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Angel Adams Parham

Angel Adams Parham is associate professor of sociology and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

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The Power of Beauty in Dark Places

Standing Firm, Youssef Ismail

This is an edited version of an address on beauty that sociologist and educator Angel Adams Parham delivered at the 2024 Zaytuna College Commencement.

Beauty. If you remember nothing else from today’s talk—and I’m aware of how forgettable many such speeches are—remember Beauty, as this will be my first and last word. Among the transcendentals, Beauty is often left for last: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. It’s often given less attention, or actively avoided, because it’s perceived to be frivolous at best or dangerously seductive and deceptive at worst. But Beauty has a transformative power to heal and to lead us toward Truth and Goodness when other means fail us. We must not, therefore, underestimate the life-giving importance of Beauty.

Let me tell you a story. Here’s the portrait I want you to paint in your mind’s eye: There are vacant lots, weeds growing with abandon. Old tires tossed here and there, black blights on neglected lawns. Children, nevertheless, play in the streets, a bit bedraggled but full of energy, still filled with hope, and taking delight in the smallest things. Walk down this street with me, and you will see that it is quite a different story with the adults. Many of them look back or down with a darkened gaze. Some, desperately hungry, hunt for more of what they shouldn’t have on streets too eager to give what will destroy. Others appear stronger and healthier, yet seem bowed down and discouraged by hard work over many long years, work without worth or meaning that seems to get them nowhere.

What does such a desolate landscape need? Jobs, yes. Better schools with better-funded programs, certainly. Opportunity, of course; this cannot be denied. But who, walking down these streets, eyeing this portrait of privation, would also urgently say, Beauty? I hope, by the end of my brief time with you, that you will share my conviction that Beauty is inseparably connected to flourishing and that the education you have received here at Zaytuna College uniquely prepares you to share this life-giving source so vital for the kind of place we are visiting in our minds.

But please know that this place I’m describing is not confined to the space of the mind. It exists in a difficult part of New Orleans, the neighborhood where my family and I lived for twelve years, a place where life’s struggles get played out on the shabby streets and in the barren homes of the children I was graced to work with. It was there that we built a humble home. It was there that our church worked to be a restorative presence. And it was there that a group of my intrepid college students and I worked for years to bring Beauty to young minds in the form of classic stories, art, and language—the kinds of classic stories and literature so prized here at Zaytuna—for we translated that rich literature into a form that would delight young children. In the midst of a community hurting in myriad ways, we read the Iliad and the Odyssey. We recited poetry and studied art. We shared meals and sang together. Much as Zaytuna weaves classic traditions together—bringing the best of Western and Islamic learning and literature into conversation—we wove Western classics with African, African American, and other diverse materials to create something beautiful for the children.

The youth pastor—realizing that our young students had to walk past tempting video games and booming popular music to read Homer with older students—wondered aloud how it was going. He was right to inquire, as we live in an age of aggressive amusements that lure the young and the old into distracted—sometimes deadly—oblivion. The seductive dangers of addictive amusement led Neil Postman to write the book Amusing Ourselves to Death—a meditation on how we damage ourselves as we succumb to the shining lights that seek to divert our attention from that which can nourish and sustain our souls. But instead of surrendering to the shiny lure of amusement, the children came to us after school and listened to enduring stories and wrote poetry. We spruced up their poems with art and created small booklets that made them proud, for they had become authors, and they marveled at their own ingenuity. As the work spread beyond New Orleans, children in other difficult places—in Houston, Philadelphia, and even Uganda—have laughed and smiled and discovered and created.

The Gathering, Youssef Ismail

I do not relate these stories naively. I do not ignore the powerful forces of social and economic injustice, oppression, and violence that mark the lives of young people in inner cities. I have visited homes where children are forced to care for themselves; I have rushed with my own children to stay clear of the windows while bullets fly outside. So no, I do not speak of the power of Beauty lightly or naively. I speak of it because I know the power that Beauty—and sometimes Beauty alone—has to inspire a life-giving, life-saving vision for human flourishing.

