How our love warps time and births transient realities
I have beautiful friends.
I am beginning with this sentiment because the inspiration for this reflection is a deep sense of gratitude and honor in how I feel about my peers. How proud I am of the lives my closest homies have chosen to discover and explore. We each have grown into conduit points of inspiration that sometimes becomes an audience experience as we applaud one another for the dynamics of our lives. This year my best friend Fon, shared an empowering story that resonated that really inspired me to create this reflection and celebration of him.
Earlier this summer, Fon had the honor of hosting his first Art Exhibit for a Photoshoot titled Fifty Shades of Grey. From my understanding, this exhibit functioned as an intimate examination of the sacred beauty elder black people possess when they inherit the gift of grey hairs. Alike leaves changing color, the body acclimates to a new season through expressing it’s internal wisdom in whitened hair coating rich melanin skin. Clouds touching the earth.
photos by Ifeanyichukwu Nwanoro. Instagram: @childisheretostay
The concept of this museum is already inherently impressive. The photos further exalt the value and gives lens to the intent of Fon’s vision; but the richness doesn’t even begin to start here. Fon further expounded on a beautiful, yet simultaneously, heart-wrenching moment he had between himself and his childhood barber. He invited his barber to the exhibit, and learned that he had never been to an art museum before in his entire life.
This triggered me emotionally. When I heard this sentiment, it reminded me of the many harmful, insidious formats in which racism and patriarchy damage black men through the robbery of life’s joy. A slow, painful death. This moment shared was indicative of the system’s larger nature which not only steals the mind of black people, but to pursues a heist of the soul. To turn the beautiful simplicity of life into internal warfare between engaging with the gentleness life can offer, or surrendering to the hardness we’re told to believe makes us “real men”.
I am saddened for the man, and I am in a deeper grief for the boy that was denied the simplicity of beauty. The kind of beauty that stays with us because it does not take up too much room. It is not a weight we have to carry, but a space we can enter. Have our boys been given the space to sit with the radiant of a sunset’s hug? Have our boys been given the space to be held by the art of someone else’s creativity? What type of man do we create when we deny them the hopeful necessities of life. Colorless. A monochrome sadness that is looking for color to reach our eyes, knowing colorful qualities exist.
Black Men Deserve Museums
The beauty reclaimed in this moment was through Fon’s affirmation. When closing his exhibit. He provided a deep, profound message of encouragement to his barber. He spoke of how the role of the barber in this world, and our community particularly operates almost as this metaphysical guide between life and death.
This is because the barber is one of the few roles that caretakes for the scalp of their client, from the beginning of life, to the end. The barber is the library for transition and black hair holds the stories. Our relationship with our hair has often been more than an aesthetic organ. It has been a library of stories, art, and often, liberation. Literal maps, blueprints, and syllabi tethered to our crowns so that we can find a way to the next revolutionary event.
When Fon told me this, as you can imagine, I felt a deep sense of pride. A love for who he is, and the growth he has shown in his refinement of his power to uplift people, and be courageous enough to reinterpret values to create healing. My boy is really out here doing his thing. However, even deeper, I expressed how empowering this moment is to both of my homies Fon and Ruck, who this discussion occurred on FaceTime while I was in Senegal. The pride that I feel, is that each of us understand the inner workings of each other deeply because we have spent almost a decade nurturing the quality of our relationship. Whether through fun, sports, conversation, grief, fear, art, etc.
This space of vulnerability has empowered us as we explore living a lifestyle that truly makes us happy, building relationships that are rooted in care, and being men that truly feel safe. What we have is a unique opportunity to heal the men that came before us through way of existing and affirming. To realize that we are all reflections of each other existing at different moments in time, and these reflections can be nurtured to bring new revelations to our elders that may feel they have already lived their lives. Black men before us have often been sold ideas, that living has to be hard; that work, and money are the only things that make you valuable; the only things that bring liberation. Often forsaking love, and the impact of their intimate, gentle presence.
Our elders sometimes haven’t had the safe space to explore other methods. Often navigating the shame that comes with needing to be the strong man for the world, but not knowing that gentleness is a necessary component for strength. Not knowing that strong men also need to be held.
Time Warps & Transient Realities
Not long ago, I visited my barber for a lineup, who I hadn’t seen in about three months (wild I know, I was trippin’). Nonetheless, every session, we tend to connect over deep topics. Discussing family, fatherhood, manhood, relationships, philosophy, politics, faith, etc. In this evening’s conversation, we discussed more of his childhood.
