Photo Credit | © Afia Ofori-Mensa
on readiness
-or-
the bromeliad
Keynote Address for the Princeton University Preparatory Program (PUPP) Graduation Ceremony
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
Dr. Afia Ofori-Mensa
I used to think that I was cursed.
For many years of my life, I believed that I had a singular and special gift for killing…houseplants.
When I was in graduate school, I loved grocery shopping. It made me feel so capable and so grown — getting cookbooks and picking my favorite recipes, and making lists of the ingredients, and cutting coupons, and shopping sale papers like I had seen my mother do all of my life growing up. Except that, at the end of it, I got to go to the grocery store and pick out what I wanted. I loved that, the freedom and independence and self-determination of it all. So, one day, I was in the produce section, and I noticed a potted basil plant. It wasn’t on my list, but I was an adult; I could go off list if I wanted! So, I did. I took that potted basil home. It was the first houseplant that I ever kept.
I didn’t know what to do with a houseplant, except to put it in the window and water it whenever it occurred to me. So I watered and watered and watered…until the plant died, and so did another basil plant after that, and then a thyme plant, and then a mint. I told myself, at the age of 25, that I had a brown thumb – and not only literally. I was “bad for plants,” I decided, and should never keep one again. And so I didn’t, for over 15 years. I never felt ready to try.
This is a story about not being ready, and doing things anyway.
*
When I was 10, my family moved from New Jersey to Michigan, with just one month left of fifth grade. I was raised in a West African immigrant family. My parents are from Ghana, and if there was one lesson I learned as their kid, it was that children were not allowed to express negative emotions to adults. I was angry and confused about why they had uprooted me with just weeks left until the end of elementary school, but because I wasn’t allowed to be angry at my parents, I was angry at the state of Michigan, instead. The one thing that was redeeming about it, was that it offered me an opportunity to reinvent myself, or, better put, it offered my sister, Akua, the chance to reinvent me. My sister is older than I am, and, growing up, I always did what she did. What she did, in this case, was to convince my mom to sign us up for an acting class that was in the community education booklet that used to come to our house in the mail a few times a year. That decision changed my life forever. I fell in love with theatre. I acted in community theatre in middle school and high school, and then I acted in experimental theatre in college, and then I acted in educational theatre in graduate school. Acting became one of the things in life that I loved the most.
My sister and I had always loved watching movies together, and once she got me into performance, I developed a life dream – one that I still hold – that I wanted to act in movies someday. As I got older, I let the dream rest, in favor of things that seemed more practical. I got a PhD. And then a job as a professor at Oberlin College. Every once in a while, I would pull that dream out and share it with someone, like a student who I was having a really good conversation with during office hours.
One year, I saw a couple of those students after they had graduated. I was traveling to a conference in California, and they lived in the area, so I invited them out to breakfast. I asked them all kinds of questions about how their lives had been since they left Oberlin, and then they asked me what my life was like, still being there. “I may be ready to leave soon,” I told them, “I think I’m outgrowing it.” One of the students, Amy, looked at me and said, “What about that dream you told me about in office hours years ago, that you wanted to be a movie actor?” I bowed my chin and tilted my head shyly and waved my hand. “Oh, that’s not real,” I said to her, “that’s just something I keep tucked away. I’m not really going to do that.” And Amy smiled and said, “Why not? We want you to have the things that make you happy.”
That day, it was like Amy gave me permission to dream again. So I started talking with people about my dream. I mentioned it to my best friend, Urmila, who I was visiting in California that week, too. It seemed impossible, I told her, because really my dream was to present at the Oscars and be declared best dressed on the red carpet. Best dressed, I could handle; I had that on lock. But I couldn’t control whether I would ever get cast in a movie that was popular enough that I’d become a famous enough movie star that I’d be invited to present an Academy Award. There was so much that I could do nothing to guarantee, that it made me not want to start at all. My friend taught at Stanford, working with undergraduates and graduate students and postdocs on imagining their futures after school. She gave me a piece of advice that she regularly gave her students: you can’t control most of what happens in life, but you can control what you do first. Take one step, then learn from it, and let everything you do after that be guided by what you learn. Maybe you can’t control whether you’ll ever end up on the red carpet at the Oscars. Maybe, as you learn your way forward, that won’t even be what you want anymore. But at least you will be moving in the direction of your dreams.
Her advice changed my life. That summer, I decided that my first step was to have a conversation with a colleague of mine, who chaired the Theater Department at Oberlin. I invited my colleague out to lunch and confessed that I had always wanted to act in movies, and I remember to this day just how brightly her face lit up on my behalf. I asked her who was the best acting teacher in her department, so that I could take their class the next fall. (She was a director who didn’t teach acting, and so I figured it would be easier for her to be honest.) She mentioned a couple of names, but then she said to me, “You know, I’m directing a show out in Cleveland. It’s a musical. Do you sing?” I told her that I had just started taking voice lessons six months prior, and she said, “We’re in callbacks next week, but you could audition then, or you could just come and watch and see what an audition is like.” I wasn’t going to go to an audition just to watch, so I went, and I tried out instead. At the end of the week, the casting director called to let me know that I had gotten a lead part in my very first ever professional musical.