This same yearning inspired many writers of the black intellectual tradition—so often weighed down by sorrow and suffering—generation after generation, to act creatively in pursuit of the beautiful vision of a more just world. This same yearning led Phillis Wheatley, a young girl kidnapped from the west coast of Africa in the eighteenth century, to petition the poetic muse to inspire her writing in the cause of liberty during the American Revolution. It was this yearning that powered Frederick Douglass’s fiery, incisive critique and oratory in the nineteenth century. And it was this yearning for the beautiful vision that led Anna Julia Cooper, born into slavery but destined for freedom, to bring the liberal arts of literature, history, and philosophy to black working-class men and women in the twentieth century, when the rest of American society declared them undeserving and unfit for such an education.

I trust that your schooling at Zaytuna College has built your capacity to do infinitely more in your own lives than all of these great minds combined, because you have received an excellent education and formation that most young people can only dream about. You have read widely and deeply across traditions: Aristotle and the Epic of Gilgamesh; Sophocles and the Psalms of David; the Analects of Confucius and the Bhagavad Gita; Cicero and al-Kindī; Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī, and Aquinas; along with too many more to name.

In all of this, your minds and imaginations have been filled with the good things that equip you to counterculturally live the way of Beauty, which draws others around you to aspire toward Goodness, Truth, and Justice. In doing this, you will follow the path of many people—both great and ordinary—who modeled for us the vision of Beauty during dark times. Here I offer for your contemplation three lives that embody the transformative power of Beauty in a broken world. You’ll see that they go from the world-renowned to the everyday—so there’s a place along this continuum for each of you to make your unique contribution as well.

Let us begin with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer whose family defied the Soviet government’s repression of those who refused to leave the Russian Orthodox Church. Though he turned away from his faith as a young man, the courage he learned from his family stayed with him, and he was condemned to eight years in prison for writing a private letter in which he spoke out against the government’s violent oppression. But the government’s punishment turned into a triumph of the spirit, for it was in prison that Solzhenitsyn turned to philosophy and back to his faith. He then poured his energies into writing, producing literature that touched the hearts and minds of people worldwide and shaped the imagination of a new generation, calling them to freedom of mind, body, and spirit. When he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, he devoted his speech to—of all things—the power of Beauty.

He began by sharing Dostoevsky’s oft-cited quotation “Beauty will save the world.” “What sort of statement is that?” Solzhenitsyn wondered. “When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything?” These are entirely reasonable questions, and he pondered them for a while before concluding that the power of Beauty lay in its unconquerable Truth. Political speeches and social programs may be based on mistakes or manipulations, but a true work of art is never false. Instead, Solzhenitsyn argued that “those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force—they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.” And this is why he concluded that even when Truth and Goodness are “crushed, cut down,” and forbidden by violence and oppression to push through the soil that seeks to nourish them, the “unexpected stems of Beauty” escape, spread their tendrils, and bring her sisters, Truth and Goodness, with her. Solzhenitsyn knew the power of Beauty.

Now let us consider the life and times of Marva Collins, an African American woman born in 1936 in Monroeville, Alabama. Anyone who knows something about our nation’s history knows that to be born black in 1930s Alabama meant an oppressive life lay ahead of you. But Marva was fortunate to be born into an educated, fairly prosperous family, since her father owned a funeral business. She was nourished on great literature, beginning with the Bible stories her grandmother read to her. Her aunt Ruby introduced her to Shakespeare when she was nine years old. She walked into the room when Macbeth was being read aloud, and she heard:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.

While she didn’t understand what it was all about, the words swirled in her mind, and she got hold of the book to read it for herself, taking delight in the line “Double, double toil and trouble,” which announces the worrying prophecy Macbeth will live out in the play.

