Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  The carceral state cannot end the trauma that comes with carceral dissonance; it can only repurpose it. The same gendered violence that caused me to lose my childhood turns seamlessly into an excuse to commit gendered violence against others. Like the cisgender, heterosexual Black men in my family I always knew I could never truly be like, I used my own powerlessness to legitimize asserting power over others in powerless positions. And I am no more innocent of this than my father.

  The women I harmed through trying to claim some sort of normative gender coherence despite my failure at manhood have names and perspectives of their own. They are Mata, my sisters, my high school and college friends. I hope there are fewer of them in recent years, and I don’t write this to erase their perspectives. There is no bravery in admitting any of this. It is necessary inasmuch as it demonstrates that finding healing for the very real gender violence I experienced, as someone who never fully identified with manhood, requires more than blaming and punishing others for my inability to identify with it—the only option the carceral state would have us believe exists.

  Today, I consider myself nonbinary. But, at most, I look like a man who sometimes wears women’s makeup and clothing, if you can look like such a thing. Neither of those things is who I am, however. Clothing is made of thread and dye, not gender, and a nonbinary gender identity is made when one knows they are neither man nor woman. I know that I am made of Black love and Black pain and Black hope and Black loss. I used to push back harder on being called a “man,” remind whomever said it that I use “they/them” pronouns, and that is still true. Conversations about pronouns and the impossibility of determining gender based on what someone “looks like” are still important, especially in a world that targets and harms transgender, intersex, and genderqueer people in genocidal ways.

  But too often my conversations stopped there, when the issue is deeper than that. I want to start conversations about my gender in a different place, at the beginning of all the gendered violence that has facilitated my carceral dissonance, and that comes long before I ever even thought about my perineal raphe.

  I discovered one such starting place while reading the work of Black feminist scholar Hortense Spillers. In her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” she argues that the social language of this country following the African slave trade requires “the dehumanizing, ungendering, and defacing project of African persons.”33 Black people were brought here as commodities, not people. Black babies were regularly torn away from their mothers’ breasts, and Black families were denied kinship bonds because we weren’t imagined as requiring the things that white people’s idea of a human being required.

  If Spillers is correct, then whatever terms we find to gender ourselves within a language that was created to describe Black folks as non-people will necessarily indicate our gender is done wrong, because a commodity cannot rightfully be man, woman, or child. To do gender in this world means we will always be able to be blamed for failing at it.

  We see this in how Black women are blamed for taking leadership roles in their families, and thereby raising boys to be “too soft,” even while Black men are blamed for their absence from the home (without regard to how this absence often is a result of state-sanctioned death or prison, or to the fact that Black men who aren’t in prison or dead have actually been shown to be more involved with their children than white men).34 I saw this personally in how my mother was punished by my father for being a woman and parenting her children and how Mohan was punished for being a man and attempting to find belonging as my father’s child. We see this in how Black, queer folks are imagined to be the reason for the “destruction of the Black family,” even though the Black family is always already being destroyed by the carceral state.

  If this system of enslavement did not end but only evolved into other racialized state-sanctioned practices that undergird this country’s justice system, then my gender was always in crisis. No amount of blaming one’s constructed penis, one’s queer children, one’s conservative parents, or anything other than destroying and healing from the carceral system that evolved from enslavement itself can ultimately change that. And each Black person, across and outside of the gendered spectrum, has a responsibility in this.

  Fri, Aug. 3, 2018, at 8:39 p.m.

  Hari,

  I have some things to say on our relationship. When I was younger I felt like you thought you had to go do your own thing, ya know find yourself and what not. And there was a period where you didn’t really associate too much with us. I get that.

  I just wish you would’ve been my big brother while you did that, ya know? Because as a kid I couldn’t understand what you were going through, it just seemed like you were absent . . . when I would’ve needed you.

  I had some resentment to you for what I saw as being a kind of absent older brother. I suppose I feel like you just went off and left me and didn’t even see me.

  It would’ve been nice to have you . . . Like so many times I wish you would’ve been there and you weren’t. Like you were just somebody in New York, completely disconnected.

  A few weeks ago, I received one of those texts where you have to press the ellipses to read the full thing. It was from my youngest brother, Visnu. I held my breath, clicked it, read this message, and cried. I cried because I wanted to say that I never knew what he was feeling when I left for New York, but that would mostly be a lie. I knew when I left home that he became a constant target of Mother Bhūmi’s, when he was far too young to understand the root of the violence surrounding her mental illness. I knew that my mother and father didn’t know how to protect him. I knew he was lonely in the patriarchal home that silenced his softness, just like I had been, but I called my loneliness different because of my gender. I called my loneliness “nonbinary,” and this still might be the most succinct way to describe it, but sometimes I called it this just to excuse why I sought some escape from the loneliness without my baby brother. Why I blamed him and everything else I left, with no concern for anyone’s healing, including my own. Why I abandoned home and Cleveland and my family and my Blackness, trying to be seen by white people in college. Why I so easily write off cisgender heterosexual Black people for any and all infractions. Because they don’t experience gender like I do, none of them, including my little brother, could ever understand.

