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2012 PROVIDENCE COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS

Viola Davis

Viola Davis has had a highly successful career on both stage and screen. She won two Tony Awards and received an Academy Award Best Actress nomination for her 2011 performance as Aibileen Clark in The Help. In 2012, Time magazine selected Ms. Davis as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.

Ms. Davis began acting as a high school student in Rhode Island. She was invited to return to her home state and deliver the commencement address at Providence College on May 22, 2012. On the special occasion of a graduation, the speaker should offer the class inspirational advice for the future. In this address, Ms. Davis eloquently urges the Providence graduates to be true to their authentic selves.

You know, when John Garrity [’73; PC associate professor of theatre arts] picked me up from the airport, I said, “Oh my goodness, I’m so nervous I’m going to be speaking in front of 1,200 people,” and he said, “Try a little bit more than that.” And I thought, “NOOOO!” •

• Attention-getter. Humorous reference to speaking to a large audience.

But really, I am so honored to be here, to impart my infinite wisdom, and I mean that facetiously, at your birth, beginning, start, threshold, genesis, kickoff, launch, commencement. And I have to say that the content of my speech would have sounded totally different ten years ago, pre-marriage, pre-baby, pre–the passing of my father, pre-midlife. I would have made a lot of stuff up and been very self-congratulatory and self-righteous about what a wonderfully dramatic speech I gave, but how I neither lived nor believed none of it. Thank God this is not ten years ago.

So what can I give you? A longtime friend of mine, Leah Franklin, after a passionate, late-night discussion, inspired me with a powerful, honest quote, and I’ll try to do it in her voice: “Oh V, you know, nobody tells you that life sucks. I mean, the only people who are happy are two-year-olds and eighty-year-old billionaires.” Now, I get the two-year-olds, but the eighty-year-old billionaires I didn’t get. Well maybe Hugh Hefner, but . . .

And for some reason that marinated in my head, and the only image that I had was from the movie The Exorcist. • When Ellen Burstyn comes home late to find her assistant frantic, her assistant then whisks her upstairs to her preteen daughter Reagan’s room, played by Linda Blair. The room is freezing, dark. Reagan, who is not really Reagan but a demon is tied to a bed, covered with scars, breathing heavily. The room is really cold, and the assistant says, “I wasn’t going to bother you with this, but I thought you had to see it.” She raises Reagan’s nightgown to reveal her abdomen, and two words had been scratched: “Help me.” And I thought, “That is such a great metaphor for life.”

• Anecdote from The Exorcist sets up the idea that we are “possessed” by beliefs and expectations of others.

• I’m going to hit you with something deep. You know, your authentic self is constantly trapped under the weight of the most negative forces in this world. And it will be an everyday battle. Sometimes I felt, and you will feel, that who you are is hidden away like a piece of really great jewelry that you keep in a box, and you only take it out during special occasions. Yet your everyday persona is a type of demonic possession. But the demons aren’t gargoyles • or red-faced men with horns but everyone else’s dreams, desires, definitions of success, greed, the pursuit of personality instead of character, the exchange of love and family for money and possessions, entitlement with no sense of responsibility, and the most frightening demon of all, lack of purpose.

• Thesis and advice to the graduates: be true to your authentic self.

• Eloquent use of style. Davis uses a simile (the real you is like great jewelry, usually kept in a box) and metaphor (demons to symbolize beliefs of others that can possess us) to make her point.

If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be. Perhaps I’d never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what everyone else seems to want to become. Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would really begin to live after all. You see, the two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you discover why you were born. • Now I have only been able to slay dragons when I have kept these two important facts in sharp focus, because at some point in life, it will indeed suck. Loss of a loved one, health issues, marriage, children, loss of passion, the discovery that what you thought you wanted in life . . . you don’t. You veer off course, but all the while, that purpose, that thing that you were specifically, divinely, made for, will be looming in front of you.

• Fulfilling expectations of the occasion with insightful advice to the graduates.

