Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  Therapy is not a substitute for communal healing practices or a community that cares for you, but it can help you better recognize what that community looks like or aid you in becoming a member of a caring community for somebody else—and for yourself—when done with that goal in mind. It is a resource. And for folks who experience marginalization, it can be especially helpful if your therapist shares a marginalized experience with you. They are then less likely to question whether your experience is valid. I’m not sure we would have gotten very far if my therapist weren’t Black and queer, or if he didn’t encourage me to continue exploring healing practices taught to me by root workers at the same time.

  “What are you here for?” he asked in our first session, sitting across from me in a small room that smelled like lavender and brass, unblinking.

  “My mother is dying. I’m probably depressed about that. I know I’ve been struggling with anxiety. And just in general the world’s a messed-up place, which kinda sucks.”

  I laughed. He asked me to slow down, take my problems one at a time, take them seriously, parse them out. He blinked just when I needed proof of his humanity, that he wasn’t the robot Purple Pixie Cut had been. We started with my mother.

  “I just feel like we just got on a path back to something good,” I offered, clutching a throw pillow to my stomach to try to force it to settle.

  “Back?”

  “Yeah. Like how things were when I was younger. When I didn’t question her love for me, and my queerness wasn’t a problem. We lost something and we’d just started getting it back. And now it’s too late.”

  “What exactly did you lose?”

  I went through the list: my rock, my confidence, my safe space, my home, my family, my religion, my—

  “Self. You feel as though you lost yourself,” he summarized.

  “In a way, yeah.”

  I told him that I was getting married the following year. How I never assumed my mother wouldn’t be at the wedding, but there was this need to let her know how much it meant that she planned on coming after all we’d been through. How much it meant particularly after her traumatizing reaction to learning of my queerness. I felt this need to let her know that I recognized the growth she’d made. That I knew she still had fears and concerns that she wouldn’t address, concerns about celebrating my love for someone who wasn’t a woman.

  I told my therapist that I was struggling because I felt like I never got a chance to say any of that to her. And I knew I still had time to tell her; even if the cancer meant she wouldn’t make it to the wedding, it wouldn’t take away that she still intended to. But it didn’t feel like I had time. Because the part of me that could express all this the way it needed to be expressed was lost somewhere, punching at walls in my chest cavity, while I was laughing it all off to keep from crying.

  “Have you heard of inner-child work?” my therapist asked at the end of our session.

  I pictured myself speaking to a baby doll in a baby voice about the things that had hurt me when I was young, hoping to mend childhood wounds, or some other pop-psychology drivel, and chuckled some more, gripping the pillow even tighter. “In passing.”

  “I think it could really help with getting back in connection with what you lost, which I think is a first step to healing this relationship that is obviously very important to you. Would you be open to trying that in here?”

  Now I was picturing the teenager running away from the police through the subway, and my knees went weak. Then I pictured the boy with my face, me with his knees. It felt like something to believe in . . .

  “I’m open to trying anything, I guess,” I replied, explaining that I’d also taken chanting back up, and recently had begun trying to communicate with my deceased grandmother per the guidance of a Hoodoo priestess friend in the same search for wholeness. A brief flash of surprise crossed his face and I gulped, afraid he might dismiss these exercises as pseudoscientific. But he only nodded encouragingly, suggesting Inner Bonding: Becoming a Loving Adult to Your Inner Child by Margaret Paul, PhD, if I wanted to read more about the practice of inner-child work.

  “You might find it helps supplement what you’re already doing,” he said, making a note to email me the link to order the book.

  “Inner Bonding is a process of connecting our Adult thoughts with our instinctual gut feelings, the feelings of our ‘Inner Child,’” Paul writes, “so that we can live free of conflict within ourselves.” Getting back in touch with your Inner Child is not about romanticizing childhood, she explains, but recognizing that our essential nature isn’t the negative feelings that may have been prompted by childhood trauma, and reclaiming that nature.

  The work, Paul argues, is “to question and to resolve, as much as we possibly can, the false, generally shame-based, self-limiting beliefs we have lived by up to now.” To challenge the self-policing that prevents us from loving ourselves. We take up this challenge by bringing our Inner Child back into our lives through recognizing when they are showing up in our thoughts and actions, and parenting that nature when it reacts from trauma with a care the child may have not received from anyone else.

  Paul utilizes all the pop-psychology jargon I imagined, with a writing style that would not be out of place in a Goop advertisement, but still I found myself pulled into the process. I heard the younger me being told that their queerness isn’t enough, their Blackness is too much, and the voice telling the younger me these things was almost as much my voice as anyone’s.

  I heard myself policing the younger version of me into silence even when they tried to rebuke being stifled, and I knew that this was not sustainable. I found myself wanting to believe what the work Paul describes could do for me, wanting to go on this journey to help heal from my anxieties, and frustrated that she didn’t quite bring me there—and not just because of her New Age approach.