  But my anxieties around my gender were never about whether I was nonbinary, or intersex, or gay or straight. They weren’t about a need to be understood. They were about feeling that being imprisoned by these concepts, being forced to act or be or look a certain way because the carceral world needed a way to understand me, made it impossible for me to feel the freedom Mata had tried to safeguard in me as a child. And it made me an agent in stealing the freedoms from others, too.

  My anxieties were about knowing that I would never truly be the man my mother or my father expected me to be, and I couldn’t be any woman they would accept me being either, no matter how hard I tried, because their expectations were rooted in standards designed for me not to meet. They were about knowing that my gender would always be done wrong, would always feel like a mistake, would always be the reason the world would demand something be cut away from me, even if that severance did nothing to make me fit into the world any better. And both Visnu and Mohan, who are as cisgender and straight as any Black person can be, must have journeyed through these anxieties, too, even if we ended up at different places.

  On a macro level, all my brothers and sisters went through the same violent conditioning I did. They grew up being told that men don’t cry, touch, or apologize and that women are subject to the whims of those around them, too. They experienced the same castigations from our parents when they stepped out of our strictly defined roles. The same fear that they would never be enough and could not be anything else. And the same childlike desire to still be something else even when faced with this terror.

  Visnu’s letter reminded me to consider all the Black boys
and girls—whether I know them to be queer or not—who are harmed or harm each other just to prove themselves men and women enough to no avail. Who are queer in the context of their “collective position relative to state and capitalist power,” as political scientist Dr. Cathy Cohen puts it, rather than just in the context of their personal identification.35 Girls whom we may not call “nonbinary” only because they haven’t claimed it publicly but who are still struggling with their gender because it was never designed for them. Boys who, even if they don’t have the same desires to express their gender as I do, deny themselves even the slightest touch with other men. Who deny it because they’ve heard “that’s gay,” and they either do not identify as gay or are afraid to, even though they desire and need intimate touch in their lives, like everyone does. Black boys who cannot bring themselves to express true care or sadness or fear because that’s not what their interpretation of god allows them to do. Black girls who cannot assert themselves without being called aggressive. In this carceral state, all Black people battle through a lack of gender coherence, and so we all have the responsibility to refuse to comply with the state’s gendered roles that ensure this battle remains.

  My gender, if that’s what it must be called, is not defined by how I dress, or what my bass-less voice sounds like, although those things may all play a part. If my gender is to be freeing, it must be defined by my destruction of and accountability for the carceral systems that hindered my parents’ love for their Black children.

  It must answer the question my therapist posed, must model the difference between holding a person accountable and beating them up, the difference between healing and punitive. The answer is in the holds and drops and pickups. The answer is not in any language this carceral state knows. Shame and punishment can address only transgressions that are visible, and we have no control over where the state directs its gaze. Shame can’t address the harms we carry with us in the shadows, in our family secrets, in our beliefs and desires. It inherently creates one set of standards for people who can afford what it takes to avoid public scrutiny and another for those who can’t. But as Old Dude on my block demonstrated, Blackness has always offered other tongues, if only we choose to listen.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A PRAYER FOR NEW LANGUAGE

  Hari-Gaura,

  I am engaged now. Can you believe it? I am engaged to a boy. The type of boy of your dreams. A Black boy with teeth that dig a cavern into his tongue, through which the cutest lisp spills out like a freshwater stream. A boy with teeth that are crooked, with teeth that are perfect. With teeth through which he whispers for me to grease his scalp on lazy Sunday afternoons. Or tries to whisper. He can’t quite do it. It seems to be physiologically impossible for him. But I read somewhere that whispering requires the abduction of vocal cords. I know “abduction” can mean the way muscles pull away from each other, but I also know it can mean his voice is too vast to be kidnapped.

  “I’m sorry, I’m too loud,” he says repentantly after laughing so boomingly that I am commanded to listen to him instead of the television show we are lying down to watch, now that the roots of his locs have been properly moisturized. He must have noticed that I am tired and my head hurts. I just want to watch my show, and the cannonade annoys me. And though we are getting married soon, I am still afraid of these moments. I am still afraid of how I don’t always know how to listen, even to those I love the most. Even when commanded to. Even when I know that I should.

