A few months ago, while putting the final touches on the book, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, I realized that there were two voices I needed to make the project complete. One voice was my Grandmother, Catherine Coleman, and the other was the voice of Ádìsá Àjàmú. When I talked with my Grandmother about the project, she reminded me that her spirit and voice are literally in every piece in the book. “Don’t force it,” she told me. “Just let every voice in the book breathe.” In “Echo,”  the anchoring piece in the book, Mychal Denzel Smith, Darnell Moore, Kai Green, Marlon Peterson, and me write to each other, exploring the need for black boys of this nation to seize breath, memory, honesty and transformative will. The piece is absolutely stunning. But it needed Ádìsá Àjàmú, the most generously genius and loving writer I’ve read in over a decade. I gave our piece to Ádìsá’ and asked him to add his letter to the mix. Sadly, the book was already on its way to the printer when I got his incredible offering. When, or if, you read the “Echo” piece in How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, come back here and read Ádìsá’s absolutely stunning punctuation. We are so lucky to call this beautiful man our brother. 

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Dear Mychal, Darnell, Kiese, Kai and Marlon—Yimhotep, brothers:

Thank you for your candor, for being courageous enough to stand in the heat and not attempting to cool pose, and for showing the sinew of pain that so often lies beneath the sheath of smiles. As you all know deep hurt sometimes explains us but we remain victorious so long as we refuse to let it define us.

Love and loss, so much of life is lived in the (heart)beats and (heart)breaks between the tumultuous and giving beauty of those two kinds of experiences.  While anyone who has ever loved can certainly agree that love has a tumultuous and giving beauty. It must seem, on the surface, like a paradox to suggest to you brothers that loss also has its moments of giving beauty; especially with the kinds of loss you have all endured personally, and kinds and quality of losses we have endured collectively as a people. But loss sometimes does give even if it introduces itself initially as a painful absence. I know you must be thinking, “This brother must be smokin’ dat ‘good-good.’” Before I attempt to convince you that I’m not channeling Smokey from Friday, I suppose I should share a little bit about me.

I was born in a small African village located in an eastern city just off the Atlantic coast of North America called the Bronx. I can’t say that my childhood was idyllic but it certainly didn’t resemble the “bleak childhood fantasy” Baldwin experienced. And I would certainly relive it again. As a child growing up in the 1970s, the Boogie Down was a dangerously magical place. Life was structured around stoops and bodegas, play and penny candies, stickball, basketball and games like Ringolevio and Hot Beans and Butter, which were our national pastimes. We were multicultural before white folks forced us to use a word to say what we already knew: that “human” didn’t mean just mean alabaster with rushes of pink.

There was always one Black person whom you played with and whom you just knew was Black like you (of the Negrus Americanus variety) and then one day you heard his mom call him in a language you didn’t know—Puerto Rican or Dominican Spanish—and then he would look at you like he was a part of a spy ring and his cover had just been blown, and you would look at him with that look that said without actually saying the Richard Pryor line: “ What kinda n*gga is you?” Eventually there would be some other dude the two of you played ball with and his mother would call him too but in language that sounded eerily like English but usually was accompanied with some elegant phrase like Bumboclot, which had you and your Puerto Rican or Dominican friend (of the Negrus latinus americanus variety) looking at him with that same, “What kinda n*gga is you?” look.

We played often and sometimes we fought; everyone thought they could scrap until the Jamaicans—we called them West Indians—changed the game with a strange new weapon—the headbutt. In the world of knuckle up street fighting, that joint was the equivalent of the atomic bomb. Needless to say there weren’t many fights with the Jamaican dudes. I still think they were the reason that guns became the weapon of choice in the South Bronx because once a n*gga headbutted you, you really had few actionable comeback options.

I’m joking of course. Kinda.

