Neptune

The musician and educator Sheriff Ghale’s time on the ship has been a miracle of sorts: he has done more, and done more well, and done more good, than any person could reasonably have been expected to do in the same circumstances.  Having arrived just as seas got rough, he had to contend with the same seasickness as most of the rest of us—which scuttled the first rehearsal of the little faculty band we’d organized for him to use to demonstrate to the rest of us what he was hoping to work on musically during his stay.  But a day later he was up and around and making fine things happen.  He has visited, by my count, twelve different classes, speaking about Ghana in relation to subjects ranging from social media to sexuality to prayer.  And his performances in our big lecture hall, the Union, have been awe-inspiring. 

 

Take this past Wednesday: from 8 to 9 PM he gave a talk on the Ghanaian music industry, drawing on his own experiences to help us understand the cultural and economic differences between Southern Ghana, which has been the focus of most of the country’s population growth and development, and Northern Ghana, where he is from, which has had much less; then from 9 to 10 PM, he offered a musical tribute to Bob Marley (whose birthday had passed on the day of our highest swells) that was beautiful and moving.  I know I’ve never before seen anyone give a compelling lecture and then immediately give an equally compelling concert—it was astonishing, all of it. 

 

Then, the next night, having visited five different classes that day alone, he collaborated with our two Brazilian students, two other students, and our ethnomusicologist, Julie Strand, on a comparison, via performance, between Brazilian and West African music.  He’ll speak tonight on a panel alongside Professor Strand, Professor Chandra Ranade (who has done substantial work for the World Bank in Ghana), and our visiting Ghanaian student, this comprising our usual “cultural pre-port,” letting everyone know what to anticipate by the way of food, opportunities. Everyone on the ship’s quite excited about our arrival in Ghana, not just because of the excitement of the destination but because we’ve been now a long while on the Amazon and the Atlantic.  Yet for all that happy anticipation, we have—or at least I have—been relishing the disorientation or reorientation of being surrounded by nothing but sea all this week.  A few minutes ago I glanced up and saw, for the first time in a week, a passing ship, and I felt mildly offended, as if it had trespassed on the long vista I’d grown accustomed to.

 

Neptune Day has come and gone since my last posting.  The students and many others celebrated it with gusto: as per ‘tradition,’ many submitted themselves to being doused in (faux) fish entrails, and a somewhat smaller number (64, I think I heard, including at least one faculty member) had their heads partly or completely shaved.  (The Spa on board offered to finish the job cleanly for five bucks a pop, and I’m told they had many takers.) Many students, perhaps all of them, posed individually with my fellow dean Bob Vieira in his King Neptune garb—he was very green and carried a trident.  I offered the following ceremonial welcome, which reflects, among other things, how intense are my football loyalties and how limited is my recollection of my high school Latin :

O Deus Neptunes, omnes nobis bowus downus ad tuus, Grandis Kahuna.  Protectamos nos de grandis aqua et maximi swellami; non compelus ad vomitus nos pasta.  Tuus potentia magis grandis sum qui Bob Vieiraus. Non subsudo nos in ignominus disgracis patheticus cum New Englandus Patrioti.  Permitti nos ad cruces vos mari cum securito and felicito et interdum Dies Taco.  Gratitudum accepto di tutti ad Semesterio ad Mario.

 

The hair will grow back before we reach San Diego, but what is even more reassuring about Neptune Day is the way, in spite of its being so atypical, it fit in with the agenda here.  Technically (if that’s ever the right word to apply to this kind of fête), and according to genuine tradition, Neptune Day ought to happen on the day we first cross the Equator: it was delayed to suit the academic schedule.  By the time it was done, students could be found all around the ship settling down to read, and by 4 PM that day they were all in their discussion groups for the Global Studies course, the first of four such sessions on the voyage. I visited quite a few discussions and found them serious, intense, and productive.  And that night we were all in the Union for Sheriff’s double-presentation.  It’s possible to brook, even to encourage, a good bit of the festive here (I will admit that I served the other night on the ‘panel’ for a kind of mock game show, based on distinguishing the real definitions of words from ones we’d made up, called Liars Club, complete with an emcee, loud music, and—for others, anyway—zany garb), because the default seems to be a good level of engagement.  Attendance at optional academic programs in the evenings has been very high—my administrative colleagues who are veterans, between them, of many previous voyages, tell me they’ve never seen it so consistently high; the drop-in writing center, a relatively new part of Semester at Sea, is doing steady and intense business; the students who come to see me about administrative problems are thinking, all the while, about substantive ones. 

 

Last night Prof. Ranade modestly concluded his quite wonderful lecture on recent Ghanaian economic history by saying that the hard work that he and his team of three fellow World Bank economists had done in Ghana over the years could not match what the 750 of us might do by way of observation and analysis when we get there next week.  It was a precise and as a profound account of what this program’s potential as I have yet heard.