  “She gets it, but she doesn’t really get it,” I told my therapist a few sessions later, after I had finally finished the book.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The shame that our Inner Child internalizes—she writes about it as if it’s all about your individual experiences and interpersonal interactions. All based on what our parents did or didn’t do to us, with no real accounting for the systemic problems entrenched in society—no real accounting of anti-Blackness or anti-queerness—and not enough concern for community healing. It feels like a very individualistic kind of self-help.” What I didn’t say was that I still feared therapy in general might have the same limitations.

  “I see.”

  “The policing I do to shame my Inner Child, I’m encouraged to do that every day by the whole nation-state of America. I’m encouraged to mute my anger at injustice, never to speak my mind about the state harming me or the oppression I feel and experience by law, and that doesn’t just affect me. That affects everyone in my community.”

  I told him about all the times I had been encouraged to think that demanding more than a two-party system or any radically different form of governance was asking for too much and being unrealistic, even though I knew that folks in my community needed something radically different. I told him about all the times I’d been encouraged to be respectable in the way I spoke, the way I looked, and where I went, and if I didn’t meet respectability standards that were incompatible with who I really was, then it became my fault. I told him how I believed this encouragement came from the state on down, that there are laws and crimes regulating all these things, and how I was sure my parents had learned to encourage me to live this way from the state, too. I was sure because I am constantly learning to encourage those around me the same way.

  I caught myself heating up and immediately apologized. I hadn’t planned to dive into critical race theory in these sessions.

  “I don’t want to sound preachy,” I said.

  This was self-policing, too, he offered. In order to heal, which was what these sessions should help me do, he reminded me that I had to be free to talk about ho
w I thought I’d learned to police myself, even if I thought something that seemed “out there.” Even if I thought that I ultimately learned to police myself from a carceral system built on the ashes of a global slave trade, from a world that punishes and encages us simply for being Black.

  I envisioned child me, little Hari-Gaura, a Black boy struggling to wear their given name in a world that made it so hard to do so, listening to my therapist’s reassurance and finding some relief. It seemed so clear then: If I am ever to stop policing my Inner Child, I have to be free to explore how I was policed out of my childhood, and how that was influenced by the state’s dependence on all Black people being policed.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say is that the dissonance I have with my Inner Child is carceral. It’s based on living in an anti-Black, prison-based society. Paul doesn’t reckon with that,” I explained, still a bit reluctantly—still expecting my therapist not to fully get it, to think I sounded ridiculous.

  “What would reckoning with that look like?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, thinking about my grandmother and the crude altar set up to her in my room.

  Over the next few sessions, we talked about how the disconnect a Black person has from their Inner Child could be an extension of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “double consciousness,” the experience of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes” of an anti-Black society. Though Du Bois’s theory is over- and misused in some academic circles, I was again relieved that my therapist encouraged this thought experiment. Bringing the reality of Blackness into inner-child work was the only way this frame could possibly be healing for me.

  I was relieved to tell him more about my grandmother—about my belief that we are all born whole, with our childlike joys and our intergenerational traumas, our instincts and our rationality, our vulnerabilities and our strengths, but Mother Bhūmi would know better than most how the state is relentless in its attempts to tear Black people in two.

  Mother Bhūmi was proof that this country has perfected using criminalization to rupture everything that makes us complete, to rupture our families and our lineage in order to better ensure our continued commodification after centuries of slavery. This is exemplified by how the carceral system today overwhelmingly provides wells of slave labor, money, and voting power to white communities in the form of prisons.17 I explained to my therapist how I thought this commodification was directly linked to what writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman refers to as “fungibility,” or the process of “exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others,” in her book Scenes of Subjection.18

  I offered that a particular and criminalizing expression of double consciousness exists that causes an irreconcilable fissure between a Black person and their childhood nature, in order to ensure their fungibility and lack of wholeness. The rupturing of Black people from our Inner Children serves to repurpose that childlike space inside us for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of the state. It replaces our openness to new ideas, feelings, and experiences with a learned willingness to criminalize ourselves and each other for refusing to conform to normalized tropes, propping up an entire prison-industrial complex along the way. And it is an extension of the same carceral logics that tried to take my grandmother from me.

  “For Black people, this separation from our childhoods is a carceral dissonance.”

  The words almost spilled out of me. I frowned at the throw pillow, disappointed in its protracted betrayal as it became more and more useless at holding things down inside.

  “And when did this carceral dissonance begin for you?”

  “I don’t know. Whenever I started accepting the pressures to conform to the world, whenever I started to adopt respectability in an attempt to survive it.”

  “So your carceral dissonance can only end when you undo those beginnings.”

  It was not a question.

  “What would undoing it look like?” I asked.

  “Maybe that’s something you have to figure out with your Inner Child,” my therapist said.

  I paused, trying to imagine it. “I don’t know where to start.”