My father had a tight grip on the bottle and loose hands when it came to my mom, so she left him for good when I was seven.  I never saw him after that. I am in my forties. Never really missed him. It is a loss that had a tumultuous and giving beauty. He gave a five-speed Schwinn, and I am told his dimples and charisma, so there is that. Like most hoods, mine had categories of poverty, there was poor, there was po’ and then there was P (pronounced Puh) for all those folks like my family who were so poor they couldn’t even afford the two “o’s” and the “R.” I have lived on both coasts. My mom heard Gladys Knight and when she said L.A. proved too much for the man, she figured she was a woman and what was too much for the man, would be just enough for a strong woman.

So we moved to Los Angeles—South Central, Los Angeles, to be precise. When you are from the bottom and you change cities or states most often you don’t really change your dire circumstances, you simply rearrange them into different categories of despair, which you hope will be more manageable. It was also a dangerously magical place but that experience was given motive force. Literally. The automobile introduced a new concept into my ghetto lexicon: Drive Bys. I survived the killing fields. Many of my friends did not—including some who are still on top of the ground. The Walking Dead was reality show in my hood long before AMC came up with a television show.

I wouldn’t say I am “thugged out” but you won’t find me sipping tea with my pinky poked out, either. I would say I am a combination of two types of educational systems — the ‘hood and the good. I believe that what defines a person is not what knocks them down, but what they get up from. There is nothing really all that exceptional or outstanding about me. I am not the kind of cat that is going to turn heads, but my being– the way I exist in the world, my sense of style, humor and personality have opened many doors over the years, and I have tried to hold the door open long enough for another sister or brother to get through. I try to live well, treat people well, and maybe, leave a footprint here, a fingerprint there that says I was here, and that maybe I touched someone, left an impression or a set of footprints for others to follow.

Now back to this tumultuous and giving beauty of loss thing. None of us escapes loss. There are only those who fashion it into something giving and beautiful and those of us who allow it to metastasize into a kind of absent-presence in our lives.

Absent-presence …  another paradox, I know.

But often we spend so much time focusing on our losses that the absence actually becomes a huge presence in our lives, crowding out other fertile, life sustaining possibilities. In other words, we let the things we don’t have take up so much space that we can’t enjoy the blessings we do have.

Mychal: As I read you letter I smiled because I saw in you a wonderful example of the giving beauty of loss. You are twenty-six, the exact same age as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X when they stepped onto the national stage. In your story were you saw kryptonite, I saw the making of Superman. The Martin’s and Malcolm’s of our world are forged out of the sinew of hurt, self-doubt, loss and self-discovery; they are not born. Every brother in our society has what I call a Walter Lee moment. As you recall, Walter Lee Young is the character played by Sidney Portier in the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s generous play A Raisin in the Sun. Wonderful film, I’m sure you agree. If not, keep that to yourself, as our friendship is still fragile.

I’m joking. Kinda.

If you recall there is a moment in which Walter Lee has lost the money they inherited from their fathers life insurance policy. The family is worried about being able to move into the all white Chicago suburb of Clybourne Park after the neighbor “welcoming committee” has offered to buy them out to prevent them from integrating the neighborhood. At first he agrees to sell out. He’d been broken (or so he thinks). He feels the weight of responsibility and it’s crushing him. And when the moment of truth arrives, he looks at his son, his wife, his sister and his mother and he finds the strength to stand up and shoulder the weight of manhood. He rejects the offer and tells Mister Charlie aka Mark Lindner that he and his family are moving in after all. That’s the Walter Lee moment. Each of us has a Walter Lee moment where we must decide to stand up, shoulder the weight or buckle under it. Manhood is a process that ends in products even though the process never ends. Try not to give too much energy to arriving at manhood on time; it is far better to be in time. As an elder told me once in my rush to arrive, “All time is real and understanding that is power.”

Darnell: I don’t know what its like to be a gay man—word on the street is that I was trying to holla at the honeys in the nursery on the day I arrived—but I do know what it’s like not be loved fully by those who purpose in in part to love you fully, and what its like to live in a world that vociferously tries to deny my humanity. When I was younger I was one of those dudes that thought that to be gay and a man were antonyms. I was certainly a part of that riptide that pulled a lot of brothers just trying to keep their heads above water.

