Baby, You're the Greatest

I’ll return to the Lost Months shortly, but today I want to focus on the here and now.

We lost someone this week. The Greatest. A man who knocked down people and racial barriers with equal alacrity and used sarcastic humor as the ranch dressing that allowed whites to stomach the freshly tossed salad of bitter truth that was existing in America within a brown body.

As a child of the eighties, I confess my level of engaging with Muhammad Ali was more as a Father than a fighter. As a muscular brown girl who would never be considered ‘dainty’, Laila Ali was an icon-- an attractive woman, sexy even, who could and would knock a bitch out. She existed on her own terms, KO-ing gender stereotypes in the way her father took on racism.

She was the woman I thought I could have been with the support of a loving father.

Not a boxer, mind you, I have rubbish hand-eye coordination, but a fighter, a woman who lived life on her own terms and was secure in her skin, flaws and all. Hollywood glamorized the relationship between ‘The Greatest’ and his baby girl to an almost Disneyesque degree, and I bought in hook, line, and sinker.

I have since had the opportunity to get to know my father. As the rose colored glasses came off, I learned the reality of Father-daughter relationships: no one is perfect, your parents are not superheroes, and a Father is still a man. And men tend to be dumb.

Well, you are. #sorrynotsorry.

I love my Dad. But I don’t idolize him. Although my father is not a three time heavyweight champion, he is a bit of a Hometown Hero. He plays piano at church, coaches pee wee football (in the south), and, along with my Grandmother, feeds the homeless every Saturday. He is a good person.

Yet he is far from my fairy tale vision of a perfect father. So far in fact, that at times it is difficult for me to reconcile the man others tell me about with the man I know. It’s not that he’s secretly a monster, it’s just that I’ve never seen him as a saint.

He’s just my Dad-- the guy who doesn’t call enough, Facebook bullies my boyfriends, drinks juice from the carton. He’s the guy who after one too many Margaritas will hit on the waitress-- in front of my stepmother (see? DUMB).

So which version of himself should a father be judged by? His truth or his legacy?

Last week my pastor’s father passed away. He preached a sermon on how all barriers to unity amongst the living disappear in the face of death (which you can listen to here). The gist of it is that death has a way of clarifying things for us; there are no Muslims or Christians, blacks or whites, lesbians or straight girls. There are only dying and dead.

Death reminds us of our own mortality. It inspires us to do something worth being remembered by when we are gone. It hurts, no matter if you lose a parent or child, spouse or sibling-- the separation is permanent. And it is agony. Yet it is in these times of common suffering that we come closest to King’s beloved community. By remembering our own pain we are able to better empathize with people who have values and backgrounds that are vastly different from our own.

I called my pastor to see how he was doing. In private we spoke about his father, the man, and how from an early age it had been impressed upon him to live up to his family name. Educational attainment, social activism, and human dignity were at the core of his familial expectations. Although we were decades apart, races apart, and raised completely differently, his daddy expected the same things of  him that mine does of me.

I thought again of my own father, whose last name I don’t share. I thought of Muhammad Ali, who threw away his family name in favor of one that honored his ancestral roots. I thought of my niece, whose father is incarcerated, and my other niece whose father is embroiled in a multi-state custody battle that allows him to see her during summers only.

Perhaps that is why Ali’s fathering inspired more admiration than his fighting in my young soul. In the Black community, fathers are just one more privilege many of us are forced to go without.

Yet whether by their presence or absence, our fathers shape the people we grow up to be. Their legacies become the building blocks for our children’s expectations. And when we lose them, a little piece of us dies too.

My heart goes out to Laila Ali in this moment, knowing that even as I grieve with her, as the world grieves with her, that we are not grieving the same person she is. We lost the legend, while she lost the man.

Regardless of what Muhammad Ali’s truth was, his legacy is one that his daughter can be proud of. He called on us to boldly confront the issues of our day-- to stand and fight injustice in its strongholds- the institutions that so enslave our minds that we stumble about ‘mentally dead’, spiritually defunct, and morally bankrupt.

Instead of giving up on understanding each other, Muhammad Ali called us to dig deeper, push harder, think bigger, and be greater.

If God in Her infinite wisdom is kind enough to give me forty-three more years on this earth, I hope I use mine half as well.

#RIP

Black Unicorns

Cleveland is experiencing a moment for which I have no words. We live in an age where white armed militants are deemed terrorists and black twelve year olds considered threats. The story of Cleveland is as singular as the story and legacy of structural, race delineated dominance for the purpose of controlling finances is anecdotal.

I have too many words for this moment. And many of them end in -er.

Alas, 2016 is a brand new year, my lovelies, and I do so try to keep my halo polished-- at least until Ostara.

I promised to choose change last year, and I’m sticking with it (at least until Beltane). That means no more complaining about problems without offering practical solutions.

I can’t solve Cleveland right now. To be honest, I can’t even talk about it right now. Tamir struck too close to my heart.

So while I work on getting myself back to optimistic and (somewhat) objective, I’m going to let you in on what drove me to share MYStory in the first place. But before I do that, Audre Lorde is going to give you the words I cannot:

“A Litany for Survival

For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision

crucial and alone

for those of us who cannot indulge

the passing dreams of choice

who love in doorways coming and going

in the hours between dawns

looking inward and outward

at once before and after

seeking a now that can breed

futures

like bread in our children's mouths

so their dreams will not reflect

the death of ours:

For those of us

who were imprinted with fear

like a faint line in the center of our foreheads

learning to be afraid with our mother's milk

for by this weapon

this illusion of some safety to be found

the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

For all of us

this instant and this triumph

We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid

it might not remain

when the sun sets we are afraid

it might not rise in the morning

when our stomachs are full we are afraid

of indigestion

when our stomachs are empty we are afraid

we may never eat again

when we are loved we are afraid

love will vanish

when we are alone we are afraid

love will never return

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive.”

― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems

My name is Ajah Hales and I have been a published author for twenty-one years. This is no small feat, considering I'm only thirty.

Although I knew practically from the moment I picked up a book that I wanted to become a writer, it took me a while to find my voice. I spent most of elementary school composing mediocre poetry, progressed by secondary school into sophomoric narrative dramas, and by college was firmly ensconced in the incense-and-patchouli world of Spoken Word.

I was art imitating life, forcing my talent into ready made molds which fit my perception of what a writer should be. Fortunately, as an English major, I had plenty of opportunities to learn the difference between mien and metier.

I took a break from writing in my mid twenties to travel the world and live the seldom glamorous, oft dangerous life of a community organizer. Living and working with individuals who had been marginalized into the fringes of mainstream society helped me gain a level of maturity, compassion, and depth that was previously lacking in both myself and my writing. I came into an understanding that the changes necessary to create an egalitarian American society were in direct juxtaposition to the values that epitomize the American Dream.

I realized that my peculiar combination of life experience and writing prowess qualified me to do something that no one else could-- to speak in a voice no one else could use.

I recognized that I could reach more people from my computer than I could knocking on doors and marching in the street, so I stopped organizing and started creating change.

Now I blog about life's quirks, quandaries, and crossroads at MYStory:  A Blog Outside the Box. I write brutal truths packaged in palatable bytes on Twitter (@glcworldtalk), and still, on occasion, knock on doors and march in the street.

Hey, at least it beats the alternative:

"This is slavery, not to speak one's thought" ~Euripides