I ramped up my voice lessons, but I wasn’t really ready to sing at the level of my castmates. After opening weekend, I got a review that said, “Afia Mensa does her best while battling some pitch problems in several of her songs,” and another that said, “Mensa tends to be pitchy during her solos.” I was so embarrassed, but what could I do except to keep learning and finish out the run of the show? I did that, made some adjustments with the musical director to place my voice more centrally in my range, and every night I went out there and sang in front of 200 people before I was ready. Two friends from grad school drove all the way out from Chicago to smile and wave at me from the audience. Colleagues told me that I had inspired them to reignite creative passions that they did outside of their jobs. Current students carpooled together on a 40-minute drive and cried and hugged me after the show. Amy flew across the country from California, just to see me perform. And my sister, who had gotten me into acting all those years before, came down from Detroit with her husband to sit in the front row.
I wasn’t ready to sing in a professional musical, but I did it anyway; and the experience changed my life. I realized that, for years, I had only been doing things that I already felt really, really good at. The result was that I might have protected myself, to some extent, from criticism; but I was really keeping myself, to a much larger extent, from growing. That musical — and even those reviews that will live on forever because: the internet – reminded me of how important it was for us to do things in our lives before we felt ready, to challenge ourselves, even to be embarrassed sometimes, in the service of our own growth.
*
A few months ago, I was talking with someone about houseplants. “I am bad for plants,” I told them, reciting the limiting mantra that I had been saying to myself since grad school. “I kill them, and so I can’t keep any around.”
“Plants die,” said this person that I was talking to. “That’s the way of life. Just get one. Do the best you can. If it dies, that’s what it was going to do anyway. Eventually, everything dies. Then you just get another one, and try again, and keep doing that until you learn and get better and better at helping them to live.” It was a simple, passing conversation, but it changed my life, and my view of myself, forever.
At the beginning of March, I bought my first houseplant in over 15 years. Then I became obsessed. Suddenly, getting plants became the most important thing in my life. Within three weeks, I had eight of them. In that time, a past student whom I had known from my years teaching at Oberlin passed away, tragically and suddenly. Her name was Caroline. She was 32 years old, and she used to tend the gardens at the Buddhist monastery where she had lived out what became the last years of her life. In the days after Caroline’s death, I could think of almost nothing but plants. I would take breaks from work and walk to the plant shop on Spring Street multiple times a day. There was one plant there that caught my eye. It had long leaves in arcs radiating out from its center, like the tentacles of an octopus in motion. The leaves were a deep, yellow green with gentle, powdery white stripes that looked like they had been carefully spray painted by an artist’s hand. I went back three times to take it in before I finally bought it. “It’s a bromeliad,” the lady in the shop told me. “It will have a flower in the middle. It’s down there between the leaves right now, climbing; soon you’ll see.”
A bromeliad, I learned, from obsessive Googling in the days afterward, is the same type of plant that produces pineapples, though most make flowers instead of fruit. A bromeliad is an epiphyte, it can put down roots just about anywhere. In the rainforest, they root on the surface of tree trunks, not in the ground, and absorb water and nutrients not through their roots but rather all over the surface of their leaves. As houseplants, you aren’t supposed to water their soil. Instead, you pour water down the center where the leaves meet and make sure it stays always that way, a cup half full. Over the weeks, I saw the flower of the bromeliad that I had gotten from the plant shop climb up through that center cup until one day, it peeked out above the leaves in a beautiful shade of pink and then stretched up and out with purple ornaments on its spiky petals.
A bromeliad, I learned, will bloom only one time ever. The flower will remain there in my living room for three to six months, and then it, and all the rest of that plant, will die – not because of anything I have or haven’t done, just because that is the way of its life. Before the plant dies, though, other plants will form at its base, where the leaves meet the roots. These new plants are called “pups.” They are exact clones of the original plant, smaller in size but greater in number. To keep them going, you replant those. They, too, will be home to a flower that will rise up from the place where the leaves meet, bloom for three to six months, make pups, and die. That is how bromeliads live forever, even after the first version of them is gone.
These are the things that I now know, at this moment on my journey. Death is the natural way of life. Plants die. People we love die. We will, too, and not only at the end of our lives. Over and over again, we will lose who we used to be in favor of who we are now. Over and over again, the version of us that we believed ourselves to be will make way for who we can become as we learn and grow.
That is because the fundamental nature of life is change. One day, you were making your way through eighth grade. The next day, you were living through a global pandemic. You submitted video interviews with your PUPP applications. You rode to a parking lot to pick up supplies for the summer. You met each other for the first time when you spent a day here on campus and finally got to see just how very tall everyone is when you are in the presence of their whole body (or maybe that’s just me?). You lost Juan months later. You kept going, and you made it to this moment today.
Like the bromeliad, put down roots anywhere you go. Make every place your own. Take in the energy of life from all around you. Stay hydrated and centered. Bloom, in the current version of who you are, for as long as you are meant to. Sing in front of hundreds of people before you know how to sing. Keep plants in your home even if you don’t think you are good at it. Do things before you feel ready to do them, and let those things change you. Release who you used to be, to become the next version of who you are.
I wish you not just one life but many lives that are spectacular. I hope that you learn to be afraid and do the things that scare you anyway. That you keep growing through the fear. That your people are always there to support you. That you let them. That you try things that earlier versions of you never would have done. That you embrace being bad at stuff. That you never lose faith in your capacity to move closer to your dreams. That you keep people around you who remind you to continue dreaming. That, no matter what happens from this day forward, you always learn and grow.
Congratulations, PUPP Class of 2024. I hope that, by the time we meet again, even you will be surprised at who you’ve managed to become.