Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  “Let’s go, Khia,” I said, throwing on her harness and thinking of Mother Bhūmi. She never did like dogs—they are considered unclean in the Vaiṣṇava religion—but once upon a time, I didn’t like going for walks around the block. For Khia, I do it twice a day, and in return she never leaves me alone for too long.

  “He maaaad nice!” Old Dude shouted at me from across the street, holding on to the A like if he lost it too soon, he’d lose himself. Or maybe he held on to it just so that he could lose himself in the expanse he created with it. I didn’t know. But I knew that he was from Brooklyn.

  The way you hold words means something here.

  Something about loss and survival. It’s not always easy to tell which of the two.

  It’s not always a binary. It’s not just how long you hold words, but where you let them drop and where you pick them back up.

  “What breed he is?”

  “She’s a pit bull,” I responded, but my voice, being the light, bass-less thing that it is, abandoned its mission halfway across the street and never reached his ears.

  “Huh?”

  “Pit bull!” I said a little louder, the effort of speaking at grown-man decibel level taking the air out of me. He waved me over. I was walking the other way, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I crossed the street, a little relieved that I wouldn’t have to shout anymore. Khia was confused by the sudden departure from our regular walking routine and resisted, so I used the harness to pull her back. Google says if we deviate from the same route every day, she won’t be so hardheaded about walking, but she’s too fucking hardheaded to deviate. This world loves to give us answers to a problem that the problem itself prevents us from accessing.

  “What breed?” Old Dude repeated.

  “Pit bull.”

  “Whaaaa? He hella small. He full grown? He friendly?”

  “She’s mixed with a bull terrier, I think. This is as big as she gets. She’s nice—to people, at least.” I laughed. Old Dude laughed back and leaned down to scratch Khia behind her bat-like ears, courtesy of her possible bull terrier lineage. At this point she was happy to have been dragged across the street, but I knew she still wouldn’t go without a struggle next time, her annoying ass. Google stays wrong.

  Niggas around here love my dog. Niggas around here love pit bulls period, but there’s something about Khia that really gets them. I imagine that they love pit bulls because the breed has been unfairly written off as monstrously violent and criminalized through breed-specific legislation, and niggas around here know what that feels like. But Khia specifically?

  “It’s his pure white coat, my nigga,” Old Dude said. “Shit is dooope.” He looked up while holding the o, and I was sure he would lose himself when his gaze stopped at my midriff. But his eyes eventually still made their way up to mine, and he still smiled. I could tell this was not a flirt, and still we survived.

  Up until then I had forgotten I was wearing a crop top, although what the hell else would I be wearing? Certainly not that damn button-down. It was over ninety degrees that day. This was the only attire that made sense to me, and what I would have worn to my meetings if I’d had the choice, and maybe to my brother Syama’s wedding, too. And for just that moment, it seemed to make perfect sense to Old Dude as well. For that moment, he could talk to queer old me without restraint. Without feeling a hatred toward his own relationship to manhood. Without taking that hatred out on me.

  Khia does that to dudes around here. Or to me. I’m not sure whether it’s that walking my dog makes cisgender straight Black men in this not-yet-fully-gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood more comfortable talking to me, or me more comfortable talking to them, figuring they won’t wild out around a pit bull. It’s not always easy to tell which of the two it is. It’s not always a binary.

  “What’s his name?”

  I had used female pronouns each time I referred to Khia, but to no avail. To dudes around here, she stays male and that’s that. And it’s not just dudes. Most people I come across seem to automatically assume Khia is a male dog because she’s a pit bull. I’m not sure what they think all these male pit bulls mate with to procreate, but I guess they haven’t thought that far. I can assume this has something to do with the breed’s supposed physical strength and aggression, which patriarchy tells us cannot belong to women.

  But why did I feel so inclined to correct Old Dude while calling him “Old Dude”—while gendering him, too—as if my assumptions about his gender didn’t have far greater consequences than his about Khia’s? Gender is so fucking weird.

