by Hari Ziyad
Given that she hadn’t screened for sex and the name is generally gendered male, Mata says the dream was how she knew she would have a boy. I want to tell her that this interpretation of her dream is how I know the ways society determines gender are bullshit—based on arbitrary rules that don’t have the capacity to hold the fullness of our existence. But I don’t.
We were named Bilal after an enslaved African Muslim whose master tried to crush him by rolling a boulder over his chest for practicing Islam, and who later became the prophet Muhammad’s first official caller of prayer. Sometimes, when I’m struck by anxiety, I think about how even the chest pains are ancestral. This helps the panic to ease and (or because) it makes me laugh like our father again.
Das is a common Hindu surname meaning “servant of,” usually given because it would otherwise be blasphemous to go by a name of god. And Ziyad means “extra” or “abundance.”
Daddy wants us to either always remember to have the courage of Bilal to pray to and serve a golden god who takes away bad things and replaces them with an abundance of good ones, or pray to a god who replaces bad things with a regular amount of good ones, and just be extra about it. Without further clarity, of course we were going to do the latter, but our father still acts shocked to witness my queerness.
I was twenty-six and Daddy had just told another terrible joke, cackling a siren sound as he drove me through downtown Cleveland to our parents’ house from the airport. The contrast between the metropolis veneer of the structures and the scarcity of pedestrians in this city has always struck me as oddly dystopian, but ongoing gentrification had brought the amount of activity more into alignment with how the place looked this time around. A sermon from Wallace D. Muhammad II played on low volume in the background, though I couldn’t pick up on what he was lecturing about.
Daddy and Mata had just gotten a new vehicle, a silvery-green Honda CR-V that all the siblings had chipped in to help buy. But it was mostly funded by our oldest sister, Rani, who—as the first of us to reach even modest financial means—has always been so inspiringly generous with her money. This fact complicates my relationship to childhood poverty in a way that makes it all the more important to be clear that I don’t speak for all Black people who grew up poor, but I don’t always remember that. I have way more memories of the old, beat-up Toyota minivan our parents owned for most of our life, which had picked up one too many yellow marks from us children swiping against the stumps on the side of the porch in the months and years after we first received our licenses.
“Honda makes really good cars,” Daddy advised when he stopped laughing, as if I’d ever shown any interest in the facts of automobiles. He straightened out his eyeglasses, a lens nearly falling out because of a missing screw. I reminded myself to buy him a new pair the next time I got paid, imagining myself Rani.
“It might not be fancy, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” Daddy continued in his odd little language of idioms. “And don’t ever buy American.”
He swore he was just talking about the quality of manufacturing overseas, though I couldn’t help but hear a fuck you to the prescribed patriotism of the anti-Black country he had lived in for seventy-eight long years.
“Thanks for the advice,” I teased.
“You’re welcome,” he said, with such sincerity that I felt guilty about the sarcasm.
I was on a last-minute trip back to Cleveland from New York. I lived in Brooklyn, but I had just found out I might have to move to LA to work on a television show. This had always been my dream. I wanted to be excited, but Mata was recovering from her hysterectomy, and because of my possible move, I knew this might be the last time I saw her for a while. I knew this might be the last time I saw her. It’s almost impossible to feel excitement about anything when the threat of fatal disease is lurking around the corner.
Daddy wasn’t late to the airport like he usually is, but I wasn’t surprised. Mata’s cancer had declared so many things different. Something made him think to ask me again to recite what he would want me to remember when he dies, and I think the thing that made him ask was Mata. I think he was also asking what she would want me to remember.
I made my joke more obvious this time, responding that he would remind me on his deathbed that if my queerness is too much, if I am extra, it’s his fault. But again he didn’t laugh. The light skin he passed down to us turned unnaturally pale about his knuckles as he gripped the steering wheel of the Honda a little tighter, and the man calling for prayer that day began softly singing out the Adhān on the radio. I was surprised to still remember the words. And in that moment, I felt more like our father than he was.
He’s still uncomfortable with the truth, with the fact that I am queer, but by now he has to know that I’m right about my queerness being bound to him. He named us this and told us to embrace all our extraness—told each of his children to embrace what he chose to call us. I’m still figuring out how, exactly, to do that, but I think I’m getting closer. I think so because now when people ask me, “Do you even know all of your siblings’ names?” I hear our father, and I understand that “live your name” has become just as much my living words as our father’s dying ones.
In high school, I wanted to legally change my name from Hari-Gaura to just Hari because it seemed more acceptable to white people who don’t like to pronounce long names unless it’s something like Tsiolkovsky, and I thought I needed to be accepted by them to find safety. Thank god I am past that. Now I better understand that our father’s naming process—which changed from biblical to Qur’anic as he moved through these two religions—was a way for us to be born with the lessons he learned along this pilgrimage, instead of having to learn them on our own. As someone who had changed his own name from David to Tariq, it wasn’t that he wanted us to be forever tied to some destiny he’d bestowed upon us against our will; he just wanted us to remember that the destiny he bestowed and the ones we choose for ourselves would always be connected, even if we choose differently from him.
