How did you teach yourself English?
I used the public library in suburban Florida. I immigrated to Florida at a very young age, and English was actually my third language, but my parents had a really firm belief in the value of education, so they almost threw me into libraries over the summer and said, ‘Here it is. Here’s America for you on a platter. Learn what you can and report back to us.’ It was really a self-taught process of using books as a script for my identity, trying things out, reading something in a book, coming to class, regurgitating it, and seeing if it worked or if it didn’t work, and how I would have to edit or address myself or put myself into what I was reading.
How was your experience triple-majoring in anthropology, English, and French at the University of Florida?
There were ways in which the English language opened up so many doors, and then disciplinary training opened up different portals for me. I had literature, which taught me social codes and semantic scripts. I wanted to learn about more culture, so I added anthropology to learn about human culture, archeological anthropology, and biological anthropology, and the different ways that we’ve come to know and understand the concept of humans. Then, I wanted to do it in a different language, so I added French as a major. I wanted to do it with an awareness of what it meant to be a person of color in the United States, [so] I added a minor in African American Studies. I had this voracious curiosity, and English was this platform for me, finding out that I could dissect the world, but dissect it at so many different angles. University just offered me the opportunity to do that and do it thoroughly, so I did.
How were you involved in the BlackListed Magazine?
BlackListed Magazine was about taking taboo thought and making it more orthodox. It was about taking unanswerable questions and trying to answer them. I think what we found in the process of working with BlackListed Magazine is that the value of the questions we were asking was never in the answer themselves, but in the process of asking in the journey and in the iteration of asking. So, as it is now, anybody in one of my classes will tell you, ‘Ms. Albert asks a lot of questions and she expects us to ask a lot of questions,’ And it comes from asking the unanswerable, asking blacklisted ideas and blacklisted concepts, and seeing how we can use language to bring them into the light.
You expertly combine research, memoir, and fiction in your work. How do you blend the genres and is there one form that you prefer?
I’m always looking for ways to affirm my humanity and the humanity of those around me, and sometimes that takes the form of a 20 page theoretical research essay. Sometimes it’s a long-form epic poem. Sometimes it’s a memoir written in French. I don’t ever want to limit the ways in which I express my humanity, and I think that’s why I jump between genres a lot, I like to teach between genres, because I don’t like the arbitrary limitation to be placed on me in that way.
One of your photographs is featured in “The New York Times.” Could you tell us more about your involvement in photography?
I was always looking for different modalities to affirm and explore my humanity. When words left me at a limit, when there was something that I couldn’t express in words, I found that the still image was really reflective. So I was a photographer for a little while. I actually taught photography when I was working in Haiti… I was teaching English, but I was also teaching visual storytelling as well. A lot of the same principles that guide the study of semantics and literature guide the study of visual storytelling. It was a really great time for me as an artist, and it helped me evolve as a thinker. It helped me evolve as somebody who sees the world in really dynamic ways. I was able to work with Nicholas Kristof… he came to interview some of the university students that I was teaching, and I was able to take a picture and have it published in “The New York Times.” But I think in the end, it just reaffirms the value of exploring. I never thought when I picked up a camera when I was a senior in college that one day I would have a byline in “The New York Times.” It was just something that I was doing as, again, a way to affirm my own humanity, to explore the world, to find a parallel for words in a way that was meaningful… I think that’s what my life is. It’s me pursuing asking questions deeply and pursuing them passionately.
What drew you to the Andover community?
When I interviewed at Andover, it was at the end of ten years of working abroad, and I went into an English classroom, and there was a student from Kenya, there was a student from Nigeria, and there was an American student from the Middle East, and they were there sitting discussing Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl.” And I said, “You know what? Maybe this is a place that I can be useful, and maybe this is a place where I can see myself.” It was this intentional, robust diversity and it wasn’t just the fact that it was Kenya and Nigeria and the Middle East represented. It was the diversity in their thoughts, the diversity in their worldviews, the diversity in the ways they articulated themselves. That was all in one classroom, in one contained span of time, I felt like the entirety of my experiences for ten years had been collapsed into one moment, and it just fit into what Andover was and what Andover could mean for me.
What has been your favorite experience at Andover?
I have a lot. At the top of my mind, it’s being a complement in Alumni Hall, because not only are the students relentlessly quirky and fiercely intelligent, they’re always asking questions and answering them in this nurturing and comforting space. I had one student, she wrote me a thank you card last year, and she said, “Thank you Ms. Albert for always listening earnestly,” and I love that… I listen not just so that I can hear students, but so that students can hear themselves through me, so that I can hold up a mirror to their thoughts, to their feelings, to their desires, and help them understand themselves in more complex and nuanced ways. The ability to do that outside of the classroom, in the dorm setting, in the gender inclusive, non-gender conforming space has been really wonderful.
What do you like to do in your free time?
I love to listen to French pop and hip-hop music. I love listening to American podcasts, and I love watching C-dramas in my free time. I’m also big on meditative walking. This summer, I was walking five miles a day through the [Cochran Bird] Sanctuary and across Andover, and it’s a really great way to air out my ideas and be one with my thoughts.
What is one piece of advice you would give?
Cultivate cosmopolitanism… well, first of all, recognize that normal is a construct and recognize that you can always break out of it and come back into it. That was two pieces of advice, recognize that normal is a construct, and that gives you both the power to build it and the power to deconstruct it, and there are ways that you can do it that can help you cultivate yourself as a cosmopolitan individual that belongs to a global community.
What is your favorite book?
There’s a book that I’ve read once every year since I turned 21, and that would be Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Not only is it a literary feat in terms of Hurston’s poetic mastery, not only is it an anthropological feat in terms of how she documented African American dialect, I think it reminds me each time of the transformative and radical power of self love, because there’s a scene where at the end… Janie is sitting in a big house, and she’s taking out all her memories, and she’s stringing them around her neck as if they were jewelry. It’s just about the radical importance of happiness, or more precisely, it shows you that happiness is a result of all of the ways you think about yourself. Happiness is ultimately a form of self-acceptance. In that moment, past, present, and future had collapsed, and Janie was accepting herself, and she was just happy. We could all use a reminder of the importance of joy, but the importance of claiming it for ourselves through self-acceptance.