  “Have a good one, bro,” he said with a final stiff pat on Khia’s blocky head and left. I hate being called “bro.” I have never felt like a “bro” or a “man” or a “mister” or a “sir,” although “boy” and “brother” and “girl” and “sis” feel okay, for some reason. When I talk to customer service representatives over the phone with my bass-less voice, I sometimes get called “ma’am,” and that doesn’t feel right either, but I never correct them. What would the correction even be? All these words feel like cages to me, like I am being forced inside them against my will. Like I am being aligned to the world’s conceptions of gender when my Black experience has so little to do with the world’s.

  But there, with Old Dude, with Khia, the words stopped feeling like a shove. It was about how long he held them, where he let them drop, and where he picked them back up—the Brooklyn way, the Black way, fried and buttered-like. Here is where you lose the violent limitations and find a place where you can truly survive. Here is where I find a god who can repair the fracture caused by my carceral dissonance.

  For a second, Old Dude and I were able to lose ourselves beyond the way words like “straight,” “dude,” “bro,” and “gay” defined us, even if those were the best we could formulate in the moment, because we weren’t stuck in just that moment. For a second, we were able to lose ourselves beyond the way these words villainize and criminalize and cage us. Beyond the way these words might sometimes make us feel hatred toward ourselves, the way we might sometimes take that hatred out on one another. We were just two Black people in our still-not-completely-stolen Black Brooklyn hood, not being made to harm each other. I didn’t really have the words for how freeing this was, but I tasted them, though. They were there.

  There are no answers that Black folks’ problems don’t already preclude in this world, so we don’t have to know all of them. We don’t have to find a home in these words, because there never has been a home for us in anything this carceral world creates. We can and have always made homes elsewhere, like in the holds and drops and pickups and annotations and redactions. Like in gospel. In outdoing one another while dancing the Electric Slide, without making anyone feel shame. We can lose and have always lost or been denied everything the world says makes us who we are—this gender, this sexuality, this language. And when we refuse to use for harming one another the things we are told we are, like in that fleeting moment with Old Dude, I think that is what holding ourselves accountable without beating ourselves up looks like.

  At thirteen, I was what my father called a “late bloomer,” which sounded like an acknowledgment that I could be flowered with the sweet and tender petals of a blossom, but he still got upset at my delicacies. Back then I really had no way to tell if my penis was real or not. I knew it was supposed to be able to ejaculate, even if I had no idea what the stuff actually was that was supposed to come out of it, and at the time I couldn’t make it do that. You could say that the burgeoning belief that my “boy parts” were fake was just me searching for someone to blame for what my parents seemed to simultaneously understand and deny about my gender: their idea of maleness did not fit me.

  I discovered more evidence of my body’s potential trickery when watching a 20/20-type show with my parents one night that same year. I cherished these moments. Our family didn’t watch a lot of TV together, didn’t even have cable, and I didn’t really mind that. Perhaps because of its rarity, when we did wat
ch a show or movie together, it always seemed like a special occasion. Like a birthday. Or maybe a funeral. It seemed to me that Mata, whom I generally imagined as completely disinterested in secular concerns, became a new version of herself in front of the TV. More connected to everyone and everything that wasn’t her god. But to the woman who had discovered Kṛṣṇa only as an adult, maybe this was just a return to an old self.

  This episode of the show featured an investigation into the lives of intersex people who had gender reassignment surgery when they were babies. Their parents had decided, based on their doctors’ recommendations, which of the two genders to force them into not long after they were born. The doctors’ decisions were mostly determined by the size of the penis or clitoris, even though gender is far more than that. Or far less.

  Many of these children grew into a deep confusion about their identities. A few later decided to transition from the gender they were assigned by their surgeons, some before anything was revealed to them about their past and the surgery.

