Through a journey of self-exploration, acclaimed inaugural poet Richard Blanco shares his quest of finding himself and a country to call home

Rodrigues, Jill

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Self, Home and Belonging

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Roger Williams UniversityDOCS@RWUFeatured News Story The Week at Roger4-17-2014Self, Home and BelongingJill RodriguesRoger Williams UniversityFollow this and additional works at: https://docs.rwu.edu/weekatroger_featured_newsPart of the Higher Education CommonsThis News Article is brought to you for free and open access by the The Week at Roger at DOCS@RWU. It has been accepted for inclusion in FeaturedNews Story by an authorized administrator of DOCS@RWU. For more information, please contact mwu@rwu.edu.Recommended CitationRodrigues, Jill, "Self, Home and Belonging" (2014). Featured News Story. 414.https://docs.rwu.edu/weekatroger_featured_news/414 News ArchiveSelf, Home and BelongingThrough a journey of self-exploration, acclaimed inaugural poet Richard Blancoshares his quest of  nding himself and a country to call homeApril 17, 2014 Jill Rodrigues ’05BRISTOL, R.I. – The discovery of oneself and a place in the world – a community to belong to andcall home – is a universal quest many pursue throughout a lifetime.For Richard Blanco, his constant exploration of self and country has taken him from Cuba to Miamito the presidential inauguration podium in Washington, D.C., where his lifelong hunt was  nallytransmuted into a sense of belonging – an embracing of experiences that he expressed in hisacclaimed poem “One Today,” written for and shared with Americans across the country as the   hU.S. inaugural poet at President Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration.His journey was complicated by the fact that he belonged to three di erent countries in the  rst 45days of his life – and that early on he identi ed as gay in a culture and era that resisted accepting hissexuality, Blanco shared with an audience as part of a President’s Distinguished Speakers Seriesevent on Tuesday evening. Just before his birth, Blanco’s family was exiled from Cuba and relocatedto Madrid, Spain, where he was born; a few weeks later they immigrated to New York City, and thensettled in Miami.Although he has, essentially, lived his entire life in America, 1970s Miami boasted an insular Cubancommunity that Blanco described as a “cultural purgatory.” Growing up in Miami, he said, was “soclose to the United States but not quite America.” Some of his poetry explores this process of“negotiating between these two worlds,” via a concept of American culture through the eyes of hisfamily and investigating the story of his parents’ lives before he entered their world.Learning about the courage and faith required of his mother to forsake her country and all her familyand friends in Cuba helped him begin to understand his own story, Blanco said. He delved into thisidea in “Mother Country,” a poem he intoned in a rich, lilting baritone with dramatic pacingaccented by a raised hand for emphasis and his eyes sweeping the audience.“To love a country as if you lost it,” he commenced, and continued reading the poem thatdeliberated on the notion that his mother sacri ced everything to travel to a country “she knew onlyas a name or a color on a map.” Taking on a Spanish woman’s in ection and scrunching his face intoan aged appearance, he read the closing lines in his mother’s voice:“You know, mijo, I’ve been thinking. It isn’t where you’re born that matters,it’s where you choose to die – that’s your country.”Still, Blanco, whose other trade is civil engineering, ceaselessly searched for a place to belong to –trying Cuba, Madrid, New England, jaunts around the world and a return to Miami. While revisitingthese places “ lled in so many blanks,” nothing satis ed his thirst, he said.It was the experience of being called upon to be the   h inaugural poet – the  rst Latino, immigrantand gay writer to serve as inaugural poet – that changed his life, he said. He explained that as animmigrant, there was a part of him that had always thought America was not his home. But having towrite three new poems in only three weeks – poems about home and belonging – he ultimatelyuncovered his sense of country.“The greatest gi  of the inauguration, really, was to  nally feel like I had a place at the table. To nally, through poetry – because every creative endeavor is an emotional endeavor as well – torealize that home, in some ways, was in my backyard all along,” he said.Looking out at a sea of people on the Washington Mall, his mother seated behind him as hestepped to the podium to read, “One Today,” Blanco said he recognized that everyone there wasjoining in the same experience – of celebrating and receiving this country as their home; that “everyone of their stories is American.”“In that moment I feel America standing as one,” he recounted to the audience in a passage from hisbook recounting the experience. “I embrace America in a way I never had, or thought I could,feeling for the  rst time that I belong, truly belong, to one country. Not an imaginary ideal from TV ora nostalgic island  oating in the sea of my parents’ memory but a real, tangible place that is mine,was mine, all along.”

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