When I was forty-two, I was present at the passing of my father, and I remember the hospice worker telling my mom that he was very, very sick, and the only reason he was holding on was because he needed permission to go. She had to tell him, and she couldn’t. Now, my vision of what I wanted to become and how I wanted to make a mark involved the musty, 1,200-seat theaters of New York City and the big screen. I wanted to be an artist. I had no vision of that forty-two-year-old woman at hospice, telling her dad to move on. And here I was, with him desperately reaching out, clinging for life, and telling him to go. •

• Use of personal examples to illustrate challenges of life.

At thirty-eight, I got married in a white dress. I thought never in my life will I get married. I had dreams before the ceremony of taking an elevator to the thirty-eighth floor of a building and stepping in and looking at me, and not the me of thirty-eight but the me in my twenties. Only the twenty-year-old me was standing there, dead, zombie. Someone told me, “Well, marriage is like a death . . . you die to yourself.” And there I was the next day, reciting those vows with great joy.

And children, no images of being a forty-six-year-old mother with a two-year-old child entered the realms of my imagination. Yet once again, here I am, facilitating a life, guiding with the knowledge that I cannot protect, but only love. Stumbling at times, yelling internally, “Help me,” happy, disillusioned, exhausted, fulfilled, knowing that I am giving all I am, all I really am, to this life. You know it’s said that humans are the only creatures who stay at their mother’s bosoms the longest. Perhaps that’s why when we are thrust into the world, we flail and thrash, looking for a sanctuary, answers, to be saved. The good news is that the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are, and as for the demons . . . you exorcise them. How? To those who say, “What is my purpose?” I say, “You know.” And to those who know, I say, “Jump!” •

• Inspirational call for action.

The people, the heroes in our life, have gone before us, the labyrinth is fully known, and we’ve only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find God, and where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves, and where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

And hey, you asked an actor to give your commencement speech, so, you know, the actor, the imagination, the flair, just goes wild. So the only thing once again churning through my head was a monologue from George C. Wolfe’s The Colored Museum, and the character’s name is Topsy. They say it’s the most overdone monologue in the world. I say it can never be overdone because the message is eternal. And Topsy talks about a function she went to one night, way uptown:

And baby, when I say way uptown, I mean way, way, way, way, way, way, way, WAY uptown. Somewhere between 125th Street and infinity. Inside was the largest gathering of black/Negro/colored Americans you’d ever want to see. Over in one corner you got Nat Turner sippin’ champagne out of Eartha Kitt’s slipper. Over in another corner you got Bert Williams and Malcolm X discussing existentialism as it relates to the shuffle-ball-change. Girl, Aunt Jemima and Angela Davis was in the kitchen sharing a plate of greens and just going off about South Africa. And then Fats sat down and started to work them 88s. And then Stevie joined in, and Miles and Duke and Ella and Jimi and Charlie and Sly and Lightnin’ and Count and Louie, and everybody joined in. And I tell you, they were all up there dancing to the rhythm of one beat, dancing to the rhythm of their own definition, celebrating in their cultural madness. . . . And then the floor started to shake, and the walls started to move, and before anybody knew what was happening, the entire room lifted up off of the ground, defying logic and limitations and just went a-spinning and a-spinning and a-spinning until it disappeared inside of my head. •

• Narrative from the play, The Colored Museum, reinforces Ms. Davis’s main idea.

That’s right girl, there’s a party going on inside here. That’s why when I walk down the street my hips just sashay all over the place, ’cuz I’m dancing to the music of the madness in me. And whereas I used to jump into a rage anytime anybody tried to deny who I was, now all I gotta do is give attitude, quicker than light, and go on about the business of me because I’m dancing to the music of the madness in me. And here, all this time I’d been thinking we gave up our drums, but no, we still got them. I know I got mine. They here, in my speech, my walk, my hair, my God, my smile, my eyes, and everything I need to get over in this world is inside here, connecting me to everybody and everything that ever was. So honey, don’t try to label or define me ’cause I’m not what I was ten years ago or ten minutes ago. I’m all of that and then some. And whereas I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain, I can’t live without it.

To the 1,200 heroes of Providence College, your commencement begins with the call to adventure, and it comes full circle with your freedom to live, so I say, “Go on and live.” • Thank you very much. I am so honored to be here at this time.

• Conclusion honors the graduates and ends with a clincher that effectively sums up the main idea in four words.