  Mata and my dad watched intently. I assumed they were trying to wrap their minds around the concept that gender isn’t always so cut and dried, just as I was trying to do. That chromosomes and hormones and genitalia and feelings and doctors’ orders are never enough to determine gender on their own. They looked concerned, my father’s forehead becoming a more dangerous wave of wrinkles than the small ripples they usually were. Mata “mhmmm”-ing from all the way down in her throat with a grimace whenever more proof was presented that these childhood gender assignments were dangerous. And that’s when I knew: my parents had made a mistake on me just like the parents in the show had made a mistake on their children.

  At the time, it was the only explanation I could think of. It wasn’t just my delayed puberty. In addition to my not-yet-there Adam’s apple, I also had no idea what a perineal raphe, the ridge along the base of a penis, was, not to mention the fact that one could be more pronounced and slightly off-center, like mine. This was proof of the surgery. My gender battle scar. Proof that all this suffering and failing to become a man had a culprit.

  I wanted to confront my parents about what I believed they had done to me, but I was certain they would feel compelled to come clean after the show. How could they watch all these people’s lives be destroyed by being forced into gender cages against their will by their parents and doctors the world swears are experts, and not try to reverse course with their own child before it was too late? But when the episode concluded, my parents barely said a word. Though heavy with worry, their eyes were guiltless, and they simply told me to go to bed. Our special moment had come to an end.

  I didn’t have to erroneously appropriate the experiences of intersex children to understand that being forced into my parents’ idea of maleness was wrong, or to heal from it, but at least I finally had something to blame. For why my voice was too soft—for why I was. For why I cried too much. For why I loved basketball only until I got into a fight over a game in high school just to prove my masculinity, and lost. For why I always lost at proving my masculinity, even when I got better at winning fights. For why treating girls like shit didn’t feel right even when I got better at treating them the way boys around me did, the way I learned boys were supposed to. And though I could no longer hold this mistakenly imagined surgery responsible after puberty hit, the belief that I needed to blame someone for the destructive ways I learned and lived gender remained.

  Blame comes too easy in a world built on prisons. Ours is a binary world, split between guilt and innocence, with no concern for healing. The inaccurate idea that my parents had surgically determined my gender without my consent provided me with someone to punish for the fact that all my boy friends were talking sex and girls and sex with girls, and I kept wanting to be the girl some of them had sex with, but couldn’t. But blame never led to being able to be what I needed to be. More importantly, it never led to accountability for the ways I internalized my parents’ harmful messages about what their children could or couldn’t be either.

  I grew up with little concept of half siblings, at least when it came to Mata’s children. Because of this, it wasn’t explicitly clear to me how the stepfather/stepchild dynamic contributed to the tension my older brother Mohan had with my father until recently.

  “I don’t want to tell your mother how to raise her children,” it seemed my father would say whenever any of the kids did something he didn’t like, although he didn’t appear to hold back as much when it came to advising her how to raise Visnu, Kiss, and me. I don’t assume he was lying about his wants, exactly, but I think now his more distant parenting of the others also might have come from the fact that he had a harder time seeing the children Mata had prior to marrying him as more than just “hers,” even though he had been in their lives for most of them.

  In some ways, I can imagine this left some of my siblings who weren’t conceived by him feeling even more abandoned than they might have felt if they were missing only the presence of their biological father in their lives. My dad was there in the home, taking care of them, and certain to emphasize that the house was to be run by his rules, but Mohan, Ganga, and Ghanasyam were still not his children in important contexts, particularly when they broke those rules. In those contexts, they became my mother’s problem alone—a consequence of how the world teaches us to blame Black single mothers for the faults of their children, to such a pathological degree that it doesn’t even matter if they aren’t single anymore or whether their children’s actions are actually faults. To this day, my father often still blames my mother for taking the lead and denying him what he believes to be his rightful role as the head of the house—simply because he is a man—when something goes wrong in their home, even though he explicitly encouraged her to.

  “A man should be able to deal with problems the way that men do,” he argues, implying that the way of men lacks softness and care.