When I hear the joke about our siblings’ names today, I laugh at how Daddy was extra successful at ensuring I would never forget this command. How he was a Ziyad before both of us. How, if I can just replace the bad things in our parents’ lessons with good ones and hold on to the rest, the best of them will never die. And you might know that you are valuable and worthy enough to come back, too.
CHAPTER THREE
NOWALATERS
My father and mother had their first children in their late teens and early twenties and their last at fifty-nine and forty-seven, respectively. The kids my father had before he married Mata mostly lived with their own biological mothers growing up, and I still don’t see them as much as I should.
My oldest brother on Mata’s side, Syamasundara—Syama, as we call him—lived at our house when I was born, along with the four siblings who were born between us: Kṛṣṇa-Kumari, Mohan, Ganga, and Ghanasyam. My two oldest sisters, Bhakti and Rani, were already well into adulthood and no longer living at home. By the time Syama moved out, there were two younger siblings, Kṛṣṇa-Jivani and Visnu, to fill the space. Occasionally, my brother and sister from my father’s earlier marriage, David and Tauheedah, would stay with us, too. There never seemed to be enough room, but in our little house with its chipping yellow paint on Cleveland’s East Side, we somehow made it work.
My little sister Kṛṣṇa-Jivani—whom we call Kiss—still swears this was the best house we ever lived in, even though it was easily when our poorness was most apparent. The front yard was a dandelion bed, with thorny rosebushes twisted through the rusty fence enclosing it. I know now that dandelions are considered weeds, but back then I thought they were more beautiful than the roses that decorated the corroding fence. Maybe they still are to Kiss, who was only five when we moved away but who has remained as good as any child at seeing things others might overlook. I want to believe this means she’s been trying to repair the fracture caused by her carceral dissonance, too.
But maybe she just misses the cluttered corner store where we’d travel on early summer days after a season of collecting coins from odd jobs and aunties. And what’s not to miss? We’d come back home armed with piles of treats that could last us many months, even as several pieces dropped through the nets we made with our tiny fingers and into the cracks of the sidewalks, where they melted and smoothed the ground the way the city government refused to: Frooties penny candies (which you could buy for actual pennies), Lemonheads, Chick-O-Sticks, and my favorite, Nowalaters—as we called them in our Black midwestern drawl.
There’s something particularly joyful about the roundness Black folks give to words with the accent we inherited only partially from the various dialects of our southern foreparents, many of whom moved to Cleveland during the Great Migration in search of factory jobs. I don’t think I realized the real name of the taffy was “Now and Later” until I was grown—that it wasn’t just one word that magically merged both the present and the future in the sweetest, tartest treat on a bright summer day. It was sugar and it was Black language puckered in our mouths. In the midst of the poverty that had enveloped the city with the decline of the manufacturing industry and the anti-Black barriers many people faced when trying to find work in other fields, there was plenty of magic to find in our hood—but I wouldn’t always believe in it.
Mata says that up until she gave birth to me, she was finishing her bachelor’s in education at Cleveland State University and student-teaching at a school for “at-risk” girls downtown.19
“I was supposed to have co-teachers, but they left me to care for the girls alone that semester,” she tells me. “Their excuse was that I was a good enough teacher to handle it by myself—even though I was pregnant!” Her voice betrays the exhaustion she’s carried for years. Even now I hear it, but still forget to ask her how she managed, how she felt, how tired she must have been. Of course she was capable of overcoming. She is a Black woman, after all—held hostage by a myth of limitless strength that allows her meager rest.
The little yellow house with the always chipping paint wasn’t exceptional for East 128th Street, except for being one of a few with a fenced-off lawn. I wonder whether my parents chose it for this added layer of protection, however inadequate it might have been, against the dangers outside. I know they chose my home birth at that house for this reason, entrusting my passage into this life to a Black midwife, who became one of my many godmothers. In our early years, it seemed that whatever small modicum of agency over our well-being Mata found she could steal back from the world for her children, she almost always would. This same thievery was at work in her decisions to raise us primarily in Hare Kṛṣṇa communities and to homeschool nearly all her children until she thought we were ready to face the outside world on our own, or as ready as we could be.
I would grow to resent homeschooling, begging Mata and my father every other day during junior high to enroll me in a public school. But when I was younger, I loved spending the school days with just my siblings. Mata never gave us too excessive an amount of homework, there was no real delineation between the school year and summer break, and I honestly wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Once she instilled a passion for reading, outside of a daily scripture class on the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, Mata mostly just ensured books were available and left us to our own devices (unless we needed something requiring her to demonstrate specific examples). She trusted the knowledge we would pick up in our own natural curiosities between our excursions making battle weapons out of sticks and duct tape in the backyard, mimicking the knights we learned about in the old, browning encyclopedias she kept stacked in the basement we otherwise avoided because of a persistent mildew problem and the asbestos bursting from the walls.
