Gratitude and Generosity: Reflecting on What We Have in the Fordham English Community
By Elissa Johnston
Gratitude, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the quality or condition of being grateful; a warm sense of appreciation of kindness received, involving a feeling of goodwill towards the benefactor and a desire to do something in return.” This definition highlights a key feature of gratitude: in addition to being a feeling and a posture, it’s accompanied by action (or at least a desire for action): the “desire to do something in return.” When we see what we have and what others have done for us, we want to reciprocate. Gratitude begets generosity, which in turn begets more gratitude and generosity.
This kind of reciprocal gratitude is always on display in communities that do a good job of caring for their members. We see it continually in Fordham’s English department. A professor recently remarked on how many thank-you emails Fordham English faculty sends on just about any internal email chain. When I interview Fordham English alumni, I consistently hear how much they appreciated the people they met at Fordham (and how they want to give back to the community with their stories and advice and mentorship). Thanksgiving break seems like an appropriate time to stop and inventory the things our community does well—including gratitude—so that we can move forward in the strength of both gratitude and generosity.
Gratitude obviously doesn’t need to be limited to a season, but yearly days of thanksgiving were originally meant to give us a special opportunity to appreciate what we have. Of course, the origins of the Thanksgiving holiday that we celebrate here in the United States are considerably more complicated than that. We can trace back the genealogy of contemporary “Thanksgiving” narratives to memories of settler colonialism that should serve as a sobering reminder that the land we live on was unlawfully and unjustly taken from its Native inhabitants. The connection between our national Thanksgiving day and the feast at Plymouth between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag is actually a product of the twentieth-century American imagination. Unfortunately, this widespread narrative papers over the history of conflict and oppression between white colonial settlers and Native tribes in the seventeenth century and beyond.
And yet it might also help us to remember that the Thanksgiving the United States celebrates today originally had almost no connection to the “first Thanksgiving” of 1621. In the first place, national days of thanksgiving follow in a much longer tradition of gratefully celebrating the harvest—a rhythm of countless generations of people all over the world. And in fact, the US’s precedent-setting national “Thanksgiving” on the last Thursday of November in 1863 was not a commemoration of the 1621 meal shared by Pilgrims and Wampanoag, but an opportunity for all Americans to express gratitude for a successful harvest at the height of the Civil War, one of the most traumatic periods in the nation’s history.
As we respond gratefully to the things that we have during this season, then, it’s also important to remember that there are things that we still want for others and for ourselves. It’s the practices of gratitude, though, that will sustain us and our communities as we work towards justice and reconciliation. Hopefully remembering the complex story of why we get time off for Thanksgiving can both remind us of what we have and remind us of those who don’t have as much during this season, orienting us outward to our communities and the world. And hopefully that can free us to appreciate practices of gratitude during this Thanksgiving season.
Here’s a practice of gratitude that will hopefully encourage you today: Fordham English faculty and students took time out of their busy fall semester to share their gratitude for the people, communities, and spaces that fill and enrich their lives.
“I am grateful for my students, my fellow graduate workers and students, and for all the staff and faculty who help make Fordham such a great community to be a part of.”
“I am grateful for the community that English at Fordham has given me: the professors, my advisor, and all my fellow majors really have created an environment of support where I feel I can express myself and begin to unleash my creativity! I have never really felt "free", if you will, to express my creativity through words. Being a first gen college student, it was never really in my mindset to express my creativity as a profession-I always thought you needed to be grounded in data/science/law, etc.- but coming to fordham and finding this community, I have been really inspired to unleash my academic creativity and allow myself to hear my inner voice. I am most thankful that my senior year has been filled with support and eye-opening opportunities. I have been able to tune into my ideas and express them through poetry and prose- and the friends I have made in this major have led me to realize that my ideas should be explored!”
“I am grateful for the Fordham Library—especially the Interlibrary Loan Department!”
“i’m real grateful for public libraries…. i’m really grateful to have a nypl in my neighborhood because it definitely kept my head straight growing up—the crocheting, arts and crafts, and tutoring events i attended were incredibly formative to my creative intuition and helped cultivate my curiosity. i wish this was a readily available resource to students abroad because what is the purpose of academia, research, and education if only a select number people have access to it? it really puts education in perspective because what does it serve us for? the ego? to uphold a hierarchy?”
“i think i'm most grateful for the intimacy i feel in the creative writing concentration. the community feels like i truly know and interact with everyone as artists rather than workers.”
“I'm grateful to be part of a department with a genuine commitment to collegiality and honest debate. Although we have our disagreements, we enjoy a remarkably healthy departmental culture, and that's not something to be taken lightly. I'm especially grateful to my BIPOC faculty colleagues: Stephen Sohn, Julie Kim, Sarah Gambito, Sasha Panaram, Dennis Tyler, Robb Hernandez, Rebecca Sanchez, and Danny Contreras.”
“I am very grateful that I had such a supportive, patient, and caring Comps committee at Fordham. My passion for my research subject has been increased, thanks to their inspiring input and encouragement. I want to dedicate my sincere gratitude to Professors Suzanne Yeager, Stuart Sherman, and Brian Reilly.”
“I am grateful for the efficient, hard-working, and user-friendly support staff, exemplified by those in our own English Department, and our adjuncts, who are doing so much for the university and its students—despite the fact that the university isn't doing nearly as much as it should for them.”
“I was talking with a student in my class about connections she was making between our course and other courses from this term and from earlier in her studies. She said, ‘I am a senior and suddenly it all seems to be coming together.’ I’m grateful for that.”
Thank you for being a part of the Fordham English community!
