{"id":3498,"date":"2021-10-26T12:07:19","date_gmt":"2021-10-26T16:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/?p=3498"},"modified":"2021-10-26T12:09:06","modified_gmt":"2021-10-26T16:09:06","slug":"ghosts-of-harvard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/2021\/10\/26\/ghosts-of-harvard\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghosts of Harvard"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Like every good heroine these days, Cadence \u201cCady\u201d Archer in Francesca Serritella\u2019s Ghosts of Harvard<\/em> is on a social mission, one driven, in her case, by the desire to understand why her brother Eric committed suicide. True, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but Cady feels sure that there were other forces in play\u2014people who might have pushed him, literally or figuratively, over the edge.\u00a0 Like her parents, Cady is guilt-ridden, tormented by the thought that her brother\u2019s suicide could have been prevented. Newly arrived at Harvard as a freshman, she begins her detective work, piecing together the story of her brother\u2019s death in an effort to begin the process of healing, for herself and for her parents.<\/p>\n

Cady has her own demons, and they manifest themselves as a trio of disembodied voices from Harvard\u2019s past: J. Robert Oppenheimer, who graduated from Harvard in 1925 and went on to become the \u201cfather\u201d of the atomic bomb; Bilhah, an enslaved woman who died in 1765 while \u201cin service\u201d at the residence of Harvard\u2019s president; and finally an undergraduate named \u201cWhit,\u201d who longs to participate in the war effort as an aviator. Deftly woven into the narrative arc of Cady\u2019s search for answers about her brother, these three figures take on a life of their own, reminding us that every tragic event in the history of institutions like Harvard is entangled in a web of narratives, some known, some forgotten, and some calling out to be told for the first time.<\/p>\n

At a service commemorating the lives of Bilhah and three other enslaved people who had labored at Harvard, President Drew Faust noted that \u201cthe past never dies or disappears. It continues to shape us in ways we should not try to erase or ignore.\u201d And John Lewis reminded those present for the affixing of a plaque on Harvard\u2019s Wadsworth House in honor of Titus, Venus, Bilhah, and Juba that, as a nation, we have tried to \u201cwipe out every trace of slavery from America\u2019s memory, hoping that the legacy of a great moral wrong will be lost forever in a sea of forgetfulness.”<\/p>\n

Heroines from times past used words and stories to repair the fraying edges of the social fabric as well as to mend, heal, and make whole. The auditory hallucinations that haunt Cady are both a disturbing sign of possible derangement but also a genius way of channeling voices from the past, retrieving their stories from Lewis\u2019s sea of forgetfulness. In her poem, \u201ci am accused of tending to the past . . . ,\u201d Lucille Clifton told us how \u201cthe past was waiting for me \/ when I came\u201d and how \u201cthe faces, names, and dates\u201d of History, once nurtured, become \u201cstrong enough to travel\u201d on their own. In Ghosts of Harvard<\/em>, they do just that, waking us up and reminding us that there is value in tending to the past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like every good heroine these days, Cadence \u201cCady\u201d Archer in Francesca Serritella\u2019s Ghosts of Harvard is on a social mission, one driven, in her case, by the desire to understand why her brother Eric committed suicide. True, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but Cady feels sure that there were other forces in play\u2014people who might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3498"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3500,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3498\/revisions\/3500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}