The Structural Poem
Let me tell you how it works.
Not the version in the handbook. Not the version in the mission statement with its careful language about community and excellence and the transformative power of education.
The actual version. The one that runs underneath like a current you cannot see from the surface but that pulls at your legs if you stand in it long enough.
Here is how it works.
They find someone brilliant. Someone who loves the work with the particular love that makes a person do more than is required, give more than is contracted, stay later than anyone is watching,
and they hire her temporarily.
Not because the work is temporary. The work is permanent. The courses run every semester. The students keep arriving. The curriculum does not pause to acknowledge that the person delivering it is not sure if she will be delivering it next year.
They hire her temporarily because temporary is cheaper. Because temporary does not require the benefits, the security, the institutional commitment that permanent requires.
Because temporary keeps her grateful.
And a grateful worker is a compliant one.
This is not a conspiracy.
I want to say that clearly because the moment you name the structure someone will say you sound paranoid, you sound bitter, no one sat in a room and decided to do this to you.
They are right. No one sat in a room.
That is precisely the point. That is what makes it structural rather than personal. The harm does not require intention. The harm requires only a system that has decided certain kinds of labour are infinitely extractable from certain kinds of people who can be kept just insecure enough to keep extracting from.
The system does not hate her. The system does not see her.
That is not comfort. That is the definition of the problem.
She was called lucky.
She was told she was lucky to have the work, lucky to teach the courses she loved, lucky to be in the room, lucky that the institution kept finding a way to bring her back.
Lucky.
As though her nineteen years of expertise were a gift the institution was generously receiving rather than a resource it was systematically mining.
She felt the gratitude. She performed it beautifully. She understood, without anyone telling her, that the gratitude was part of the contract, the unwritten part, the part that kept the system functioning smoothly, that kept her from asking the questions the system could not comfortably answer.
Questions like: If I am not qualified enough to hire permanently, why am I qualified enough to carry the curriculum?
Questions like: At what point does temporary become a word that means we will take everything you have and give you nothing you can build a life on?
She did not ask these questions out loud.
She asked them in the parking lot. She asked them at two in the morning. She asked them in the shower where the sound covered the asking.
They called it flexibility.
Her flexibility meant: no pension contributions she could count on. No sick leave that did not cost her the income she could not afford to lose. No ability to take a mortgage on a contract that expired in April.
The institution called this flexibility.
She called it something else.
She called it the transfer of institutional risk onto the bodies of the people least able to carry it.
And here is the part that makes the grief complicated:
She loved it.
She genuinely, helplessly, permanently loved the work.
Her love was the subsidy.
Her love and the love of every brilliant, committed, devoted person working on a contract in every institution that has learned that passion is a resource you do not have to compensate fairly because it will show up anyway.
I am not bitter.
I want to say that and I want it to be true and mostly it is.
I am clear.
There is a difference between bitterness and clarity.
Bitterness is personal. Clarity is structural. Clarity names the system. Clarity holds the institution accountable without requiring a villain.
I want the structure changed.
I want a world where the next woman, as brilliant and devoted and careful as she has been, does not spend nineteen years as temporary.
She is still in the system.
But she is in it differently now.
She is in it with her eyes open. She is in it with the clear naming of what is happening and why and whose interests it serves.
She is in it with this poem, which is not bitterness but testimony.
Not grievance but record.
They used my labour and called it privilege.
They used my love and called it flexibility.
They used my devotion and called it inspiring.
They used my silence and called it professionalism.
I am no longer silent.
Not because I am angry, though I have earned the anger.
Because silence was the last thing they needed from me that I was still giving freely.
And I am done giving freely to a system that calculated the price of everything I offered and decided it did not have to pay it.
Aquí estoy. Con los ojos abiertos. Ya no en silencio.
Here I am. With open eyes. No longer silent.
Translation Note: Spanish phrases in this poem were assisted by Google Translate (translate.google.com). The Spanish is woven in as an act of reclamation, a return to a language of the body and the self that exists beyond institutional English.