But I didn’t lack for community when I was homeschooled. Even with all the peculiar Hare Kṛṣṇa chanting and the constant smog of incense filling our house, the neighborhood kids were drawn to our home in ways that rejected the characterization of Black children as violently resistant to nonconformity, a popular narrative among white people and those who seek proximity to them.
The way Mata’s evangelism manifested—keeping the door open for anyone to eat with us because prasādam, or food first offered to Kṛṣṇa, is considered purifying—might have had something to do with how well we got along with the neighborhood children. It was also a very Black manifestation. State-designed poverty forced many of the neighborhood kids to skip meals—sometimes we had to do the same—but that has never seemed to stop the Black people I’ve known from sharing with one another.
During our family’s last few summers on East 128th, my older siblings Ganga and Ghanasyam would lead the building of a yearly “clubhouse” in the backyard. We organized our friends to gather materials for it from the local demolition sites and scrapyards that seemed to line every other block. Most of them didn’t blink an eye when asked to contribute corner-store treats or money or to help build the frame for the clubhouse—our requirements for joining.
But Roberto was different. This might have been a story about the most carefree, joyful, fellowship-filled time of my life, if I didn’t have to account for my perception of him.
In the way I’ve told this story before—a way I only recently began to question, having not thought deeply about it for some time—I would speak of Roberto as a physically imposing, overly aggressive, and unpredictable figure, the villain in an otherwise perfect tale of childhood community. I placed him in the role of the antagonist who ruined everything for us that year, tormenting me and my siblings at every turn. Roberto was much bigger than Ghanasyam—who at ten was around the same age, three years older than me—and I interpreted this fact as proof that he used his weight to get his way and as evidence of how terrifying he was. I remember him having a few heated arguments with Ganga, who was twelve at the time, about the decisions she made as clubhouse leader, and I used this to paint him as always seeking fights because of some innate hostility. He didn’t have the same regard for the clubhouse we’d built, and I used this to craft a tale about how jealous he was of what we had. Even though we were both poor, he was a different type of poor from me.
In this version of the story, other poor Black children were always a different type of poor from me.
It was easy for me to use the facts of Roberto’s body and his very typical youthful conflicts and his poorness to fabricate him as a hulking, envious saboteur with a penchant for cruelty, which became the explanation for why we disinvited him from the clubhouse the last summer we lived at that house. And that was the first story that came to mind when I tried to find the root of my carceral dissonance: the story of this large Black boy who didn’t know how to be in a community. There must have been a reason my childhood was threatened, I told myself, and Roberto was the easy target. He could be a morality tale about how you shouldn’t treat other people. I could use my memories to create a history that the facts couldn’t fully support on their own. And I did exactly that, all the way up until I started to write about the last time we built the clubhouse and how it felt like my childhood was lost with it, as I tried to trace the beginning of that loss.
But my memories don’t tell the full story. When I sat to write, I found myself blanking on the details. What was the “way” that Roberto was trying to get? What were Roberto and my sister arguing about, and why did I assume he had sought out those arguments? What exactly were his plans to sabotage the clubhouse? Did I actually remember anything about him beyond his Blackness, his poorness, his ordinary childhood disputes? Why was I so committed to telling this story when I had nothing else to back it up, and what other possible stories were there? What story would the childhood version of me who actually experienced this have told, their perception not yet fully tainted by the biases and misafropedia that I’ve come to hold?
Looking back on it, my conflicts with Roberto were, in fact, fairly mundane. But the figure he grew into in my mind—a figure that solidified o
ver years of refusing to interrogate the way I told this story—was anything but. Misafropedia creates monsters out of Black children simply for being children, and I had internalized this concept by virtue of not actively working against it. It’s wild how there didn’t have to be a specific, spectacularly terrible thing a Black child did in order for me to villainize and criminalize them spectacularly and almost automatically—how an ordinary story about ordinary childhood things can stick with you by anti-Black adhesive for so long if you aren’t critical of the ideas and beliefs you take for granted.
On our walks, Mother Bhūmi showed herself to be a complicated but caring grandmother who was suffering through countless traumas at a time when I’d fashioned her a raving monster who caused only suffering. She was demonstrating that there are many different versions of the past, that each is affected by the perception of the person telling the story. Why did I cling to this specific narrative of Roberto being a villain and this belief that my childhood would have been perfect without him? What systems of power affect the meaning I give to this story? Why have I believed for so long that there can be only this one version and this one meaning?
One could argue that there are indisputable historical facts, but what we do with those facts, and our acknowledgment of some facts and not others when describing our past, means that there is no way to perceive the past objectively. We are subjective beings. It is necessary to reimagine one’s past narratives without clinging to a false sense of objectivity, and to always question our biases and where they might come from. Without doing so, it’s no coincidence that I used the details I can access today to imagine Roberto in the same way Mike Brown was described by the police officer who murdered him. “I felt like a five-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan,” said Officer Darren Wilson, trying to justify shooting the eighteen-year-old on the side of the road in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. “He looked up at me, and had the most intense, aggressive face. The only way I can describe it—it looks like a demon.”20