New York Times best-selling author and UM professor Kiese Laymon wants to talk about what unites and divides the university community. He addressed the latter in a panel discussion at Lost Dog Coffee on Sunday night and will speak on the former at the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College (SMBHC) annual spring convocation on Tuesday.
Each year, the SMBHC poses difficult questions that are meant to have many possible answers at its convocation, including some that are deemed unanswerable, hoping to promote critical thinking in the university community.
Laymon, this semester’s speaker, will address the question, “What unites us?”
“The SMBHC loves to set the ‘debate agenda’ for our campus,” said Douglass Sullivan-González, dean of the SMBHC. “We thought that given many of the challenges our university, state and nation confront, what more perfect opportunity to engage a great writer and speaker such as Professor Laymon to tackle this question?”
Sullivan-González believes that Laymon is one of the most qualified speakers when it comes to addressing unity, adding that his “work and thought will challenge (the SMBHC) to align our actions with the core values of our university.”
Although Laymon will speak about unity, he feels he must first address what divides the community, especially at the University of Mississippi.
During the event at Lost Dog Coffee, Laymon discussed the controversial Confederate monument in the Circle on campus.
“Why haven’t we collectively made it come down until now?” Laymon said. “We have not made it important enough for us to take down a symbol that says, in no uncertain terms, that all black folk walking around here is labor.”
The monument has become a focal point on campus, and many students have become vocal about its proposed relocation to the Confederate cemetery. According to Laymon, the monument continues to devalue African Americans at the university.
“I just don’t understand, en masse, how a group of people who know, who see (and) who are intimately connected, can just be collectively so absolutely violent toward a group of people who hasn’t done the same thing backwards,” Laymon said.
Laymon is a native of Jackson who attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University. He later graduated from Oberlin College and received an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University.
He is widely known for his latest memoir, “Heavy,” a book that explores an internal part of himself, which he wrote to “create a piece of art that (his mother) could be proud of,” not because of who she is, but because it was a good piece of art. The New York Times named the book one of the top 50 memoirs of the past 50 years.
Laymon hopes that students, faculty and staff who come to hear his speech will critique it by going home and writing something better than what he decides to share.
“A lot of things unite us,” Laymon said. “I’m most interested in our collective experiences of shame, joy and complicated love of Mississippi.”
The SMBHC’s spring convocation is a non-ticketed event focusing on honors students, but it is open to all. This year it will be hosted at 7 p.m on Feb. 4 in the Ford Center.
