Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  When I was younger, I only ever saw Mother Bhūmi with her mental health at its worst. By the time I was born, her illness had spiraled in the absence of a proper diagnosis, and we weren’t around her much. When I did see her, it was often because of some emergency. She lived many of these years without the health care, basic financial necessities, or supportive community to keep her illness from consuming her.

  I don’t remember much about Mother Bhūmi from that time other than the terrifying altercations between her and Mata. I once even witnessed my grandmother spit at Mata, an image still seared into my memory in vivid color. I saw so many such horrors that I would cry myself to sleep sometimes, wondering whether I ever fully knew my own grandmother’s love, and whether the answer to that meant I never could fully know it. But then she designated me her walking partner.

  I could usually anticipate Mother Bhūmi’s request. Her bright eyes would shrink between bulbous cheekbones and unruly eyebrows as she pressed her lips together in a toothless smile, flaring her nostrils mischievously. “Would you walk your grandmother around the block?” she would ask in third person at random intervals during the weeks I was home for break. Her voice was an earthquake, still powerful despite its tremors. Her frame still felt towering to me, though it clocked in at no more than five feet three, even before accounting for the inches she lost with old age and the large, colorful head wraps she always wore.

  By this point, she was managing her bipolar disorder and taking her medicine, and my parents cared for most of her fundamental necessities after moving her in. I had learned to cope with most of her idiosyncrasies. By “around the block,” I knew she meant five or six streets over. It could take more than an hour strolling at the leisurely pace her weathered bones required.

  One particular day I had something to do, some party to attend thrown by friends from high school with whom being young was the only thing I had in common, but I couldn’t bring myself to say no to her. It might have been just a grandchild’s instinct to avoid disappointing their grandmother, an instinct that grew as I began to understand just how much she had been disappointed already. Or maybe it was the part of me I thought I had lost, the part of me that caused her to keep buzzing around, asking me to accompany her on these strolls. Maybe that part of me knew this would be our last walk together in this life.

  “Sure,” I said, preparing myself for another overwhelming religious sermon sprinkled with conversations we’d already had multiple times but she’d forgotten having. On our walks, Mother Bhūmi would sometimes tell me about all the occasions on which she had been attacked by police as she fought for the rights of Black people as an activist in her community. She told me about being attacked by men who were supposed to love her. About being attacked as a Black Hindu woman worshipping in Hare Kṛṣṇa temples, which, in this country, are overwhelmingly white. She always came back to how nothing stopped her from loving Kṛṣṇa and her guru, though the abuses that white supremacists and men and so-called religious leaders had rained upon her did separate her from her tenderest aspects in critical ways.

  I was busy contorting myself to become the man I thought I had to be—severing myself from my own tenderest aspects to make myself palatable to a cruelly normative world—and it hadn’t occurred to me to consider what it meant if we had both been separated from our tenderness. It hadn’t occurred to me to consider whether this separation, on each of our parts, had shaped my ability to love and be loved by my grandmother. If the distance between us wasn’t all on her.

  I had been blaming Mother Bhūmi’s bipolar disorder, which clearly had been exacerbated by the attacks she described, for the many times I’d seen her brutalized by the police officers who came to address the “disturbances” she instigated during her breakdowns—as if to be mentally ill in a society that fuels mental illness is reason enough for the state to punish a person. My walks with my grandmother were beginning to illuminate how unfair I had been.

  Strolling at her side, I was increasingly faced with the idea that carceral logics—beliefs rooted in policing, punishing, and incarcerating the socially undesirable and in locking up those who don’t fit neatly into this society’s binary definitions of selfhood—were at the root of everything that had been unfair to our entire family. Because the only solution they offer is punishment, adhering to carceral logics prevents us from recognizing our role in each other’s pain, sometimes even as a coping mechanism developed in an understandable attempt to avoid the cruel and constant hand of punishment ourselves.

  I was beginning to understand all the ways I’d also adopted carceral logics in my unsuccessful pursuit of fitting neatly into society’s definitions of manhood—definitions I was told I had to achieve in order to find protection. Unfeeling, violent definitions of manhood that didn’t make room to heal my own traumas, let alone make room to heal my grandmother’s. This time, I walked beside Mother Bhūmi as she paced much more quietly down the manicured street, until we reached the first main corner.

  Cleveland Heights, which is now about half-Black, can be understood along the familiar trajectory of many of Cleveland’s “diverse” suburbs: to live here, Black, middle-class families had to fight redlining (and, in some cases, white-supremacist mob violence) to make space for themselves, only to be subject to predatory lending practices and increased policing, which to this day contribute to a constant decline in their wealth and safety.5 Still, Cleveland Heights is mostly populated by households with more money than residents have in the poorer, Blacker city of neighboring Cleveland proper, where I was born. This is reflected in its sizable yards and their characteristic foliage, which were now aging brown and yellow and red with the coming autumn. Mother Bhūmi’s unmistakable grittiness seemed out of place here, but her thin body, wrapped delicately in a vibrant sari, progressively relaxed with each step, appearing to welcome the idyllic calm on the street. Rare wordless minutes passed before she finally broke the silence with that Alabama drawl she’d lugged with her when she’d moved to Ohio as a teenager.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  I instinctively let loose the kind of humorless laugh that pulls air out of one’s head rather than the lungs, compelling a spell of dizziness. There was a sixty-year gap between us—her at eighty-one, me at twenty-one—and we were both only a half year away from our shared birthday month. And yet so much of the life she and I should have shared was already lost and too far gone.

