Gay shares mother’s story in 1st public remarks since resignation
Claudine Gay’s first public remarks at Harvard since resigning as the university’s president in January came not from lecture notes in a classroom, but from her heart in a chapel on campus.
Gay recounted her mother’s inspiring experience as a Haitian immigrant in Boston during Wednesday morning prayers at Memorial Church in Harvard Yard.
Gay, who resigned amid controversies stemming from the Israel-Hamas war, campus antisemitism, and allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly works, remains a professor at the Ivy League institution.
She said her mother emigrated from Haiti “buoyed by a clear and urgent vision for her future,” and an agency placed her with a family in the Boston area, for whom she served as a live-in nanny with the understanding that they would help enroll her in English language courses, but the agreement was never honored.
“It was not long before she realized that the family did not share her vision,” Gay said, according to a transcript of her remarks published by Harvard Magazine. “Her household responsibilities expanded. Her freedom of movement diminished. Her questions about ESL courses went unanswered. All of the assurances that had emboldened my mother to leave Haiti were swept aside in an effort to impose what felt, at best, like indentured servitude.”
Gay said her mother quietly began making plans to leave the family and join her sister in New York. She began making weekly trips to the post office to mail small packages of her belongings to her sister’s home in Brooklyn.
“Eventually, a day arrived when she set out for her weekly errands, carrying nothing more than her purse, and this time walked past the post office and continued on to the bus station where, heart racing and determined, she boarded a Greyhound for New York to begin again,” Gay said.
When Gay heard this story as a child, she said she viewed it as “an epic adventure story” and was “captivated mostly by the subterfuge and [her mother’s] cleverness,” but as she grew older, “the adventure receded as the focal narrative.”
“I wondered instead about how she decided what to send ahead and what to leave behind. What was important to her, what mattered most for her future,” Gay said.
Gay’s mother died last May, and she previously spoke about her in remarks at the church last September. On Wednesday, Gay said she has been reflecting on her mother’s journey in recent months, “about her resilience through setbacks, about the courage to pursue a bold vision for her future despite forces intent on her diminishment, about the hope that allowed her to begin again.”
She said she now sees her mother’s story “less as entertainment” but rather as “a reminder of what lies within us in out-ofthe-way places of the heart, and what may lie ahead if we dare to let go of the past and trust in the process of renewal.”
“As I stand on the threshold of a new chapter, I miss my mother’s voice, but I find comfort in the knowledge that I am my mother’s daughter with her resilience, courage, and hope, with a soul that delights in beginnings, and that is enough to step into the unknown with confidence.”