Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir
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PRAISE FOR HARI ZIYAD
“Hari Ziyad is one of those writers who transports you into the moments, the minutes, and the seconds of Black life in subtle and gentle ways that are rarely possible. Every word drips with a deep love and commitment to telling true and just stories about our nuanced Black queer lives. Black Boy Out of Time is so moving, so alive, so real. This book is a reclamation and celebration of Black childhood and coming-of-age in all its hidden beauty and pain. We need this memoir, and I’m so grateful Ziyad is here to write it.”
—Jenn Jackson, Syracuse University professor and Teen Vogue columnist
“Hari Ziyad consistently creates work that centers the voices and lives of the most marginalized members in our society. Not only is their work brilliant and insightful, but they challenge readers to examine themselves in a way very few writers can do. Alice Walker once wrote, ‘Those who love us never leave us alone with our grief. At the moment they show us our wound, they reveal they have the medicine.’ Ziyad’s words cut deep, but they also provide healing.”
—Shanita Hubbard, author of Miseducation: A Woman’s Guide to Hip-Hop
“Hari Ziyad is committed to recovering the unrecoverable—the seconds, the minutes, the hours of things shed and discarded as if there were no value to be found in what we were, even though it leads us to what we are. Ziyad is surgical in this pursuit, attempting to be as careful but incisive as possible so that memory does more than remember: it testifies. Like all of their previous writings, Black Boy Out of Time is tribute to and examination of the necessary, the overlooked, the irreconcilable, and the witnessing the world would much rather not do. Ziyad is both lightning rod and lightning bolt.”
—Robert Jones Jr., author of The Prophets and creator of Son of Baldwin
“Every generation has its defining writers, and Hari Ziyad is one of ours. Their writings force you to interrogate and challenge everything you thought you knew and to look at the wound you pretended wasn’t there, but they never leave you without the cure to finally heal the pain.”
—George M. Johnson, bestselling author of All Boys Aren’t Blue and We Are Not Broken
“Black ‘boys’ who never come of age, who are always already someone or something else, are at the heart of Hari Ziyad’s work. Ziyad writes with clarity, passion, care, and a deep love for all Black people—especially those of us who are constantly moving through and around gender. Black Boy Out of Time is a necessary read for Black queer boys and nonbinary people who can relate to finding themselves in a world designed to keep them lost.”
—Da’Shaun Harrison, author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
“I often think about cultural work as before Hari Ziyad and after Hari Ziyad. I don’t know that there is another writer and cultural worker who has done more to make us intellectually, imaginatively, and bodily engage with the ways that traditional conceptions of gender, sexuality, Blackness, class, childhood, empire, and power necessarily mangle our relationships to each other. Hari’s work goes far beyond bombastic pull quotes or titillating essay titles. In their hands, we see language being cared for, carved up, and absolutely dismantled. More than anything, Hari’s art insists that we ask not simply the hard questions, but the unintelligible questions we’ve convinced ourselves have no answers. In their work, I understand that pointed questions rooted in a love of Black queer folk must be part of our liberation. They have changed the way people write, think, and love one another on and off the internet.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy, Long Division, and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America
“Hari Ziyad’s incisive writing is a rare mix of balladry, criticism, and reportage. They write of the times with clarity and courage. They appeal to truth and beauty. And in so doing offer us Black-loving art that is both shotgun and balm.”
—Darnell L. Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America
“Hari Ziyad’s work is the cohesion of all their interests in the so-called marginalized into a single force that illuminates just how central to freedom communities that are abused and underestimated by this society truly are. If the margins are said to be the dwelling place of Ziyad’s subjectivity, then they see their job as showing how the ones in the margins are also the ones who ensure Earth keeps spinning. Through their eyes, the disfigured, the queer, and the riotous are given life, a stage, a platform, and an embrace.”
—Phillip B. Williams, author of Thief in the Interior, winner of the 2017 Whiting Award, Kate Tufts Award, and Lambda Literary Award
“Alongside James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, Darnell L. Moore and Danez Smith, Hari Ziyad’s work fits in as an exciting new entry in the canon of queer Black American literature. At the same time, Ziyad’s writing stands out as a stunningly original voice, and they tackle race and gender in ways writers of all races seem to find too hot to touch. Yet as challenging as Ziyad’s ideas are, they are not inaccessible. Though Ziyad writes explicitly as a Black writer with Black readers in mind (and Black children at the heart of their work), white people are always asking me about their provocative stories. Ziyad stirs impassioned debates and strong reactions from both those people I know who have been following their work for years and those who are encountering it for the first time.”
—Steven W. Thrasher, Northwestern University professor and author of The Viral Underclass: How Racism, Ableism, and Capitalism Plague Humans on the Margins
“Hari Ziyad is a new and important voice narrating for readers both the trauma experienced by Black people and their struggle for liberation. Throughout this text, Ziyad pulls back the curtain and interrogates how anti-Black racism manifests not only in the structures Black people encounter but also in our interactions between each other. Beyond providing texture to the hurt that, too often, animates Blackness, Ziyad’s book details for the reader the possibilities and directions of Black freedom and healing today, and it explores how we must protect Black children from a perpetual cycle of trauma. Ziyad’s book will add nuance and depth to current renderings of what it is to be Black and queer and what type of personal/political liberation is possible.”
