now work – the first degree-granting HBCU, Lincoln University – just wrapped up a beautiful week of programming for the Black Public History Festival.

The week’s events underscored the value and sacredness of HBCUs as spaces for incubating revolutionary leaders and artists such as Kwame Nkrumah and Elizabeth Catlett; affirming and protecting the brilliance, beauty, and joy of our Black youth; and preserving our languages, traditions, history, and culture as a collective. Seeing students, faculty, staff, friends, and more show up each night reminded me that, as a people, we have always made something beautiful with the least amount of resources, and sometimes, under the harshest of circumstances.

Though HBCUs are not without their flaws, I know there are people like myself and my Ubuntu Center faculty colleagues who are doing the work and creating lifelines for each other, our students, and our communities beyond our respective campus gates. We hope to model for others the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and the many ways knowledge can be built and shared, transcending traditional academic forms through the arts, intuitive silence, and dialogue.

October will bring cool mornings and familiar faces at homecoming tailgate. But more than this, autumn is a time for honoring the past while striving towards better futures for us all.

I'm Still Guided by Toni Morrison

By Tiffany Pennamon

“Anything can happen in art. There are no boundaries there. Having to do it, or having to prove that I can do it, is what was embarrassing, or insulting.” — Toni Morrison

I am forever guided by the life, wisdom, and ancestral spirit of Toni Morrison, one of the greatest authors and literary critics to ever walk this Earth. Here is a remarkable interview where she discusses her writing responsibility as an African American, her learning from African and Afro-Caribbean writers, her “sovereignty as a racialized person,” and why it is okay for Black writers to write specifically to and for other Black people.

Moon as Mirror ~ Shadows / Shinings

By Tiffany Pennamon

Go out and be with it as you did when you were a child, when you needed to be with something, with anything else that was changing and surviving the changes. — Joseph Fasano, “The Moon”

My earliest moments of introspection and musing came as a child in awe of the moon, whether on long road trips or staring out my window as dusk turned to dark. Its cratered surface and milky luminescence, along with the vastness of space, fascinated me so much that I wanted to be an astronaut and astronomer at various points in my life. I spent hours reading or watching TV series about space – the planets, constellations, NASA’s Apollo missions, Black holes, the origins of the universe. Although my life path eventually led me to literature and women’s studies, my enchantment with the moon and stars now takes the form of embracing change while accepting the shine and shadow of my essence.

New Moon. You may look, but I do not wish to be found; I am contemplating. Brooding. Manifesting. Although, if you do happen to stay awhile, remaining curious, I may eventually unfold again.

Waxing Crescent. I am calibrating fresh wings that occasionally falter in deluge and crisis. The metamorphosis is underway.  

First Quarter. Equilibrium. Balancing surviving and thriving. Sometimes it’s two bowls of Lucky Charms for dinner. Sometimes it’s a savory pot roast.

Waxing Gibbous. Rooted and hearty enough to step forth, speak up, share art … yet still making space to live gently with the uncertainty of the unseen.

Full Moon. Embodying the quiet confidence and fortitude learned from my daddy, uncles, and brother; embodying the audacity and ferocity passed down from my grandmother, mother, aunties, and cousins. It is okay to be seen when Source brings me to zenith. My scars, valleys, and depressions do not make me unlovable. Presence is more than words.

Waning Gibbous. When the light starts to taper, I am equipped to confront the void and dark matter of the unknown. I am deliberate / and afraid of / nothing.

Last Quarter. No longer ashamed of being sensitive, of being whimsical, of being intense, of being angry, of being sensual, of being light, of being dark. It is paradox paradise.   

Waning Crescent. Reticent. Grieving. Receiving and extending grace. My chosen community holds me in tranquility while I traverse my sea of space. I detach periodically, for health, but always return again.

As I continue to think about what it means to change while in community with others, there is something very comforting about having a celestial body watching over me not only during the loneliest hours of the night, but also throughout the day if you know where to look. The moon’s presence is admirable and something to learn from because presence, like the moon, cannot always be expressed in words. I hope to be the same for others: holding them with my gravity, and bearing witness at all times even in my own retreats into silence.

I watch the moon; it watches back. It is a mirror reflecting a soul that is just as cratered, just as primordial. It is a needed reminder of the star shine within – that I can be small and still so vital to the world around me.