Why I Greet

I was warned, prior to embarking to the States, that Americans have poor English. While I appreciated such efforts to prime me for my experience in this country, I remained unfazed.

For one, poor grammar, especially in a language that has forced itself upon the world, can only be expected. In fact, embracing “poor grammar” is a mode of anti-colonial resistance that I applaud. But, upon my arrival in the land of liberty, I was stumped to find that the dominating language rebelled, not just against conventions of grammar, but against norms of punctuation – with one clause in particular. It was in the cosmopolitan confines of Cambridge that I encountered the “Hi, how are you?” that ends with a period, instead of a question mark.

It swiftly dawned on me that the city that I was to be courted by for the next four years of my life was one that did not know how to greet. Instead, I have been espoused by a city of sprinters, where we dash past others with such speed that people become mere meter-markers in the race to wherever we are off to next. In our ritual performance of city life — where eye contact is seemingly too intimate for the people we mumble “hi” to on our daily commute — I miss “Sawubona.”

I miss more than the cadence of the vowels, cradled by the warmth of the “buh” and elevated by the whispering “w.” I miss more than being immersed in the language from which it evolved — a language that I cannot speak nor adequately understand, but a tongue that I cannot divorce from the place I call home. Where I come from, in the clicking vernacular of the people of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, “hello” is not “hello.” In isiZulu, we greet with “Sawubona” — “We see you.” When we greet, we witness and profess, breathing soul into the hollow chambers of “hello.” I miss Sawubona. I miss being seen.

Remarkably, I have received some of the best greetings of my life in the short while that I have been in Massachusetts. However, most of these experiences have taken place at restaurants, cafes, and retail outlets, where smiles and “hellos” are attached to monetary values. It would be convenient for me to pawn off this flaw as characteristic American commercialism, and add it to my arsenal of reasons for criticizing the nation I now find myself a part of, a nation which I begrudge for all it possesses at the expense of places like my home. It would be easy to extend this observation and juxtapose it with the values of community that I have attached to

South Africa — a country with personality, a nation with charisma. While I could belabor my disdain for the capitalist failings of the United States, the issue of greeting (or the lack thereof) is not limited to America. In fact, my own dedication to the conventions of “Hi” and “How are you?” is a relatively recent development.

I began my commitment to greeting people out of compliance with my high school’s regulations. These rules, which stipulated the need to greet, legitimized a culture of acknowledgment. But this legitimacy was selective. I recall these regulations being virtually italicized with our interactions with the staff of the school — the teachers and the management personnel. But not the people in between. Not the caretakers, of which the majority in South Africa are poor; The people who traveled from far to maintain the equilibrium of well-trimmed suburbia for insupportable wages and even fewer thanks. This rule may have originated to enforce traditional dynamics of institutional respect. But the omission of some workers in institutionalized greeting culture had sinister collateral effects, even if they were accidental. By greeting along the socio-economic pecking order, we were pre-determining which people ought to be seen more than others.

What began as a daunting chore, motivated by the fear of retribution, became a commitment to seeing — acknowledging — everybody: cashiers at the supermarket, security guards, the workers at my high school.

And, here at Harvard, we should make an effort to greet the people in our entryway, strangers we sit with at Annenberg, and our classmates. But we must be most dedicated to greeting the people who are often glossed over as part of the red brick of this institution — HUDS staff, the workers milling about the yard during the day, the security guards who man the gates of the campus 24/7.

We live in an age where the rights of these workers, both in our institution and in the greater community, are at odds with a society co-opted by the dynamics of profit and capital. Thus, choosing to acknowledge all people becomes a political decision. The exploitation of these workers is sustained by the narrative that they are disposable. But narratives of expendability become void when we begin to perceive all people as people. “Sawubona” then, becomes not just the act of witnessing: It asserts itself, more importantly, as the refusal to ignore.

We greet to center the people who are eternally lodged in the peripheral – even if just for a moment.

Colombe O. Eyono ’25, a Crimson Editorial Editor, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.

This piece is a part of a focus on Black authors and experiences for Black History Month.