—Cathy J. Cohen, author of The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics and Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics
Text copyright © 2021 by Hari Ziyad
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Little A, New York
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ISBN-13: 9781542091329 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1542091322 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781542091312 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1542091314 (paperback)
Cover design by Faceout Studio, Lindy Martin
Cover illustration by David Cooper
All photos courtesy of the author.
First edition
To Mata: The kinds of lessons you left always swim in the blood. This is my promise to remember that next time . . .
And to Toshani, Malani, and Aja: Here is also my vow to ensure you never forget.
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE MISAFROPEDIA
CANTO I Black
CHAPTER ONE CARCERAL DISSONANCE
CHAPTER TWO A PRAYER FOR MY FATHER
CHAPTER THREE NOWALATERS
CHAPTER FOUR A PRAYER FOR REST
> CHAPTER FIVE D*MB SMART
CANTO II Queer
CHAPTER SIX A PRAYER FOR LIMITLESSNESS
CHAPTER SEVEN GUILT AND GODS
CHAPTER EIGHT A PRAYER FOR ANOTHER WORLD
CHAPTER NINE REPRESENTATION MATTERS?
CHAPTER TEN A PRAYER FOR CHOICE
CHAPTER ELEVEN MY GENDER IS BLACK
CHAPTER TWELVE A PRAYER FOR NEW LANGUAGE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN LOGGING OUT OF PASSPORT TWITTER
CANTO III Free
CHAPTER FOURTEEN A PRAYER FOR HEALING
CHAPTER FIFTEEN TRIGGER WARNING
CHAPTER SIXTEEN A PRAYER FOR FREEDOM
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN IF WE MUST DIE
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN A PRAYER FOR COURAGE
CHAPTER NINETEEN ABOLITION
EPILOGUE A PRAYER FOR MY GRANDMOTHER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Memories, always being shaded by subjectivity and biases both conscious and unconscious, are much more temperamental than I sometimes realize, but I have tried to re-create events, locations, and conversations with honesty. In some instances, I have purposefully changed identifying characteristics and the names of individuals and places in order to maintain privacy, or combined a minimum amount of characters and events for readability. My greatest fear in writing this memoir was that I might encroach upon a story that is someone else’s to tell or distort narratives in a harmful way, and perhaps that is on some level unavoidable when you are exploring the deep intricacies of a life that is connected to so many others, but I hope you can sense the care for this story’s subjects in these pages.
PROLOGUE
MISAFROPEDIA
I used to resent the fly who has the whole world to buzz around but stays circling my head anyway. I learned only recently that insects orbit our bodies because they are attracted to our decaying skin. They sense the parts of us that are dying, that we would never otherwise notice. Perhaps, in the single month they have to live, they are just trying to share in this terrifying experience together—just saying, “I am dying, too”—but all I ever heard was a nuisance.
My grandmother Mother Bhūmi lived with my family in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, for the last four years of her life. Whenever I came home during a break from college, she would single me out to go on walks with her, no matter who else was around or capable. I still don’t know why she picked me. I used to believe she was simply testing my patience. Now I wonder if, like the fly, she was being drawn to the parts of me that I had begun to lose over the years: pieces of my childhood that reflected so much of the life she would soon lose, too.
When my grandmother converted to Vaishnavism, she was given the name Bhūmata, which is also what Hindus call the earth goddess. My mother was called Kṛṣṇanandini, though she raised me to call her Mata—the Sanskrit word for mother. They both found faith in Kṛṣṇa, the central god of their Hindu denomination, but Mother Bhūmi, who struggled with bipolar disorder my whole life, lost pieces of herself along the way. She died in 2014—“of natural causes,” the medical report said, but that’s a lie. When Black folks die, it is never so simple.1 When Black folks die, it can always be traced to the myriad ways the state has perfected killing us over the last five centuries of colonization.
The other day, I had a nightmare in which Mata was chanting. Her long fingers lurched around furiously inside the cloth bag that she carries with her everywhere to hold her sacred chanting beads. The bag is stitched with a figure of Kṛṣṇa, who is described in Hindu scriptures as being so black he appears blue. The figure on the bag is rendered blue, as Kṛṣṇa usually is, but with no trace of the black he’s supposed to be.
After Mata was initiated into Vaishnavism, she made a vow to repeat the mantra from which the sect gets its nickname—27,648 names of Kṛṣṇa or the names of his energies—on her beads daily. I regularly witnessed this process take up hours of her day, and so it wasn’t the chanting that turned the dream into a nightmare. It was the way the words spilled off her tongue like blood, like a plea, like, What more can I fucking lose to this world to stop it from trying to kill me? It was that I didn’t remember how to speak without my tongue being forced by the brutality of this world, so I could not form words to offer her protection from brutality. I just sat there, grasping for sentences to comfort my mother like they were the last few pockets of air in a slowly submerging room of a capsized ship.