One theme that came up was the struggle to exist freely, and safely as a young black boy interested in music; particularly, band. I remember he began this conversation, telling me how so much of his youth could have been saved and protected, if someone just saw him, and told him, “it was okay.” This hit home. Another heavy sentiment that weighed on my mind with how many black boys become invisible because we view boys as men. We don’t see their humanity, we see their danger.
While groups in these environments also fall into the trap of turning legitimate passions like band music that can add to someone’s life, into a joke. This joke would soon be internalized as a form of masking. Hiding to fit in so that there was a space of safety, and if safety required turning his passion into something to shame, so be it.
Yet, I see connections within his story shared, and the story between my homie’s barber. Black men denied space to exist; Black men denied space to explore; Black men denied space to be. In the moment my barber shared his story, I realized this is the moments we can take pride in. Not living the lives our elders wished to live, but showing them it is still attainable and helping deconstruct their realities so that they can find a deeper connection with living. It is difficult, because there is often a divide. A pressure our uncles and grandparents may feel to possess all of the answers, and know the path forward; feeling ashamed in not knowing.
Where my peers and I exist, we have the opportunity to return that sentiment. I have the opportunity to be the one to tell my barber, “it was okay”. Even with the growth he has shown. Even with how proud I am that he actually is now a professional drummer. I can still say “it was okay”. This isn’t because I know more, this is because existing in a time that allowed answers to unravel and deconstruct the abusive, harmful systems that neglect us, have allowed for healing to be reciprocal.
We do not have the opportunity for our egos to tell us our elders need to have the answer. We are in a perpetual state of survival due to a continuous targeting of black lives. If nature listens to the cries of it’s most oppressed occupants, what has it heard from black people’s pain? What has our blues offered the land we’ve become. I think it’s offered us interdimensional loving. The love of black men has inherited the power to warp time, and create new transient realities. I am almost proposing a theory for our metaphysical experience that suggests, there isn’t even an elder. As above so is below, there is no forward, there is no backward, there is no past, there is no present, only reflection.
We are light, and the only phenomenon we may have to surrender to is gravity; not time (I’m getting a bit physics-scientific here, but stay with me). This is a suggestion that the history and thoughts that existed for our elders in a past time do not lose their relevance because they are in the past. Their sons exist as reflections of silenced dreams. Don’t confuse this with us being required to live our fathers dreams. Understand this as our growth into the spiritual men we should embody through rejecting anti-blackness, and patriarchy through our actions. We won’t just exist as potential examples of who our forefathers can be, but more importantly, we can exist as insight that we are them just under different contexts. We are them just under different light.
Therefore, wounds of the past can then be restitched by choosing to embody the mold of the present that rejects harmful ideologies and systems. It reminds me of The Will To Change by Bell Hooks,
“It’s not true that men are unwilling to change. It’s true that many men are afraid to change. It’s true that masses of men haven’t even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go of the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change.”
We have a choice. I think the new learnings, the new revolutions, the inherited youth that is rebelling against harmful ideologies that imprison men from birth are manifestations from the grieved hearts of older men. The silent tears that travelled through time to water the soil of what we have become. Now those manifestations must be met by our fathers, uncles, and grandparents to meet the moment and walk into that change.
What makes this so special is that they do not have to walk into that change alone. They don’t have to walk into their ascension and transition with regret. If we allow for the transient echoes to guide us, if we allow ourselves to exist outside of the traditional, western, Eurocentric confines of time and intimate space, we can create Intergenerational Healing. We can be the one’s to tell the inner child, “it is okay.”
Ultimately, I don’t want this reflection to be a call to action, as much as I want it to be a call for realization amongst other young brothas around my age. I don’t want this to feel like we have to bare the labor of healing older men that still subscribe to anti-black, patriarchal, tyrannical means of living. I want to advocate that our choice to do the work, and our choice to embody the adventurous quirks within ourselves is the labor.
If we are reflections of one another, then we are visible light, and if we are visible light, embodiment is the call. This is because existing in your truth, and being seen in your truth can fill the void of silence and require you to do nothing but continue to be. Being is the affirmation.
Black boys deserve to be.
Black men deserve to be.
Across the spectrum of our conditions, experiences, and identities, black men deserve to Be. Black men deserve museums.
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