How Do You Mourn A Strong Poet?

There is pain to mourning, especially when death takes them so young. There is a singularity to death, to be sure, but we are always aghast of its repetition. It was an afternoon. A graduate student and a friend sent me an iMessage indicating that Greg Dimitriadis had just passed away. That “just” was no more than few minutes. Thankful to have known so quickly, but horrified—or was I paralyzed?— by the news. On the phone with the friend: “What do you mean by passed away? It can't be. I just saw him at AERA in Philly few months ago.” Greg and I had a promise to meet at least once a year at a conference and catch up with our news. In Philly, he told me about his newfound love. He complained, “We work too much.” I nodded strongly, “So we gotta balance things, Awad.” “Damn right, Greg; damn right!”

To know strong poets is to know them in person and through their work. Greg and I know have known each other through our work, first. Located within the politics of radical pedagogy, our paths crossed as each, in our separate corners and countries (mine in Canada and his in the United States), was invested in the poetics of hip-hop, radical cartographies of youth culture, and its ability for social transformation, and new forms of literacies, where identity, pedagogy, and hope are central. His ability to produce as much in such a short life, on the one hand, and to maneuver between these rhizomatic spaces, on the other, is what qualifies him as a strong poet. In academia, we have too many poets: those who are brilliant in their own way, who definitely know how to write and work their way into the system, but who write and work for tenure and securing their lives in the academy. Strong poets are altogether different.

Strong poets, according to Richard Rorty (1989), do not simply write verses. They definitely do not write articles to get tenure, even though they may acknowledge our need to secure our jobs, because if one is not good to one's self, one is no good to anyone. Daring in more ways than one, the strong poet is someone who not only has the language, but also the vision to tell us something new or invent the known in an unknown language. As such, Maxine Greene, Paulo Freire, Joe Kincheloe, Roger I. Simon, and Michel Foucault, among others, as well as the emerging (but cut way too short) figure of Greg Dimitriadis, all fall under the term. For me, Greg is a strong poet precisely, as Rorty put it, because he was horrified of simply being “a copy or a replica,” he had the courage and audacity to engage, look for and think through the “blind impresses” (p. 43), the gaps and the blind spots of thoughts, ideas, and practices. Three central blind spots that Greg has identified: the poetics of hip-hop, the politics of difference within cultural studies, and how to conduct research that is bestowed with the ethics of bearing witness and the angst of testifying. For Greg, we do not conduct research per se: we provoke, we complicate conversations, and we rephrase the known in an unknown language. Be it hip-hop, postcoloniality, democratic education, curriculum theory, pedagogy, urban youth, qualitative research, religion, labor studies, race, or gangsta rap, Greg always had the courage and audacity to look for and “think through” (Derrida, 2000, p. 30) the gaps and the blind spots of ideas and practices in these champs d’étude or fields of study.

For Rorty (1989), these gaps and blind impresses are the difficult knowledges—problems, if you like—that society or the particular group prefers not to face, be it racism, antisemitism, sexism, classism, or homophobia. In the face of formidable pressure, Greg chose to walk through these problems, so to speak, and dealt with them at the individual, national and international level. He was an inspiration, and humanity represented in person for those of us who knew him well enough to call him a friend. As someone who “made things new,” to use Rorty's (1989, p. 43) terms, Greg as a strong poet acknowledged—if not lived on—the contingency of life and ideas. Life and particularly education, in Greg's works, were thus turned into a mobile army of metaphors that are in constant need for writing and rewriting. For Greg, life and education were not a result or an ensemble of actes gratuits (random, haphazard, and gratuitous acts) but arduous actes de raison (acts of reason). To live and to educate as a strong poet, as Greg did, requires a vision, an imagination, an intense desire (usually for social change), a faculty of reason, and a “talent for speaking differently” (Rorty, 1989, p. 7). For me, Greg is a strong poet precisely because he was a human being, a scholar, and a good friend to many. He was a human being who was “capable of telling the story of [his] own production in words never used before” (p. 28). And for this reason, his vocabulary was not free-of-error. Yet, his life was wrapped around the ethical responsibility of storytelling: that one has to tell one's story. It is a moment of failure, if not death, Greg was famous to repeat, to be told one's own story. His work with young, urban, and marginalized youth is an example to follow. Ethically mindful, it bore witness to their lives, struggles, hopes, and desires. To fail in life, and particularly in education, in Rorty's (1989) terms, “is to accept somebody else's description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems” (p. 28), Greg Dimitriadis never accepted this, hence he was, and still is, a strong poet. For me, his book, Performing Identity/Performing Culture: Hip-Hop as Text, Pedagogy And Lived Practice (2009) exemplifies his life as a strong poet and his politics as a radical pedagogue.

Strong poets never die because, through works like these, they become a public text that is read and reread. And as long as there are strong readers, strong poets will continue to live. To rest in peace, as I hope Greg is doing, is to carry on his work. In carrying on their work, strong poets do not expect anything from us but our absolute best. Strong poets desire deeply, so that others, especially the marginalized, can live in a just society; and love unconditionally, so that we are guided by that which is hopeful and which we are trying to bring into existence.

People like Greg, in other words, understood that in this theater that we call life (or education), we are confronted by two things: the purpose of life and which direction to take in it. In his wonderful discussion with Sophie, the protagonist in Sophie's World, Alberto reminds the 14-year-old Sophie that, as humans, “We are condemned to improvise. We are like actors dragged onto the stage without having learned our lines, with no script and no prompter to whisper stage directions to us. We must decide for ourselves how to live” (Gaarder, 1996, p. 457). Greg has written his script, and it is a beautiful one. He left us wondering, so what is our script, our poetic line, and our verse in this life? The choice is ours, but as Greg and I always repeated every time we left each other, the most beautiful are yet to be born, so let us give birth to them.