birdsnessssst:
(This speech was presented to an audience at York University for the Black Futures Now Conference on July 16th, 2016. I began this speech by asking audience members to join me in a small breathing exercise: breathing in and holding it for 3-seconds while telling yourself that you are “breathing in the new,” before letting go and telling yourself you are “getting rid of the old.”)
I learned this breathing exercise during therapy in 2014 while I was in the process of mourning a loss. Considering the alarming headlines and events of the past week, with the brutal murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, I wanted us to practice this exercise together as I believe all black folks—today and for the past five centuries—have been in a state of mourning.
On March 15th in 2014, my cousin Masud Khalif was murdered at a restaurant two blocks away from the building we both once called home. Without getting into the details of his death, his killer later used my cousin’s height, weight, and black skin as a reason for believing Masud was a threat to him. This is why he decided it was justifiable to kill him that night.
Masud was a character and a relatively active agent in my life. We both grew up together in Scarborough, and later in our lives, we went to the University of Toronto together. This meant we both spent endless nights bullshitting our way through essays only a few hours before their deadlines. I actually almost always hated referring to him as my cousin because he was so much more than that to me. He was like my older brother when he would threaten ex-partners of mine or give me money whenever I was broke (which was almost always). He was my friend when we spent almost every weekend together out and about downtown, trying to forget the stresses of our studies, jobs, or home lives. He was always really great for a guaranteed good laugh.
The last night I spent with Masud we spoke about our futures. He told me that despite all odds, he was going to become a criminal lawyer. He said this to me with a tone that was so matter-of-fact that you knew it would happen because he wanted it to happen. I always envied how bold and courageous he was, and how adamant he was about not letting anyone in this life tell him who or what he could be. There he was, a black man who didn’t let imposter syndrome dictate his destiny.
In that same conversation he also spoke very matter-of-factly about my future: for him, I was going to be a writer, and a good one at that. I was 24-years-old at the time with one degree under my belt, working as a personal assistant, and very confused about who I was or where I was headed. I always had dreams of being a writer but didn’t know how that could happen, and it meant everything to me that he had hope for something I had completely given up on. There I was, a black woman who let imposter syndrome dictate her destiny.
That night we ended a five-hour evening together with a grand hug after he told me why I was his favourite cousin. We exchanged some laughs and “I love you” a few times before I watched him walk down the pathway of my house and onto the street.
I felt uneasy.
A week later, I sat at the edge of my car as I watched a group of men place his body into the ground. I don’t remember what I was thinking at that exact moment, much like I don’t remember what went through my head when I touched his dead body for the last time at a Scarborough masjid, a few blocks east of the building we grew up in. For three months I had no real control over my thoughts or emotions. Sometimes I would find myself crying at the grocery store while searching for ripe avocados because a Lorde song reminded me of that time we had dinner in my living room, arguing about her having talent. Other times I found myself outside movie theaters frantically following tall black men who I thought were him.
To mourn is to lose complete control of yourself. It is to surrender yourself to that deep abyss of loss.
I lost so much control of myself in 2014 that I found myself doing things to my body and health I never would have imagined doing before. I thought of things I had never considered thinking before. I flew on planes a lot in 2014 for work, and for the first time, I felt no fear each time that plane would push off ground… because I didn’t fear to die. “If it happens, I’ll see him again” I would tell myself in every moment that a healthy person would feel concern about their life. But ‘health’ is a normative term, and I did not feel ‘normal.’
After two months I found a therapist, and on a week-to-week basis, he taught me how to breathe again. I never felt like I was doing it right. After two months of breathing exercises, I quit my job, canceled my lease, and used my minimal savings to afford a trip to Somalia with help from my mother. I had never been to Somalia before, and didn’t know how to speak my mother’s tongue, yet I was convinced that it was a practical idea to move there. I was in dire need of getting away after months of depression had consumed me.
The first day of Masud’s janazah (a three-day period of mourning for Muslims before we bury a loved one’s body), my friends sat with me in a staircase in the same building Masud and I grew up in. They were there for me—like black women always are for their kin and community—but they were there for themselves: they too had lost a friend. One friend told me that it would take one year of mourning before the pain would stop: one year for anniversaries, birthday’s, and memories to pass. She said that by the one-year anniversary of his passing it would begin to become easier.
So I counted for 365 days.
