Gorman’s America

In class we discussed Mrs. Gormans use of “we” in her inaugural poem, which made me rethink this quote:

“And so we lift our gaze, not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.”

-Amanda Gorman ‘The Hill we Climb’

It could be argued that “we” (Americans) have not laid down our arms to reach out for one another. That we refuse to set aside our differences and choose to live without harmony. Amanda Gorman’s life itself could be a testament to that idea. Just a few lines before she calls out, “We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one” (Gorman, 2021).

She is scripting the injustice of the very moment she is in. The injustice “we” created and allow. Gorman is not naive, she is not in denial, she is aware and acknowledges deep wrongs in our America. And yet this poem doesn’t feel like condemnation, it feels like hope.

Gorman’s word choice in the first quote is, I think, a call to us Americans. She is telling us who we are not based on what we’ve practiced, or what we’re capable of at our worst, but what is true to us at our core. I think Gorman’s power is that she is prophesying who we will be by speaking like we’ve been it all along. And in a way we have been, not in a way that erases wrongs, but in a way that lets us defeat them.

“For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.“

For Gorman and I this is true, even across time. There is a light in the American people. We know it in part because she was brave enough to see it, because she is brave enough to be it.