  “No,” I replied aloud. I have a boyfriend, I told her in my head, a small part of me hoping the pieces of her that had been passed down in the blood now rapidly carrying oxygen out of my brain might overhear.

  I would never tell Mother Bhūmi I was queer aloud. By then, I had imagined that she was sealed off by her own carceral ways of thinking—punitive ideas she heeded that encouraged harming those who did not fit this society’s norms around gender, even if they were family. It wasn’t that she couldn’t understand my queerness or love me if she knew, but I believed that the parts of her that would understand and love me were buried so deep beneath her own pain that they would take years to excavate. Years I knew she didn’t have. Years that had been stolen from her, just like my childhood had been pried away from me.

  How much could I blame her for what she replaced them with? How much could I blame myself for internalizing self-hatred while trying to find what about me was worth saving in an anti-Black, anti-queer world that hated me, too? How much could I blame Mata? And how much should I hold accountable the world that separated us from our childhoods in the first place and told us that blaming each other was all we could ever do about it? Was it my, my mother’s, or my grandmother’s fault that we were too fractured ourselves to hold every aspect of one another, or did the problem stem from an anti-Black society that wouldn’t allow any of us to exist as fully whole people within it?

  Sometimes on our walks, Mother Bhūmi would recite to me “pastimes,” the word used for religious parables in the Hare Kṛṣṇa tradition. One in particular stil
l resonates with me: the pastime of Prince Dhruva Mahārāja.

  When Dhruva was only five years old, his stepmother—jealous of his status as heir to the throne at the expense of her own younger son—forced him from his father’s lap during an otherwise unimportant father-son moment. Because she was the king’s favorite wife, Dhruva’s father permitted her to stop the prince from sitting on his lap without protest. When Dhruva complained, his stepmother told him that no one but god would be able to grant him the privilege of his father’s lap again.

  The five-year-old took his stepmother’s irreverent challenge to heart and went to the forest to suffer through religious austerities so severe they are said to have shaken the foundations of heaven and earth, in hopes of compelling divine intervention. In order to appease the child before his profound sacrifice destroyed the universe, Viṣṇu—an incarnation of Kṛṣṇa—finally appeared and offered to grant Dhruva whatever benediction he desired. Even though the prince responded that witnessing such divinity was enough for him, he was still rewarded with a kingdom even larger than his father’s. Many Hindus regard Dhruva as one of the utmost examples of devotion, and for his faith he was afforded the status of a star.

  For most of my life, I had tried desperately to find myself in Dhruva, in all of Mother Bhūmi’s and Mata’s stories of faith and devotion, but Dhruva never could have been a Black boy in this world. I say this not simply because his story is rooted in Indian folklore. I say this because Dhruva’s god’s sanctity was propagated throughout this country with white people in mind and not us. When Dhruva was invoked in my and my siblings’ Black lives, Black suffering for the sake of pious ideals never proved to be enough for divine intervention—for any kind of deliverance from the carceral structures that haunted us. Sacrificing a tenderer relationship to gender—childhood’s relationship of openness, gentleness, and vulnerability—and beating myself up trying and failing at perfectly masculine performances, under the direction of my parents and their gods, never brought me salvation. Renouncing these “impious” parts of themselves and their bodies never results in kingdoms for Black children.

  In a colonized world, the gods before whom Black children are told to humble themselves require them to toil without ever being seen in the images of these gods, leaving them with only the false promise of being saved. This was true on the plantation, where Black children were designated as capital much the same as their parents, and thus any attempts to live as free as the model white child were met with beatings or worse. And that is true in America today, as exemplified by the persistent wealth, health, and criminalization gaps that Black children still face at every level of assimilation into the country’s culture.6

  Too often, the gods Black children are presented with demand they conform to respectability politics, with morals rooted in what white society sets as the standards for behavior—standards that were designed specifically to exclude them.7 In this colonized world, there will never be a god who appears for Black children just because they believe and suffer and are careful enough. Any god who might save them requires a new world entirely.

  Because Black freedom requires a new world, writing about it sometimes necessitates new language. Just as often, if not more, it requires refamiliarizing ourselves with the old languages we may have forgotten. Ancestor veneration allowed me to really see my grandmother—and, by extension, all my complicated relationships—in a new light and to have the necessary conversations I once thought were impossible, and following root workers and medicine people who are knowledgeable about indigenous anti-colonial practices and methods has led me to much of what is described in these pages.8 But I also needed to wrestle with these ancient concepts in novel ways to apply them to my modern life.