I woke up to my sweat turning adhesive between the sheets and my skin, and Mata’s repeated prayers seared into my mind: Hare Kṛṣṇa Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Hare Hare, Hare Rāma Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma Hare Hare.
For her sixty-sixth birthday, she had asked all ten of her children for the same thing she requested the previous year, and the year before that: “I just want you to commit to chanting one round a day.” One round—1,728 names.
“Okay, but what do you really want?” I responded with an eye roll. She knew I wasn’t the praying type.
“Money would be nice,” she relented. And so I sent her money.
I still think that if Mata could wish for any one thing in the world, it would be that each of her children, who now range in age from twenty-one to fifty, take the religion of her mother more seriously. But only a few of us were chanting regularly before the disease.
She told me about her uterine cancer diagnosis just the day after that sixty-sixth birthday, at the beginning of 2018.
It was spreading.
“I don’t want you to freak out,” she said over the phone in that pliant voice of hers, as warm and sweet as a mug of hot chocolate. My heart skipped as she stirred in the words “rare and aggressive.” I could tell that my mother had practiced this call numerous times, and I assumed she had delivered the news to my older siblings already. But as meticulously as she’d phrased it, underneath her carefulness I still heard, “I don’t want you to be a child.” The unuttered words mocked me through the filter I’d built policing myself, trying to get away from the little boy I had been conditioned to want to leave behind.
Almost immediately after I hung up, I finally began chanting like Mata had always asked. Praying, pleading, too. We all did—the ten of us who were brought into this world through her now deadly womb. Or her womb was always deadly, I suppose. It was always Black, and its likelihood of carrying a fatal cancer was always higher because of it—just one of many such racial health disparities that the United States has not eradicated, despite medical advances.2 (Research by my sister Ganga, an epidemiologist who studies chronic stress across social groups, illustrates this.3) Other disparities—that Black women in this country are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related issues than white women, for example—exist for the same reason, too.4 And when researchers say people with underlying health conditions are the most vulnerable to public health crises, as doctors are forced to choose whom to let die once health-care systems become overwhelmed, they are talking about people with bodies like Mata’s. They are talking about how her body is always more expendable in an anti-Black system that devalues her existence. They are talking about Mata’s Black womb.
This same womb created us, her children, each a promise to be the steadfastly religious Hare Kṛṣṇa devotee into which she worked so hard to chisel us. Each a promise that would not be fulfilled until she was already dying, until it was too late.
Faithless promises. Broken promises.
All of us Black promises who still can’t figure out how to pray to a god in a way that would have them save us from harm—both that others inflict and that we do. Promises who’ve twisted ourselves like pretzels to fit into a society that will never have space for us.
Who can really protect Black children in an anti-Black world?
I have filled this book with the unanticipated prayers discovered in this experiment of finding new faith, or at least one that was new to me. A faith that truly honors all that Black people lose in tryin
g to persist through structural and systemic anti-Blackness, and returns us to those things in the spirit of Sankofa, that Akan symbol of reclamation that became a significant emblem to so many in the African diaspora as they sought out their roots. A faith for us Black, queer people who have survived the anti-Black, anti-queer, organized religions that have been thrust upon us in place of the healing spiritual practices of our ancestors. Faith that my mother might come out the other end of this horrible health crisis whole, when she was barely surviving before.
I imagine that a search for this type of faith is the same reason Mata ultimately turned to chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa. I would argue that she was seeking something she could believe in to save her and her family from the violence she faced as a poor Black woman in America, even though she’d never say this expressly. I believe she was searching for something to protect her from having to provide refuge for another seventeen-year-old shot six times in the back by the police just for being Black, like she and her mother were forced to do with my oldest uncle, Jasper. She was looking for something to protect her from having to call the life he lived afterward “making it,” though he carried the last, inoperable bullet in his body until he died. She was seeking to reclaim an ancestral healing practice, too, trying to hold on to the puzzle pieces of our lineage that were chipped away by colonization and a state unwilling to meet my Black grandmother’s bipolar disorder with care.
But Mata would probably deny the past is what she is searching for.
“This material world,” she always says, “is full of suffering.”
There is nothing in it to salvage, not even among the jigsaw shards Mother Bhūmi, the riddle who gave birth to her, left behind. There is only chanting Kṛṣṇa’s names.
When Mata and Mother Bhūmi renounced the “material world” in 1972 to join the Hare Kṛṣṇa religion, they were twenty and forty, respectively. Both of them had already waded through various denominations of Christianity and Islam, and had even spent some time in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It made sense that Mata, as the oldest daughter of an often-single mother and as essentially a coparent to her six younger siblings, would journey together with Mother Bhūmi through faith. But this interdependent exploration probably also contributed to their fiercely volatile relationship—especially as Mother Bhūmi’s disease progressed and went untreated.