Self-Discovery: A Hope in the Unseen
It took me thirty pages until I got hooked on Ron Suskind’s A Hope in the Unseen but then I was taken completely. I became enthralled by this story of Cedric, a good kid who sticks it out through deprivation, hardship, insecurity, and fear, and finds out just what he is made of. And he is made of gold, pure gold tempered by the unflagging strength and faith of his mother, burnished by his own faith in God and in himself, and shining, fully lit, by his accomplishments as a ghetto kid in an Ivy world. The biggest accomplishment is knowing who he is, finding out his identity not by how others view him but how he understands himself. It is a book about survival and faith but most importantly it is a book about self-discovery. Cedric is inspiring in how relentless he is, how hard he is on himself and on others, and how very genuine his search for self is. And because the discovery of self is hard-won and true, how very powerful, quiet, and real it is. This book is not melodrama, it is real life and it is wonderful.
This book should be mandatory reading in high school as an antidote to what seems to be universal whining about how tough kids have it these days, with stiff competition for college placement and stress about personal identity. Cedric, boy child of a single mother, knows tough, from the drug-dealers and shootings in his neighborhood, to the rough ribbing he gets at school for being a serious student, to the nights where no dinner is served because there is just no money left over for stuff like food. He has to be both a beacon to his community (held up by his teachers and pastor as an example) and a scourge (ridiculed for acting “whitey” and for having dreams); all his mother’s faith but also her hopes ride on him while his absent and imprisoned and drug addicted dad judges him by his sexual conquests (zero).
What holds life together for this amazing boy are three forces: his mother, his church, and his own sense of who he is, no matter how hard that may be to define at any given time. What he always has is pride, pride in what he can be, what he has been, and what he works towards. He is like an immigrant in a new land as he strives for academic achievement, first in high school where he is solitary due to his dreams and then in the privileged atmosphere of Brown University, where he is solitary due to his background. Nothing in his past has prepared him for Brown, everything is new, the lingo, the customs, the traditions, and the rituals.
What I found very striking in reading about Cedric’s first months at Brown was how the other kids shared a sprawling background of historical, cultural, and psychological knowledge. Some of it was actively learned but much of it was absorbed and assimilated through a medium shared across the board by this group of elite students: they had been reading books, lots of books, all their lives, in school and out of school. What they gained in years and years of reading, Cedric had to catch up on in just a matter of months, and that was not possible. When he visits the Brown bookstore and sees all the books, he realizes how much there is for him to learn, to experience, and to study, contained right there within the books.
Having bucked the notion of what a black boy is supposed to be like in high school (to paraphrase Cedric, the basketball playing, the sex and partying and acting tough), Cedric finds himself at Brown struggling to find the identity that fits: he can feel his identity but he can’t pronounce it, nor has he any idea how his concept of self (Black, solitary, angry) works in Brown’s atmosphere of intellectual rigor, of tolerance, diversity, and experimentation. His honesty, his unquestioning faith, and his anger both obstruct his way at Brown and assist him in finding the strength to dig deep and discover just what he can do. When he writes an epic poem instead of a analytical paper about his experience observing a class in a poor, bleak Providence middle school, he is feeling his way towards understanding his past and defining his present: “Maybe I’ll just let the colors run.” He will not be contained by the color of his skin; he will not be bound by anyone’s definition of who he is, including his own. He just will not be bound at all, but free to leap off from the confidence of what he has accomplished and what he believes in. His identity is just a starting point and the future is open.
I found one of the most telling scenes in the book — and one of the most moving — to be when he is counseling a good friend against juggling girlfriends: “Listen, trust is something you have to practice. Someday you’re going to fall in love with someone, and you need to understand what trust is all about. What you’re doing now is developing bad practices of betraying people’s trust.” He is talking about relationships but what he says applies to self-knowledge and self esteem. He must be true to himself. He will not let himself slide, he will demand the most, and be honest with himself, and trust himself because of the rigors he places on his actions. Cedric is genuine in working out his identity, refusing to fall into the easy groupings offered in college, identity by race or gender or sexual orientation. He uses the demands of his classes, the intellectual skills he learns of analysis and review and revision, together with his passion, to understand himself. He has hope in the unseen and security in the knowledge of what he has experienced and overcome. From a place of hope and security, anything is possible.
