The following is a Guest Post by James Silk, who is a Clinical Professor of Law at the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School. After Jim shared his thoughts privately, he gave us permission to share these reflections with our readers.
I hesitate to share my thoughts about the death of Nelson Mandela. It feels pretentious to express my personal reaction when I have no claim to any insight or wisdom or connection to Mandela. To reflect without resorting to cliché seems almost impossible. I started to write tonight only to try to understand myself why the news of Mandela’s death affected me so strongly and felt so personal. But I decided to share my graspings, first, with my family and friends and then with others I know are struggling with their own complicated feelings.
I was driving when I heard that Mandela had died. As I pulled over, tears overflowed my eyes, taking me by surprise. My immediate thought was, “What right do I have to cry over this great man’s death?” As tears continued to brim, I continued to question, “Who am I to mourn the far-off passing of a hero who belongs to his country and people?” But the sadness returns every time I hear his name or see his image or think about the loss. I wanted to understand, but I have found only feeble guesses, more questions than answers.
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First, most personal and removed from any more universal response, I imagined my father, with his gentle smile and voice not unlike Mandela’s, born a year before Mandela, in harsh circumstances that might have embittered him but, instead, made him an unfailingly loving and generous father. Maybe it felt, in the language so many used to talk about Mandela, like losing a father, but a father to us all. Or was it just that losing a hero so linked to the promise of life came as an especially hard-to-ignore reminder of the fate we all share but that, for some of us, is no longer far enough away to scorn?
I thought back to myself fumbling through my twenties unsure of where I might find a path into life as a responsible adult until, in graduate school in the late 1970s, I happened into a small role in a modest effort with people of inspiring dedication and integrity trying to help end apartheid by pressing the University of Chicago to divest from companies doing business in South Africa. It was the clear wrong of apartheid, cynically consecrated as law, that pushed me eventually and diffidently to seek a place trying to contribute in some way to the cause, then beginning to blossom, of establishing and protecting human rights.
And Mandela’s death felt instantly like the end of something, but what exactly was it that felt like such a terrible loss? It’s all the things that people have said, many, like Muhammad Ali, eloquently, about what Mandela accomplished and meant. Still, that didn’t seem to explain the desolation, here and tangible and personal, that I felt. That, I thought, must be the worry, even the fear, that we are deprived of Mandela’s profound optimism, his embodiment of the possible counterpoise between justice and love, his transcendence of bitter difference, hatred, and long years of life stolen in the service of greed and power. It’s not only that we’ve lost this one remarkable person who gave us these gifts; it is as if, without him, there is no one in the world who embraces, represents, insists on these values. Without his example, in a darkening time, where will we look to find the inspiration to optimism that the world so badly needs? The hope, as my son, Jonah, said, is that Mandela’s death will remind the world what he stood for. Optimism for most of us, I believe, requires work. That work may be even a little harder now.
The closest I came to understanding why I have found myself experiencing grief (and not just the more comprehensible sadness of a hero lost) is something a little different or maybe just a summary of it all. In a world that has been looking uglier -– politics and its rhetoric, ugly like never before, our earth and home, turning violent and ugly, the ethic of terror, spreading its ugly contagion, ugly greed and disdain for people in need, pushing us further and further apart -– we have lost a great leader who was, in every facet of his life and despite the cruel injustices he suffered, beautiful. When you think of Nelson Mandela, you see a beautiful man and life. We are diminished because a world short on beauty is today less beautiful. Where we need it most, from the Middle East to South Africa itself without Mandela to the prisons of China and the United States to the city streets, who will stand, defying the ugly, beautiful in the face of hate, darkness, greed, and fear?
For now, with no intent against the peace of Mandela’s final rest, I keep hearing the words of Dylan Thomas:
“Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Maybe Mandela’s gift to us is one more act of reconciliation: to insist that we “rage against the dying of the light” and still have permission to finally “go gentle into that good night.”
Photo via Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science (public domain).
(Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)