  “I ain’t afraid of no man,” he insists, perhaps unintentionally illuminating that the issue stems from a need to defend his sense of masculinity from threats both real and imagined.

  Naturally, when my older siblings started to become adults, they broke my father’s conservative rules all the time. Mohan, the oldest, wasn’t supposed to bring explicit CDs into the house. He wasn’t supposed to have girls over. He wasn’t supposed to use the family vehicle without asking my father first, even if he had asked my mother. My father didn’t want to tell Mata what to do with her kids, but he also had to assert his dominance as the man of the house. So instead of working with her to establish solutions to my brother’s rebellions (which probably would have involved being fully present as a father), he and Mohan clashed constantly.

  Once, Mohan and my father had been yelling back and forth all day when Mata called all the children to the living room to have a frank discussion about house rules. I was in high school at the time, and Mohan had just come back to live with us after losing his job. He was in his late twenties then, and even more disaffected with my father’s strict rules than he’d been as a teenager. I suppose that these rules operated as a stark reminder that Mohan still didn’t belong in my father’s house, in my father’s family, even though belonging is what every child deserves.

  Mata began by opening up the floor for the children to speak candidly.

  “I just feel like you haven’t been there for us like a father should be,” Mohan admitted, his eyelids working furiously to mop up any hint of tears. I had never seen him speak so vulnerably about his feelings to my father. But my father responded by looking Mohan straight in his eyes, which had reluctantly become weirs, resolutely stone-faced.

  “Why are you crying?” my father pried.

  “He can cry,” our sister Ganga chimed in defensively. “That’s a horrible feeling to have.”

  “You boys need to man up,” my dad responded, ignoring her, revulsion palpable in his words. “I don’t want to tell her how to raise her children, but your mother needs to teach you that. This is wh
y a woman can’t raise no men.”

  It would take too much work for Mohan’s eyelids to be successful now. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to, that he could cry, but I knew that wasn’t true. I knew he couldn’t, at least within the confines of the world I still deferred to. We children had all been shown from a young age that men don’t cry or apologize, that crying and apologizing were womanlike and weak, and I knew there were punishments for these actions. I knew that punishing women, and us for our proximity to them, was the way the world worked, and I believed it was too much to ask for more. So I did not comfort my brother. I did not defend my mother. I watched my father get up and walk away, and then I got up and walked away, too.

  Despite all that Mother Bhūmi and Mata did to move the moon and stars to create space for our family, I grew up witnessing even the most powerful women being subjected to the whims and desires of the men around them. My father would make unfair comments about Mata’s ability to mother her children, and few of the adults in the community she created seemed to bat an eye. Some of the men in my family would get drunk and count off women like conquests, their own daughters like trinkets. I would hear whispers of some of them beating their conquests and trinkets into submission, others of sexually assaulting them, but the whisperers lacked alarm, and I followed their warnings to bury mine, too.

  Though these blatant displays of misogynoir never seemed right, they always seemed normal, and when you have to choose between the two, this world encourages you to pick the latter. So for a long time I did. Even when I understood that I would never be like my father or any of these other men in my life, even when I believed I wasn’t born male, even when I loudly proclaimed myself to be gay, I still tried to operate within the confines of this sexist reality that placed men and their desires above women and theirs. Sometimes, I still do.

  Blaming my parents for my failure to achieve manhood never stopped me from attacking women. It never stopped me from making degrading comments about women’s appearances based on white-supremacist beauty standards. I still dismissed women’s concerns as overly emotional because they were women. I touched women without their consent and waved it off as a joke, “because I am gay!” Blaming my parents, rather than attempting to hold myself accountable and heal from my conditioning, allowed me to convince myself that I couldn’t possibly hurt women this way because I wasn’t attracted to them, as if violence has ever been dependent on attraction. As if I got to dictate what should happen to women’s bodies just because my intentions differed from the cisgender, heterosexual men who did the same before me. As if it didn’t hurt when straight women did the same to me because they assumed I was a gay man. Intentions have never negated impact.