We are in community, but alone. Removed from our homes, our children, our loves, our mothers, our fathers, our animals. We are stripped of our statuses real and imagined: financial, familial, political, letters behind a name (even names!)- all are irrelevant here.
We are reduced to students scrabbling away for understanding. We are overloaded with learning. Non-coherent, we push out papers instead of dinners, we read instead of sleep. We long for arms and hands to cook for us, caresses in the night.
We are in the liminal stage of transformation- brought to our knees by an academic process, and a removal of identity.
This is the ritual, the transforming of us into what they want us to be. What we want to be. For we volunteered for this, didn't we?
Communitas
It is in the liminality we find solidarity. We form a network of care. My Thai friend says to my Rwandan friend: my daughter. She replies: my mother. We laugh and share. I hunt for boots and spices with the Mistress of Crashes, and we share a similar meal... this vegetarian, though, chopped chicken for Ramadan at 2:00 am Saturday night, because when one is asked to help, it is only fair.
Those of us with children, with babies we left behind, animals, sweet innocents or kids we fear will resent us, we share a physical ache in belly and back. We are the lunch-packers, the ones who eat together mid-day, in our concave of the Spinhuis. We shoulder books instead of small bodies, hug texts to our chests.
Transformation
occurs only when the process is complete. Only when we will return to society, with new knowledge, new ways of being.
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