Man, this is a good shake I’m having at this here tea place. Taro-Coconut Shake with Passion-Fruit Jellies. I’m keeping it tropical.
Ok, what have I read lately that’s interesting? HEAVY by KIESE LAYMON comes to mind. I’ve thumbed through BLACK SKIN WHITE MASKS by FRANTZ FANON. There was a similarly titled short story I enjoyed last year, written by that one Zimbabwean writer… the one who wrote HOUSE OF HUNGER. DAMBUDZO MARECHERA was his name, yeah. He was a crazy gifted writer. A lot of folks called him just crazy. All I know is drugs are crazy. What else…
I’m still in the above-mentioned tea place and these miniature white people are staring at me, slurping their bubble tea. White people need to teach their children not to stare at black people. It’s rude. Also. We might bite. Rawr.
Anyway, do I regret my past? Sometimes, yeah. Do I remember it? Sometimes, yeah. Do I wish my present was easier? Sometimes, that, too, yeah. But overall, I guess I can’t complain. I’d rather not be in this country, but nothing is forever. I’m in this temporarily, ya know. I’m gonna leave, dammit. One of these days.
And I realize that this all sounds very much like the immigrant longing for a perfect over-there home that’s discussed in ELUSIVE JANNAH by CAWO MOHAMED ABDI. Talking about how refugees always see their next destination as the one place where everything will come together for them. Well, there is no over-there.
All we have is here.
And I suspect that I’ll always find something deficient in my here. But it’s not my job to think about that. What is my job? Whatever it is, I’m not there right now. I’m here writing. Which is what I wish my real job was.
And people keep telling me I’m a good writer, which doesn’t make me feel any better about anything. I’m like dawg, I’m just tryna write. I don’t wanna hear all that other stuff. I do this for the love of it. And if there’s a way for me to make a living off of it, raise some kids with it, find a wife within the folds of these words, well, then, damn, I’ll just have to put up with you telling me how good of a writer you think I am.
Look, I’m an okay writer, okay? There’s a whole lot of people who are a whole lot more dedicated to the craft than I am. I’m just some guy with an ear for language, a sense of rhythm and a buncha crazy stories to tell. I’m also very emotional and when I get overwhelmed by those emotions then writing is the only thing I can turn to, other than prayer. And that’s how I get right with myself. That’s how I remember to be peace. To slow down and breathe. That’s how I get into the zone, in a trance, when I drift off into the click and the clack, man. Ain’t nothing like that.
Believe me, I’ve done a whole buncha drugs in my life and not much compares to the feeling of being in flow. This is it, for me. This is as close to lasting happiness as I’m likely to find. I say that knowing that writing will probably, also, be the cause of much pain and grief in my life. The joy outweighs the sorrow.
Or, it could be that I’d be in pain regardless, and writing is just a by-product of that pain. But I can’t say that for sure – because many of the things I’ve been sure of in the past have turned out to be categorically false. Or I grew disillusioned with them after the sheen wore off. Either way, I’m here, I’m writing, and I’m okay with that. More than okay, I’m elated. Though it could just be the sugar high plus emotional high of this Quran recitation in my ears, transporting me back to Ramadan 2017 in Masjid Salaam, Mugoya Block, South C, Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa, Africa, EARTH.
This is writing for fun, this isn’t work. I mean, when the program starts, I guess they’re gonna challenge me to do things I’m not willing to do in other settings. That’s okay though, cuz, I guess, that’s how you grow as an artist. And growth often hurts. And it’s very possible that I’ll be crying for relief a few months from now, in the dead of winter, yuck. But this is my dream, so I’m hoping that I’ll work just a little bit harder for it than I would nearly anything else.
Listen, if I was willing to grit my teeth for the last year at a soul-sucking medical interpreting job while depressed and emotionally unstable, man, then I think I can do anything I set my mind to. And, at the same time, it’s just school, bro. I’ve been training myself to read and write and re-write and read read read for the last year. I’ve developed a habit of reading, which is great. And I suspect that it will only increase with time, especially under pressure.
Remember that one time I drove all the way down I-35W South to Northfield, MN? And I went to that private liberal arts school, CARTELON COLLEGE, wherein lay the only copy in the sate of FLOWERS FROM HELL? Man, that book was nasty. Dark as hell. Raw. Some end-of-life poetry. And not of natural causes. If depression was a book, that book would be as close to it as you could get.
Anyway, I took the day off from work, with my broke ass, and I drove the 60 or so minutes down there. And I didn’t have the rights to check out the book because I didn’t pay 50K per annum to attend that private college, so I had to read it on the spot. But it’s whatever. Small towns scare me. Private schools scare me. White people in their ivory towers are scared of what they think I should be.
Which is fine, or whatever, except that scared white people are quick to call the police, and the police, as we all know, are quick to draw like a wild west cartoon character named McGraw.
Ker-Blow.
It would’ve been ironic if I went down there to read a poetry book in order to finish an assignment, and some white person got scared of my blackness, called the cops on me, and the cops went boom boom, pow pow, and I ended up face up, on the ground, flowers blooming near my dying body.
It would have been ironic that I got killed for trying to gain knowledge, which is maybe why they say knowledge is power. Power to keep the oppressed under burden. Power to keep the powerful in power.
Even more irony: how they’d have hung my black ass not too long ago for learning how to read. You know? And it’s well known, you know, that a lot of these institutions, colleges, hospitals, state capitols, whatever; a lot of these places were built by and with the lives of black slaves. Black slaves that were hung if they tried to escape in the physical, with their feet, hung if they tried to escape in the mental, learned to read.
So the goal of higher education is to further oppress the mind of the oppressed, and to keep elevated, figuratively, the mind of the subjugator. Just like the goals of the courts, the state penitentiaries, the beat cops on traffic stops, are to keep the body of the black man down; whether in bondage or below earth, keep him down.
They want to drown your mind, body and soul in chains. At least in this life.
But they can never win, young black, because this life is just an illusion and it’ll be gone before they know it. Even if they think they can live on through their children, through their society, country, what have you… each individual person is destined to die. And when you strip away everything else, well, then, what is left? Just one soul, one body, one lifetime. One day of judgement for us all. That’s wild, bro. Dumb wild.