On Being a Lapsed Classicist: From Personal and Disciplinary Rupture to Restoring Lost Traditions and Finding a Way Back

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• On Being a Lapsed Classicist:From Personal and Disciplinary Rupture to Restoring Lost Traditions and Finding a Way Back^*
• Lylaah L. Bhalerao

Dem tell meDem tell meWha dem want to tell me

Bandage up me eye with me own historyBlind me to my own identity

—John Agard, Checking Out Me History (2004)

when the pandemic began, I was in the penultimate term of my Bachelor's degree in Classics and moving back into my family home in London. Now, I am in the third year of my PhD in Ancient World Studies and living in New York City, having moved across the Atlantic when borders were still closed, airports were empty, and travelers were all masked. For me, these last years of communal separation have spelled a rupture from Classics and from home; but also, a return to intellectual and cultural traditions embedded in my roots. Traditions that, as has become apparent to me, have also been severed from the discipline we call "Classics." Here I attempt to tell a personalized disciplinary history: using the story of my Caribbean diaspora family (largely defined by physical and cultural rupture) and how it has impacted my relationship with antiquity as a microcosm, I meditate on how Classics has intentionally created rupture between itself and intellectual traditions of color. Furthermore, I am now asking whether it is possible to return to the discipline and to restore these intellectual traditions to a position of legitimacy and esteem. [End Page 335]

I spent a lot of time over the pandemic years feeling angry. No doubt we were all angry—at the universe, governments, our own circumstances. My anger, however, was directed at the discipline. Anger. It is one of the most widely studied words in the Classics.¹ However, it is not an emotion to which scholars feel entitled, it is not one we admit to having—not in the rational, objective world of academia and certainly not if we are in the minority of scholars of color. Add to that being a woman, and the reputation precedes itself. My anger had less to do with the pandemic itself than with the racial reckoning also occurring during this time and how Classics departments, particularly in the United Kingdom, addressed their own complicity in upholding discriminatory structures and ideologies.² The pandemic simply provided the time and space for two Classics degrees' worth of anger to rise to the surface.

When I first thought about rupture and return, one moment of anger stood out clearly: in March 2022 I was researching into Afrocentrism for a paper on reclaiming Blackness in Greek and Roman North Africa, and I had just discovered that two of the most notable contributors to Afrocentric studies of antiquity, Ivan Van Sertima and George G.M. James,³ were from Guyana—where my maternal family is from and my grandparents were born. James contended that Greek philosophy was stolen from Egypt while Van Sertima emphasized the African-ness, and indeed Blackness, of Egypt. All I could feel was anger, followed by confusion, sadness, and a lot of questions. Why were these scholars not a part of my classical education, not even as a brief mention? Why was I allowed to believe that my cultural heritage had not meaningfully engaged with my field of study? I had spent my institutional life explaining where Guyana was—clarifying that I did not, in fact, mean Ghana—and believing that my country of origin must not have an intellectual tradition since it was so unknown. What would it have meant to me when I was undergraduate, I wondered, to know that this was not the case?

In that moment, I teetered on the tipping point between rupture and return. It came at the end of a two-year period of rupture: I wanted to break away from the field of Classics—and so I moved across the Atlantic in search of a more critical approach, locating myself in an Ancient World Studies department. Yet, it also hurtled me down a path of rediscovering the traditions of a heritage from which I felt ruptured and which had been excluded from the field of study in...