A Gazelle Ate My Homework by Habib Fanny

Author:Habib Fanny
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thorntree Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

June

Oakland Community College in Farmington Hills, Michigan, seemed to have the most beautiful campus in the world. This was for the simple reason that I had seen no other campus when I started classes there in the fall of 2003. In retrospect, I’m hard-pressed to say what I loved so much about it, save that the lawns were very well manicured. To my 17-year-old eyes, it also seemed to have the most beautiful girls in the entire world, but I was exceedingly awkward with women and couldn’t imagine why any of them would want to date me. I was very conscious of the fact that I had no social skills. It appeared that I was younger than every single person on campus. And my conversational English was still not all that great. It was hopeless.

My favorite subject in high school had been math. “I don’t know what course others may take, but as for me, give me calculus or give me death.” I had learned about Patrick Henry’s speech and, thinking myself exceedingly clever, taken to writing my version of it on blackboards after class. It was no accident that I was seen as a very, very odd duck. But high school was gone. And I had to decide what exactly I wanted to study. I had liked math and physics, and therefore told myself that I would like engineering. It seemed to make sense. My hardest class that first semester was Calc III, but I enjoyed it very much. I also liked my history class, which was taught by a man who in retrospect was an eccentric amalgam of conservative and Black nationalist. He found such unlikely things as Tecumseh’s curse plausible. Nevertheless, I very much enjoyed his lectures, especially because we were both admirers of Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton was the hero that I needed. He was the wunderkind who had immigrated to the colonies as a teenager and overcome much adversity to become one of the greatest and most important founding fathers. He was the man I wanted to be. Because his favorite poet was Alexander Pope, I tried to read Alexander Pope. Because he had read Hume, I tried to read Hume. Because his prose was complex and hard to understand, I tried to make my prose—even emails—hard to understand, in the mistaken belief that opaqueness of meaning was a reflection of intelligence. It goes without saying that his enemies became my enemies, and there is no one I hated more than Thomas Jefferson, the slave owner who had written that Blacks were “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” I devoured biographies of Hamilton, which in retrospect had all been written more as hagiographies than as scholarly attempts to explain the man in his historical context. I came away from these books genuinely puzzled that anyone might find anything admirable about Jefferson.

But it wasn’t the classes I was taking that would change my life. I was fortunate to be assigned June Swartz as my counselor.

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