Many years later, while living in a black neighborhood in Chicago, a place of struggle where the children were muted and their eyes were dull, Marva recalled the sparkle great literature had brought to her own eyes and the darkness it had lightened, and she embarked on an ambitious plan to create a school that would fill the young people of that Chicago community with Beauty and hope. They came to her literally mute—some had been so profoundly affected by trauma that they did not speak. Others were assumed to have low IQs. But those whom others had cast aside became Marva Collins’s intellectual wonders. In the book commemorating her life, she explains:

I was constantly reminding the children that some of the greatest people in history—Socrates, Milton, Galileo, Einstein, Edison, and Columbus—were ridiculed and told they would never amount to anything.

Every day I put a different quotation on the board:…

Speak the speech trippingly on the tongue (Hamlet)

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once (Julius Caesar)

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation (Thoreau)

He who eats my bread, does my will.

This last (quite provocative) proverb was meant to remind the children that they did not have to live down to the low expectations others had set for them. Marva Collins steeped her young pupils in literature and philosophy; she took them to libraries and museums; and twenty years later, the formerly mute spoke eloquently, and those who had once been swept aside like dust were lawyers and accountants. Marva Collins knew the power of Beauty in dark places.

Finally, let us consider Samman Akbarzada, an everyday hero, someone much closer to your own stage of life, a first-year student of mine at the University of Virginia. Though quite young, Samman has endured what many would find unendurable. She lived between bouts of violence in her homeland, going to school each day never knowing where and when the next blow might strike. Then one day, the combatants bombed a school, killing more than sixty young girls very much like herself. In mourning their lives, Samman wrote poetry:

You load your guns
We’ll turn the pages
You pull the triggers
We’ll press our pens….
Stain us with blood
We’ll paint crimson roses

These daunting and devastating lines exhibit a fierce determination to learn and flourish, to live defiantly in the midst of destruction and death.

As she was writing poetry, she also completed a novel and secured a publishing contract—as a teenager. Her novel tells the story of a widow who lost her husband to government violence. But just as her novel was due to be released, Samman received word that her life was in danger because of what she wrote. A late-night phone call gave her five hours to pack up and leave the country.

As Samman sought to make a new home in the US, she continued to write, publishing a book of poetry in 2022. For Samman, the cultivation of the poetic imagination—both for herself and for those who read her work—became as necessary as breathing. As she reflects on the power of writing, she explains: “What is poetry but a moment of weakness, and what is art if not finding pleasure [despite] one’s suffering? There is an eerie beauty in pain…. Like all other art forms, literature is not only for comfort but also for coping with the atrocities of dear life, forcing us to crawl under our skin until it feels right and we can breathe again…. I aspire [for this book of poetry] to be [a] sanctuary.” Samman desires to become a trauma-informed psychologist and to continue writing in order to put the ineffable, and the agonizingly painful, somehow into words that help her and others to make something redemptive out of suffering. Samman knows the power of Beauty in the midst of sorrow.

What these three exemplars demonstrate is the power of Beauty as it exists in the form of the moral imagination. The British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch defines the moral imagination as that capacity we humans have to make pictures of the good life while coming to resemble those pictures of the good that we have breathed into being. We struggle, often against great obstacles, to bring this good into being. And where do these images of the good life come from? They come from stories. They come from poetry. They come from art. We fill our minds with these treasures and transmute them to empower, to inspire, and to heal.

Zaytuna graduates, you have it in you to show the way of Beauty in a world that is thirsty for it. For we live in a world where the good, beautiful, and true are more and more firmly crowded out by entertainments, distractions, and trivialities that keep us from the deeper sources that have the power to refresh and inspire. You have been equipped with ways of seeing the world through philosophy, literature, and faith, while so many others perish for lack of them. As you go forth now into the world, illuminate the path that leads to Truth, shine a light on the obscured byways that lead to Goodness, and point the way to the stepping stones that bring us closer to Justice. You can do all this by living a life that stands as a testament to the transcendent and transformative power of Beauty.