  “Ask him.”

  I laughed, but he was dead serious.

  “You said you were willing to try anything.”

  “I did, didn’t I?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A PRAYER FOR MY FATHER

  Hari-Gaura,

  I should start off by apologizing. If we still have this in common, you really don’t appreciate being thrust into a deep-ass conversation you didn’t plan for. This is a bit like showing up at somebody’s house unannounced. I haven’t talked to you in ages. I haven’t braced you for this. That’s on me.

  If I’m being honest, trying to start a conversation with you, my “Inner Child,” feels just as uncomfortable as when I began praying again after Mata’s diagnosis, or when I set up an altar and started talking to Mother Bhūmi after she passed. Maybe all these things are the same, in a manner. But as uncomfortable as praying and giving offerings to pictures of our grandmother were at first, they made a whole lot of what I was struggling with on my own better in ways I couldn’t have even imagined. They made me feel like I wasn’t alone. Know I wasn’t.

  I’m here writing to you because my therapist swayed me to try. Because I’ve listened and learned from my elders in this craft—including James Baldwin and Toni Morrison and Kiese Laymon—who have demonstrated the immense depths a relationship might reach when one has difficult dialogues directly with another on the page. But really I’m here because there are so many things that I know you never heard, that you needed to hear, and I want you to finally hear them. If it’s not too late.

  I think that ultimately what I’ve been struggling with is the fact that no one ever made you understand that you are valuable and worthy enough to stay—to be carried inside me and protected. What I’ve been seeking healing from, through prayer and therapy and ancestor communication, is the fact that I will always be lonely without you. The thing is, I still don’t know how to express that fully yet. I hope you’ll bear with me as I figure this out.

  Oddly enough, Daddy has been a critical guide along this journey. As you know, the man has always loved a terrible joke. By now, you might think people would have stopped responding facetiously, “Eighteen?! Do you even know all of their names?” when they find out how many siblings I have. But nope. They still do it. And every time I can just picture Daddy roaring with laughter as he tilts back his head, a leathery, bald island surrounded by waves of white-water hair.

  There’s never been much logic to the question—most people know the names of thousands of people, so why would it be difficult to remember fewer than two dozen of those closest to you? But Daddy wouldn’t mind. For him, a bad joke always hides something more interesting underneath. And against my teenage self’s wishes, I’m becoming more like him, finding myself laughing at this question more often these days. Rediscovering my own hidden gem by recalling Daddy’s fascination with his children’s names when it happens. They say time moves in only one direction, but it seems to keep bringing me back to the people and things that came before me when I least expect it, how I least expect it, as long as I let it.

  I think that’s the first thing you should know: how you see the past will change in the future. You’ll see our grandmother differently, yourself differently, our parents differently than you do now. But what I’m still learning is that you can also have a say in how you see those things. A person’s history is not just a static fable that must be accepted in whatever form it is given to them; history is something that we are all constantly shaping with our current perspectives. History is, at least in part, what we interpret it to be. For a long time, my interpretation of history was one indoctrinated into me by the same people who tell us that slavery has no reverberations and we should just get over it—a deathly limiting perspective that didn’t allow me to truly reckon with how I have been influenced by what
came before me any more than it allowed me to reckon with how I can influence it.

  In exploring how to truly witness how I have been affected by our past, I am compelled to acknowledge that reshaping how I understand it affects what came before me, too. It affects how the past shows up in my life, in the stories I tell about it, and thus it affects what the past is to whomever I tell these stories. And I guess that’s really why I was so open to this Inner Child thing: I realized that maybe I can still affect you, too. Protect you, the way you deserved to be protected.

  Hari-Gaura, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how Daddy didn’t spare you talk of dying despite how young you were. It was as if he knew your youth wouldn’t spare you from experiences with death any more than it did for Kodi Gaines or any other Black child in this world, and he addressed it accordingly.

  “When I’m on my deathbed,” Daddy would say, his long limbs swinging lankly around in the air to emphasize his point, “what’s the last thing I would want to tell you?” (He still asks me the same thing almost whenever I see him, and by now I know instinctively what he’d make his last words.)

  “Live your name,” he says to each of his children every time, as if it’s the most profound lesson to ever leave his lips, and maybe it is. “You were named this for a reason.”

  I’ve grown on our full name, Hari-Gaura Bilal Das Ziyad, and have gained a new appreciation for it as a combination of Arabic and Sanskrit monikers and a linguistic coming together of Mata’s and Daddy’s adopted religions. Mata says an angel gave her the idea for “Hari-Gaura” in a dream while she was pregnant. Hari, which is how most people know me today, is a name of Kṛṣṇa, meaning “one who replaces bad things with good ones,” and Gaura means “golden.” Traditionally, the name is reversed—Gaura-Hari—but the angel wanted to emphasize our contrarianism, I suppose.