Each day I searched my way through social media, calendars, text messages, and emails to remind myself of that particular date one year prior, and figure out where Masud potentially was. Did I hear from him that day? Did we hang out? Did I wake up to his loud steps in my downtown apartment?
I would actively take a walk down memory lane each day, reflecting on where I was, or if I was with him. I would smile or laugh at our memories together before I would spend the night crying myself to sleep.
By March 15th, 2015—one year after Masud’s passing—I realized my friend was only partially right. When you are mourning the pain doesn’t go away. It never does. But after some time, it eases: you learn how to live with it, but never fully escape from it. The only significant change I had noticed after one year of mourning was my breathing: the anxiety attacks began to decrease, and I found myself controlling them better than I was able to before.
So here I am, two years and 5 months after Masud has transcended. In two years time, I slowly figured out how to peel myself off the ground and continue to live life. But every so often I find myself back there again. Glued to it. Because mourning never ends. You learn to wear it with you everywhere you go.
Jermaine Carby. Dionte Green. Mark Carson. Dontre Hamilton. Eric Garner. John Crawford III. Michael Brown Jr. Tanisha Anderson. Tamir Rice. Jerame Reid. Tony Robinson. Phillip White. Eric Harris. Walter Scott. Freddie Gray. Jonathan Sanders. Sandra Bland. India Kager. Andrew Loku. Alex Wettlaufer. Alton Sterling. Philando Castile.
When we see the faces of these men and women on our screens and their names across international headlines, behind them is a community of people—mothers, sisters, fathers, grandparents, friends, and loved ones—who are only beginning this process of mourning. It’s a painful, surreal, and dangerous process that never ends. Right now, the mothers, sisters, girlfriends and family members of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile are experiencing a change in their breathing patterns. They will spend the next few days, weeks, months, or years learning how to breathe again.
Before talking about black mourning today, I asked us to do the same breathing exercise I have done since Masud was killed because, in the wake of these unjust slayings, I believe the families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile are not alone in their loss. I don’t believe you need to know a black person who was murdered intimately in order to mourn their loss. I believe you just have to be black. And I believe that outside of “improvisation, transcendence and resilience,” the DNA of black people in the Americas for the past five centuries has involved an intimate relationship with mourning. It’s an invasion of our collective spirits and ancestry.
During the Jim Crow era, on average, 39 black people were lynched per year, and during the worst year of the Jim Crow era, 161 black people were lynched in America. In 2015, 258 black people were killed by US police—almost 100 more people than US history’s most shameful moment. The threat to black existence and black life has never ended, thus black mourning never will end either; and so long as black people are being killed by the state and by non-black bodies on account of their blackness, black suffering remains. Hundreds of black women across the Americas, in this moment, are suffering: they are reflecting on how they birthed, raised, loved, and then buried their children. Hundreds of black women are trying their best to learn how to breathe again.
In the words of James Baldwin: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
Every time we hear of another black person murdered, we as a community experience a collective rage, anger, grief—pain that we do not know how to articulate or define because it is deafening and blinding. But we know it comes because of our blackness. We are in so much pain as a community that we have to remind others why we matter. Think about the fundamental aspect of this: “black lives matter” is a statement that should obviously be true, but it’s not, and our community is constantly reminded of how and why our lives do not matter.
The reality of being a black person in the Americas is to live with a consciousness of being a black subject in a world of “white” power. It is to live in a realm of double consciousness; we are actively aware of our bodies, our words, our actions and how they are perceived by white “power”. We are actively aware of how those perceptions of ourselves and the extensions of ourselves are detached from who we are because white “power” has produced these distorted perceptions.
I am so hyper-aware of these perceptions of my blackness that when I demand better service at a restaurant, I know that to the outside world I am embodying the “angry black woman,” so instead I choose to keep my mouth shut.
I am aware when I walk into stores that I am under surveillance; that my black skin convenes for surveillance, so I police my own actions before someone else does.
I am aware that my skin is enough for me to face employment and housing discrimination, much like I am aware that my black skin can lead to economic racism, like higher charges of interest rates and fees opposed to my white counterparts.
I am aware that as a black woman in Toronto, I am three times more likely to be carded than anyone else. I am aware that my black skin not only criminalizes me but dehumanizes my value as a human being on this earth.