  In 2008, Black feminist scholars Moya Bailey and Trudy of Gradient Lair, facing a dearth of shared language for the intersection of misogyny and Blackness, coined the term “misogynoir” to describe “the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience.”9

  Similarly, “misopedia” is a word meaning the hatred or disdain of children, but there is no commonly understood word in this language for the specific way this hatred manifests in the lives of Black children. There is no commonly shared word to describe why our children are so uniquely harmed by everything from health-care inequity to lack of access to education. Why our children are so constantly gunned down in the streets by police. And so, in a related vein to “misogynoir,” and in the hopes of illuminating this specific expression of misopedia, I offer “misafropedia” to mean the anti-Black disdain for children and childhood that Black youth experience.

  As a term, “misafropedia” helps me to describe the systematic oppression of and disdain for Black children—a disdain that culminates in discarding Black children’s existence. Their existence is discarded literally in the abuse and incarceration of Black children within systems such as the school-to-prison pipeline—as when police handcuffed six-year-old Kaia Rolle and held her in a detention center for throwing a tantrum in class in 2019.10 And it is discarded figuratively in how the state attempts to indoctrinate Black people into abusing and disregarding our own childhood natures to pursue idealized, binary concepts of manhood or womanhood.

  My hope is that with access to a more robust lexicon to describe our experiences, coupled with an appreciation for the imaginative work of those communities who don’t rely on colonization for understanding, we will also be able to better manifest the experiences we wish to have. I want to offer colonized Black people—and myself in particular—a type of road map for reclaiming the childhoods we sacrificed or that were forsaken for us because of misafropedia. I want this book to help disabuse me—and perhaps many of us—of the hatred for Black children that underlies the belief that they should perpetually suffer like Dhruva, without any of his rewards.

  I must have been around five the first time Mata shared with me Dhruva’s pastime. That also happened to be the year I had another unforgettable nightmare, this time about Mata and my father dying, which was followed by me crashing headlong into my first panic attack.

  Maybe Dhruva’s story had prompted me to think about my own father’s lap dissolving underneath my body, of forests in which I would perform never-ending sacrifices to get him back, and the panic attack was just my inability to make sense of why I woke up before any god appeared.

  Maybe the anxiety was simply me trying to make sense of the fact that, even then, I knew there were no unimportant father-son moments—not when the death and encaging of Black fathers is a birthright. A drive down the wrong road, selling the wrong cigarette without a license, driving with a license and reaching for it at the wrong time when asked for identification—any moment could have been my father’s last with me, so every moment with him counted. But the world kept pushing me to look for god in the same direction as Dhruva had gone to suffer and sacrifice, even when I knew in my bones that there must have been more places to seek salvation.

  In my search for other prayers, I had to conceive of other pastimes—other parables out of the stories that offered me the space to imagine Black childhoods differently than I had been able to when I was determined to twist myself apart to fit ideals that weren’t designed for me.

  On August 1, 2016, five-year-old Kodi Gaines was shot by police officers who had forced their way into his mother’s home, claiming they were attempting to serve her a warrant for a traffic violation. Kodi’s own mata, Korryn Gaines, had experienced many previous violent encounters with the police, a few of which she recorded and uploaded to Facebook and Instagram. In many of these videos, Gaines identified the carceral state’s policing for what it is: an irredeemable, anti-Black practice. She marked it as another system of enslavement, masked by the same mutation that sonically blends the word “overseer” with “officer” in “Sound of da Police” by KRS-One (whose stage name, coincidentally, was inspired by his own exploration of the Hare Kṛṣṇa religion). Then she called for the carceral state’s abolition.

  Korr
yn had attempted to record what would later become the moment of her death as well. However, before killing her, law enforcement contacted Facebook to have them suspend her account while she was broadcasting the altercation live. The site complied with little hesitation. The only witness to Korryn’s murder was her son, who would go on to explain in a later video recorded by Korryn’s sister: “My mother said back off . . . so the police said, ‘We is back up.’ So then they started shooting. Then she went on the couch. And then the police just took me. She died. The end.”

  Korryn’s end came just as the Movement for Black Lives began accelerating. Given that, one might have expected her death to be a cause du jour, considering it was prompted by something so egregiously minor as a traffic violation, a child was injured, and the state so brashly flexed its awful power to limit the witnesses of its abuse. Popular media and those who sought its favor had so far built the visible parts of this movement around victims who died with their hands up. But Korryn epitomized the refuser, the enslaved who jumps overboard, the grandmother who fights back against a state that criminalizes her mental illness, the child who disappears rather than becoming an adult intent on rending themselves into pieces.

  In one of the videos Korryn posted to Instagram of an earlier run-in with police, she detailed how embracing this type of refusal pushes beyond the colonial concept of a linear existence that ends with death, pushes beyond this colonized world I was stolen away from my childhood into, where death is an inextricable feature of Black life, exclaiming, “I’ll live on forever, my nigga!”