Marvin Sterling
Prof. Marcy Morgan was co-chair of my MA and PhD committees in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. My MA thesis explored the experiences of African American military personnel at a naval base in Japan.
As part of my graduate coursework, I took Prof. Morgan’s seminar in African American linguistics. At some risk of understatement, I found the course quite challenging. One assignment involved transcribing an extensive selection of the recorded speech of one of my interviewees. I became frustrated by how slowly the transcription was progressing, by the meticulous coding it required.
One day during office hours, after who knows how many drafts, Prof. Morgan read my most recent transcription aloud. I started laughing and told her she sounded exactly like my interviewee. She said that was a probably a good sign that I had gotten the transcription right.
I now think that her own playful, intuitive performance in bringing the text to life did much to make her assessment true. Still, that assessment made me feel pretty good about myself. I had a deep respect for Prof. Morgan, for her seriousness, incisiveness and care, for the sense of decency and mission that so animated her scholarship on African American sociolinguistic and musical cultural life. I was gratified by the diasporic range of that scholarship, including her work in Jamaica, where I was born.
This session and many other hours of advising; chats along the corridors of Haines Hall; encounters after graduation at conferences and symposia, and at her hip-hop archives at Harvard: these moments return to me as I reflect on her passing. I realize, almost with a start, how much her mentorship has enriched my sensibilities now as a professional anthropologist. Don’t just interview the sailors, she once advised me, back in the days of thesis research. Shoot hoops with them, hang out with them, get to know them. It is easy to understand how this scholar would become renowned for doing so much to bring hip-hop, in all its ferocious and beautiful truth as Black social art, respectfully (though not necessarily respectably, because nobody needs that) into the academy. My feelings of a complex loss—personal and professional—is as much as anything else a measure of the extraordinary mentor she was to me, as she has been to so many others still trying to do right by her guidance.
Adrienne Lo
Marcyliena was a generous and tough mentor. What I remember most about her was the time and energy she devoted to mentoring us from a position as a faculty member of color. We use that phrase now as though it constitutes some type of natural kind: a person of color who is also a faculty member. It is hard to describe how vanishingly rare this person was in the late 80s, when I was an undergraduate. I know I took a class with one faculty member who was publicly out. Did I take classes with any faculty members who were considered racialized? Or have a single non-white TA? Language instructors aside, I think the total number of such people that I was taught by over 4 years was zero. There were 50 faculty members of color in Arts and Sciences (out of 612 total faculty) my first year—maybe I was just in all the wrong classes.
One of the many jobs I had during college was to work reunions. One of my classmates had an encounter with an elderly alum, who when faced with an Indian American face at check in remarked, “Well, we sure didn’t have anyone of your flavor when I was here!” As this story ricocheted around, it was always accompanied by the snappy retorts that we might have launched back (“Do you mean my race or my gender, sir?”). Even though in the real world, we mostly just smiled and moved on, since it was a solid paying gig otherwise. I think we might have made nearly double minimum wage ($3.35/hr) at the time.
When I entered UCLA in 1995, it was a whole other world. Suddenly, there they were—faculty of color in linguistics, applied linguistics, anthropology, education, ethnic studies, sociology, history. In this veritable surfeit, Marcyliena stood out. She was the tough one, the one who asked sharp questions at talks and who would not hesitate to pointedly remind you about issues of representation and responsibility.
Marcyliena was unstinting with her time, attention, and guidance. She went out of her way to create a space where she could help us understand what it meant to try to make our way through the prickly institution of academia, to explain the kinds of burdens and expectations you might encounter, to figure out how to find the friends who would have your back in a space that could be unremittingly hostile. Spending your time herding a group of needy graduate students, some of whom are not even your advisees, is not the usual path to fame and fortune. I don’t think she ever got any credit, in the usual sense, for the thick packets of extra readings she handed to us, the dinners she made, the weekends where she brought us into her world off campus. This extensive backstage labor was not anything Marcyliena ever sought to make known; it was just the work that she recognized needed to be done. Thank you, Marcyliena, for your generosity and care and your pathbreaking work as a scholar and mentor–may you rest in peace.