  I’ve been so preoccupied with talking at you and trying to raise you from the dead that I haven’t fully grasped the beauty you offer in teaching me about how to listen. Something about how to let folks rest in peace, especially when their peace is different from mine. Louder than mine.

  Society places familiarity at the root of care so much that I always see danger in anything with which I have less than a significant degree of similarity. So much so that I feel compelled to run from anything that doesn’t rest inside my comfort zone, or to prove that it does despite reality. But perhaps learning to listen to Black children, both gone and still here, is a necessary model for how to be present for others even when our experiences diverge. Even amid the differences of our wants, needs, and desires. Even when forced to stay physically apart. Even when I don’t fully know the other person’s language. And isn’t that all love really is?

  When Timothy proposed after the opening night of his one-man show last year, I told him yes, but I don’t think “Will you marry me?” was really the question. He doesn’t even believe in state-sanctioned marriage. Neither of us believes that the state should have the power to legitimize our relationship, and we don’t believe that the benefits marriage affords to people should be refused to those who don’t or can’t tie the knot. We don’t believe in how the fight for “same-sex marriage” took up so much of last decade’s “queer agenda,” when so many Black, queer kids like you were living and dying on the streets, when so many Black transgender and intersex kids were fighting and dying in opposition to the idea that there is such a thing as a “same sex,” and neither of us believes in re-creating a heteronormative family image in gay drag.

  “Fuck marriage!” I told Tim when we discussed the possibility months before his proposal, something I certainly suggest everyone do before springing any life-changing decision on someone they claim to love. “But I do want a ceremony to celebrate our love, and I want to be in the best legal position to adopt our children,” I conceded.

  I explained my thought process to my best friend, Lisa, when we met up for the first time after my engagement, before asking her to be my maid of honor.

  “Of course!” she replied in a squeak that can be produced only when you are as small as she is and the excitement for the good fortune of someone you care about tries and fails to abduct your vocal cords. Lisa is four feet ten with the thickest socks on her feet, but she always reminds me that Black Virginian women have never let their size be the reason they disappear.

  “Or will it be best woman?” she pondered aloud, her southern twang blanketing the words in a warmth only Black southern twangs can create. I told her yes, which wasn’t an answer, but I don’t think “Is it maid of honor or best woman?” was really the question.

  “Fuck marriage and how gendered it is!” she conceded. But so often, we both admitted, this limited gendered language offers the only words we can think of to describe our relationships with other people.

  Lisa and I were suddenly five drinks in, and our excitement had been sufficiently libated into a clumsy release of our demons, the liquor beaming a spotlight onto the darkest monsters in the gaps between us.

  “Maybe you won’t get it because you’re not a woman and the pressure to be with someone is different for you,” Lisa said, “but I get so lonely when my friends find serious partners.”

  I ordered both of us another round.

  “But it’s not just because I’m reminded that I’m single,” she continued. “I am trying not to give too much energy to those pressures. But when my friends get serious partners, they forget about me. I just hate always coming second to everyone.”

  “You don’t come second to me. You’re my best friend,” I assured her.

  “But that’s not the same,” she told me, and I knew she was right. “Are you really ever going to choose me over Timothy?” We’d had this conversation before. We keep having it because we keep asking things that aren’t really the questions. That aren’t really what we need to ask but seem to be all we have the words for.

  “And I’m not asking you to choose me,” she said. “I would never ask that. That’s why I know how this is going to go. Because that’s how it has already gone. As a single woman, this is the labor I expect to do.”

  She pointed out all the time I spend at home in Brooklyn now. How, since I moved in with Timothy, I rarely come to Harlem, where she and most of the rest of our friends live.

  “When you are in a relationship, that person comes first,” she said. Her little
hand is no bigger than yours ever became before you left this body to me, Hari-Gaura, but somehow it made its way fully around the giant glass of six-dollar house merlot.

  I apologized. She told me I didn’t have to. I told her I will do a better job of being there when she needs me in the future. Of listening when I know I should. That though I knew that lovers and friends aren’t the same, I didn’t believe that always prioritizing the former at the expense of the latter was the way things have to be. That her feeling sad about these priorities and me doing nothing to address her concerns shouldn’t be the inevitable conclusion just because she’s a woman. I tried to explain that love needn’t be a competition, and we should be able to show up in different ways for different people without comparison. That it feels like we can’t only because capitalism turns everything into a limited commodity, leaving us with a shortage of connection.

  Then I reiterated that she is my best friend, as if that wasn’t just its own type of prioritizing. As if I didn’t know this wasn’t really the answer either. As if I knew what was.

  Hari-Gaura, you spoke a love language that still feels foreign to me.