I’m sorry. Truly.

As I got older saw more of the world and saw more of world in me, I came to understand that what I was pushing back on was the ways in which gay men’s assertion of manhood disturbed my own notions of manhood. Much in the same way that Black agency forces white folks to have to recalibrate their sense of identity, so too does gay men’s agency force us as “straight” Black men to rethink our notions of manhood and gender. I think the term you used to describe this was “heteronormativity.” My dexterity with complex concepts sometimes get the better of me, I hope I didn’t do violence to what you meant. This is a far more intricate conversation with more nuances than space here allows. The flashpoints and trajectories of love, sex, sexualization, gender, power, identity, trauma, family, oppression, repression, community and the sociology of selfhood require a much more involved conversation beyond this epistolary moment.

Let me just say, the loss of the acceptance of ones humanity can be powerfully disabling, if we allow it to be. As I continue to grow up, I have come to realize that a part of growing into adulthood is about finding the world that welcomes you, all of you—or if you cant find it, having the courage and vision to create it. That, to me, is revolution.

Kiese: My man, though we barely know one another. Please know that I’m down for you like four flat tires. When you are not serving in your role as LeBron James’ publicist, you’re one hell of a scribe. In reading your letter and reflecting on Darnell’s letter. It is amazing to me how often we overlook how much of what we consider manhood is really the result of an unconscious process of brothers in contact and conversation with African womanhood but imagining that it’s a brothers’ only conversation. Much of our bravado, swagger and virulent sexism that informs the unstable elements of manhood are as much the result of whom we imagine women to be as it is about whom men actually are.

In other words, the loss of a kind of fundamental personhood, that has gendered expressions, has created an absent-presence that evidences itself as a form of solidarity in patriarchy, whose very sustainability requires a slow destruction of our best selves.  That manhood within the context of patriarchy is not really manhood but what’s leftover when you negate “feminine” force. It is the celebration of the reflection in the mirror while hating image that calls the reflection into being. Like white supremacy, it is an identity built upon a shared lie, in which we, and many of our sisters, are complicit. To “give up the game” is to tell on ourselves. We protect sexism, misogyny and patriarchy not just to protect other men, but to protect that part of this shared lie that our own identities rest so unsteadily upon. This palimpsest of manhood needs to be erased in order to rediscover a kind of manhood that is constructed from a sense of personhood rooted in women and men in contact and conversation about what values animate our best spiritual selves.

I am reaching, I know. But to dream is free; it is the failure to dream is exorbitantly expensive.

If I can return to a nod that gave to A Raisin in the Sun in my reply to Mychal, Walter Lee has his rites of passage, but in the truest African sense, it is the women of the village, the Younger women, who give him their stamp of approval, when the Mother says to Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth, “Walter Lee done come into his manhood right nice today” and she says “Yes, he did.”

It is the fool who imagines himself a writer with pen with no ink, and it is the fool who thinks that only men create and shape other men.

Kai: I so appreciate your willingness to share a part of your journey and your willingness to be honest enough to know enough about your struggle to say you are still uncovering you. When Kiese asked me to participate in the conversation and to reply to all the letters, I thought “I got this. How hard can it be to respond to brothers talking and thinking about a spectrum of manhood?”—and then I read your letter. A woman who  becomes a “transman” and who loves women and men is a book, not a letter. I wanted to know more about what unique insights you might have about men, about women, about life as a transgender person, as a person of African ancestry (or what some is metaphorically known as Black) and how these multivalent perspectives informed your thinking, being, and doing as a transman. Reading your letter put me in mind of the work by Lorand Matory’s Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion and Ifi Amadiume’s Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. Both examine the intricate ways in which Africans have thought of, conceptualized, understood and inhabited gender and identity within specific cultural context. Stay with me: I also wonder to what extent our investment in western worldview delimits our ability to understand gender and identity as spiritual realities that have material manifestations.