Lanita Jacobs
Professor Marcyliena Morgan was a formidable scholar, amazing writer, gifted storyteller, beautiful-haired woman who had the capacity to make grown men tremble and cry. Her capacity to see and protect me as a first-gen scholar who didn’t know all the ropes made a difference in my scholarly career. I remember being dazzled by her lectures as an undergraduate, so much so that I shifted my graduate school bids from sociology to anthropology, potentially hurting a former (still precious to me) mentor-advisor in the process. She also actively had my back both when I was an undergraduate and later, her graduate student, on issues fraught with power; I couldn’t name this at the time but she could, did, and blessedly intervened. She also taught me vital b-side lessons while looking me in my face, one of which was this: if and when you critique your sister/brother in academe, you’d better know damn well where to place emphasis; if your critique flows from a uncritical imbibing of the power structure – and academia does have one – revise it ASAP.Why? We can’t impugn another’s, say, hubris without a concerted full-bodied smackdown of the conditions of impossibility occasioning and, in some cases, demanding it. This too: love – and we all should have it, feel it, and be able to freely center it in all that we do – doesn’t mean a doggone thing if the object of your affection can’t even see you well enough to cherish and reciprocate what you bring to the table. Among the best gifts she gave me, the kind with exquisite linger, is two-fold: when I was an undergraduate taking her class, she introduced me to Zora Neale Hurston, a Black female ethnographer-folklorist-playwright-Lover and Wanderer Supreme whose work, life, and legacy has steadily sourced me, helping me stand after I got knocked down. She also did not dissuade me (as a Black American, female “native” scholar) from being curious about Black women’s speech or anything else about African American language and culture. Race wasn’t a bad word to her, a concept to be forever bracketed and debunked in deference to some other fronted-emphasis. While our paths diverged, I will always be grateful to her for this. May she rest in peace and power.
Kesha Fikes
It’s been quite hard to put into words who Marcyliena was for me…because she offered so much. The significance of her presence in my life began when I was completing my MA thesis. She regularly invited me to her home where I learned that work and nourishmentmust go together: she fed me gourmet meals as we sat together and co-processed the direction of my thesis. The form and quality of this tutelage was such a contrast to the anti-black politics animating graduate education. Within the sweet, intimate privacy of her home I was being taught how to write critically, how to collaborate, and the ways that the power of the black radical tradition enveloped and carried us through what Moten and Harney call ‘study’ as our daily praxis.
Marcyliena stepped in again as I struggled to complete my doctoral dissertation: I was feeling exhausted and defeated. Just like before, she invited me to her home, nourished me with lovingly prepared meals, and reinforced the principles of ‘study’. I will never forget how attuned she was to what I needed along each step of this journey. She created the following script for me at a moment when she telepathically sensed that I was “done” – the year was 2000, the day was April 5th:
Kesha,
Think back to the days of slavery on the MARCH TO FREEDOM with Sojourner Truth at the lead. (her MC name is Lady T and yours is Mo K)
Lady T: Ma’ burden is heavy Lawd but if you jest get us thew this here tes’ on our walk to freedom we will be …
Mo K: What da fuck you talkin’ ’bout?
Lady T: Now Lawd – I know some among us have a mighty bad attitude…
Mo K: What IN the fuck are you talkin’ about? Don’t make me disrespect you!
Lady T: Ya see Lord, some – uh one – among us thinks she cannot make the journey. This is the sort of thing that happens when the struggle is clouded by existentialism, debates on individuation (I am not in disagreement with the resurgence of a word that I thought was rejected prior to modernity), intentionality and the mediation of power! But in the end, we must all be free from ole’ massah! So you jus’ keep goin’ and I will pick yo’ ass up if be done fall and hep’ you get yo’ hair done when necessary and cook
you dinner – but YOU CAN NOT STOP ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM!
Mo K: Fuck!
Please send me what you have so I can look at it.
Love, Marcy
How did she know? Her timing was so impeccable. Marcyliena was my Lady T, my Sojourner Truth. Nuf said! Without her, I would NOT have crossed the finish line. I love you, Marcyliena. THANK YOU.