I am aware that if my black skin were enough to get me killed like it does hundreds of black people every year in the US and Canada combined, that people will spend more time deliberating why I deserved death as opposed to mourning my life.
I am hyper-aware that my Blackness is a social “uniform” that functions in a way to set apart and alienate me as a black person. My blackness is the object of images, language and ideologies of me that are pre-determined and constructed because of my social uniform. “I am overdetermined from without.” It is the fact of blackness.
When we as black people turn on our television sets and watch a police officer chokehold a father to death for selling “loosies,” or shoots and kills a young black boy for playing with a toy gun in a park, we collectively experience a pain that the rest of society does not understand and cannot fully comprehend. They feel saddened while we mourn our humanity. We watch these visuals that are broadcasted endlessly and everywhere; they are modern day lynchings, and we are reminded that we live in a society that believes we do not matter. We carry the pain of those dehumanizing visuals and cries of “I can’t breathe” with us through our work days and into our beds before we sleep. And the pain of every video or story of these inhumane slayings that we learn of piles up; it piles up so high that they become taller than ourselves. It piles up until we forget how to breathe.
These statistics I have shared with you today do not consider the names and numbers of the countless black women, trans, queer, non-binary and non-gender conforming folk who are murdered at alarming rates, and whose deaths are never publicly recognized or collectively mourned. Hardly do the names of these people make it to public consciousness, if at all, or the all-male list of black victims that we continuously chant on the Internet and in our public protests. Even the “data” isn’t available for those who demand statistics, and who don’t believe that modern day anti-black racism exists: there are no existing accurate public resources that provide the numbers of how many queer and trans black people go missing or are murdered in both Canada and the USA.
For as long as black people have existed in the Americas, we have known improvisation, transcendence, and resilience. We continuously mobilize and strategize methods to challenge the system that works against us in efforts of finding black liberation. For as long as we have existed here, we have formulated black liberation movements: The Black Liberation Army, The Black Arts Movement, The Black Panthers, The Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, The Nation of Islam, and now Black Lives Matter. But we must be honest with ourselves about what black liberation has often looked like in the past and today: patriarchal, heteronormative, classist, cis-gendered, with a destructive focus on the humanization of black masculinity. We teach each other that black identity is singular, thus not inclusive. Our discussions of the dehumanization and invisibility of black life do not include the alarming realities of transphobia, homophobia, poverty, patriarchy, or mental health.
I feel that it is important for me to say that this is the primary reason why I feel nothing but unwavering and an unapologetic solidarity with Black Lives Matter Toronto: an organization that works relentlessly for an inclusive understanding of blackness that is queer, trans, gender non-conforming, non-binary, Muslim, and more.
A fight for black liberation will not succeed without love, support, compassion and, most importantly, understanding and (re)learning. Our black liberation movements will never fully succeed so long as we maintain its heteronormative, cis-gendered, ableist, classist, and patriarchal agendas. The validity of black life is not just about black men. Whether you’re behind the leaders of BLM-TO, donating funds to such movements, sharing statistics and information, writing—even if it’s knowledge-exchange through social media—we must actively be aware of our own privileges as we continue to combat the ongoing oppression against black people everywhere.
Black men must learn to actively understand how they contribute to a culture of patriarchy.
Black cis-men and cis-women must learn to actively understand how we contribute to a culture of transphobia.
Black heterosexually-identified folks must learn to actively understand how we contribute to a culture of homophobia.
We must stop allowing our collective definition of blackness to be understood as singular, because it is not. There are no binaries in Blackness. There is a multiplicity. There is infinity. And we must honour that. Learning to breathe again means learning to breathe together, like how we are breathing together in this room today.
Our mourning of black life should never be singular because we all matter. Black disabled lives, black trans lives, black incarcerated lives, black queer lives, black deaf lives, black immigrant lives, and black women lives all matter.As we continue to live in a state that actively works against us systematically and culturally, as it has for centuries, we must learn how to take care of each other because we are all that we have.
For as long as we continue to live under a state that actively chooses to disavow our humanity and believe that we do not matter, black death and black mourning will remain an agonizing reality. It will continue to chip away at our sanity, our livelihood, our families. This is how you slowly die here—if you are not killed first. With every new name that we learn of, every face that becomes painfully imprinted into our memories, we must remind ourselves that we matter… all while remembering how to breathe.