Is it possible that one could be born with a woman spirit in a man’s form and vice versa? I don’t know. What I do know is that African societies have wrestled with these questions in the past relying on worldviews that accommodate much more expansive operational notions of gender and identity. Of course, by now you must also be thinking but what about the LGBT sentiments on the continent? I would note the impact of colonialism but also that all societies have their range of complexities and contradictions and that we must examine all of it in the hopes of constructing a more harmonious world, a world that welcomes all of us, or as I said before, the courage to create a new one.

I was educated within a tradition that taught me that the goal of thinkers and scholars is not to produce answers but to ask better and better questions. Perhaps in some ways your courage will yield better and better questions. I hope you maintain the courage to pursue them openly.

Marlon: Kierkegaard wrote that we live life forward and understand it backwards. I suppose there is a quality of truth in that statement; that looking back offers us the opportunity for reflection that helps us understand our current location. But what if you’re in an unlit tunnel and all you see is darkness whichever direction you look? In the midst of the darkness, your sensory perception begins to slowly erode and as we find ourselves in a kind of suspended animation, stumbling blindly through the forest of patriarchy in search of a emancipatory manhood. I don’t know, but I think a lot of brothers feel that way. I know I did once upon a time until some good men turned on the light in my life. In that space, prison seems like an improvement for some of us.

The walls can sadly orient us.

It’s horrible situation to feel like one is in prison whether incarcerated or not. I’ve been incarcerated before—twice— but never in “Mister Gilmore’s house.”

I have always been blessed with good women in my life, but I wasn’t always good to them when I was younger. In fact, I was quite mean at times. I have never raised my hands to a woman, but I wont front and say that its something I never considered. And while I am proud of that, I know that I have been emotionally abusive. I see infidelity as a form of emotional abuse too.

It wasn’t until I decided to confront my own hurt that I began to change and move closer to the man I wanted to be. And bruh, confronting that kind of hurt is like ripping duct tape off of a gaping wound and pouring rubbing alcohol on it.

That shit hurt! A lot.

I suspect that’s why so many of us seem unwilling to do it. So we simply expressed that deep hurt in other ways. Some of it is constructive but most of it destructively. I don’t have to tell you how repressed anger and hurt eat away at the body and soul. I think there is giving wisdom in your father suggestion that we not suffocate our spirits by holding in love. But loving is a circle and once we give it, we also open ourselves to receive it and that love at times can remind us of loss and hurt. To avoid that that loss, we simply break the circle. My hope for you is the same as my hope for myself that: that we find a good partner and love that partner like s/he is as essential to your life as oxygen. No matter the question, Black Love is always the answer.

Always.

Brothers, in looking over my letter I realize that I have violate the most basic rule of an epistolary relationship: brevity.

I apologize.

Among the Dogon of Mali, they have a system of knowledge that they divide into four degrees: 1) Giri So (Knowledge at face value) —understanding things at a surface level; (2) Benne So (Knowledge on the side)—knowledge based on other perspectives; (3) Bolo so (Knowledge from behind)—knowledge based on reflection, sankofa; and (4) So Dayi (Clarity)—to see things in all their “ordered complexity.”

In other words, deep knowledge involves understanding life forward, sideways, backwards and panoramically. Live life forward. My hope is that as we build, share, think and become better men that we do so with the kind of humility that acknowledges we not only have a lot of questions, but that we are also willing to live our way openly and courageously to the answers.

In life, love and liberation,

Ádìsá

Àdisà Àjàmú is the Executive Director of the Atunwa Collective, a Community Development Think Tank in Los Angeles, California. He is the co-author, along with Thomas Parham and Joseph White, of the fourth edition of The Psychology of Blacks: Centering our perspectives in the African consciousness (2010). Currently, he is completing two books, a collection of short stories and a collection of essays on African (American) life and culture.

Ádìsá Àjàmú