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In Between Around and Beyond

It's grief season for me, and the week before the anniversary of my dad's death is always the hardest - everything about Thanksgiving triggers my grief.

It was our main family holiday.

We had no family traditions more consistent and persistent than thanksgiving- where we would invite 50+ international grad students to our home for a fully home-cooked meal that my mom, sister, and I would prep for extensively.

The driving force, of course, being my parents' memory of being young and in a new country, trying to manage academia and marriage and children. 

Trying to do this while writing and teaching and grading? Sometimes it feels like it shouldn't be a priority. But taking the one day to rest and spend family time is the perfect refresher before the end of the semester. It was a reminder of why they worked so hard in the first place.

Holidays are so locally cultural, and if you're new and don't know it's coming, you just have to hope someone "in the culture" will take you in and show you what it's about. Otherwise you're alone and isolated while others get to bask in community and love.

There was a professor who did that for my parents-- invited them into the experience while they were in the middle of building themselves. When my parents had the means, they decided they wanted to do that for their students.

We would start cleaning the house a week early (with my dad, hilariously, vacuuming stairs that would not even be used or seen).

We would scan our lives for anyone who might need a place. My dad's grad students in English and African Studies. My mom's law students. Bola and I would pick peers and TAs of ours to invite as well. We would cook 3-4 turkeys. We would prepare enough food to send everyone home with trays full of leftovers. We would plan seating and music and decor. It was a family production.

For the people that wonder why my nuclear family can pull off any event on any scale together- this is why. Practice of course, but between work and school and life, we made space for this ritual.

We took some years off, but not the year he died. In 2019, we put on as big of an event as ever. I took some more ownership over the music. My dad gave a slightly different speech.

He always spoke, while the food was ready and everyone was smelling the love we cooked, about the land we were on and how it had been plundered. How any bounty we experienced had an unspeakable cost. But the year he died, as if anticipating this as his final broadcast, he looked at everyone and told us how we had the right to take up space. That as not-yet Americans, or new-Americans, we had every right to exist, to contribute, to make ourselves whole here.

He died the Saturday following that Thanksgiving. I was the last person to speak to him earlier that morning and I was the one to find him.

So, I'm sure it makes sense why this time of year feels particularly empty now. Life in general feels emptier without him, but around Thanksgiving, my body prepares itself for a tradition I can't bear to uphold yet. And instinctively, my body braces for tragedy. I can so rarely rest or sleep or relax. My body tenses up and I lose hours every day to anxiety management.

Recently, I've reached a somewhat awkward stage of acceptance of my grief. it feels better than the shock I experienced initially. It feels better than the guilt I've felt for not becoming more of myself faster, so he could witness. It feels better than the pressure of trying to become him. But at the same time, his death is as inescapable as ever in acceptance. 

I do not have any more lofty goals that would make grief easier to bear because I know nothing will. The gifts he gave me will continue to fade. My memory of his voice and his gait will become less reliable. The grief is now mundane, and simply a part of my character. It is here to stay.

So now, I leave myself breadcrumbs. I create new things that are rooted in my grief, so that as some artifacts and experiences fade, others are just being born. This is as close as I can get to keeping him with me.

I've done major projects (my apartment, some essay writing, some fashion/textile design), but I'm also seeing the value in the incredibly small creations. Most recently, I had the opportunity to design a travel credit card, and I used it to commemorate him.

My dad was a traveler. He was the most well traveled in our family, and the ease I travel with now is based on watching him navigate any space.

On the card, I chose a hot air balloon icon - because I was notoriously obsessed with hot air balloons as a child, and was routinely teased for as long as I can remember about how I would relentlessly beg to be in one.

Earlier this year, my mom revealed to me that when I was 2 years old and we were visiting Paris, my dad was actually going to humor me. He had pulled my mom aside to suggest he call their bank in the US to transfer the funds needed for us to go on this hot air balloon ride together. My mom refused, because we didn't have the money. When she told me this, I was shocked and felt so thwarted (28 years later 😂).

I had always felt so dismissed about this dream growing up. Being the youngest and therefore fully unaware of the dynamics of age at play, I just felt like I was never taken as seriously and I wanted to be. To find out that my dad even intended to take me- that he saw this desire of mine to be in the sky as relatable and worthy of investment- just made me feel so much more validated and seen than ever.

So as basic as it may seem, the hot air balloon to me now signifies that aspiration, that almost-shared experience of seeing the world together.

Next to the hot air balloon, I chose some of my dad's words. In his book on Fela, he wrote quite a poetic dedication. I have read it many times and it strikes me differently every time. The line "in between around and beyond" has always echoed strongly, and somehow fits in this travel context, perhaps a life context, of continually searching for new perspectives, of never being satisfied with the perspectives already experienced. Maybe that's the common drive he noticed in me when I would stare at the sky and ask to be transported anywhere and everywhere.

This card, the design, the reminder of his poetic spirit in this new context... It's not the same thing as having him here, but it is *of* him, it is new, and it has a whole life to live.

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Home (2020)

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Autumn escape to the Catkills, NY

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Art Omi, in upstate NY

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Sohrab and Madaline are engaged! Oct 2021

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Valentine’s Day 2021 Song: Black Magic Hour - Jidenna

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I keep asking the 13 year old me for creative advice. She did everything as if she already knew that 'wanting' was a life condition, not a phase. She made peace with it, she made art with it, and she followed her wants wherever they led. She didn't look away when she couldn't have something, but bravely looked closer still.

As I seek advice from this earlier self, I'm inspired by the evidence I've found of how genuinely and openly I believed in the abundance of love, even as I navigated spaces where I found none.

Sonnet 132 was my favorite sonnet when I was 13. I was taken by the metaphor of pity as this anatomical grief, and how grief and blackness intertwined were anointed as beauty. I was wholly uninterested in academic interpretations--there was no truer truth than the one I had chosen.

I can't say that I've encountered any truer grief than when my father passed away. November 30, 2019 was somatically carved into me, and now my grief oozes out of my pores and slinks through my digestive tract and binds my muscles and joints. Anatomical grief doesn't feel quite so beautiful in practice.

And still, there's this elemental version of me who decided everything should be beautiful even as it hurts. While this mindset has often prevented me from saving myself unnecessary pain, it has also brazenly cast every torturous moment as ultimately poetic. It's this version of me who sees grief as a privilege.

As in, it is a privilege to have felt so loved and cherished and celebrated as a child. It is a privilege to use that love as the source of the love I desperately want to show others. It is a privilege to see once and subsequently expect the best from the world, it is a privilege to be dissatisfied with any less. It is a privilege to be heartbroken until everyone has this privilege.

December 1st is likely to feel like my new year's day ad infinitum. So like every new year, I've been reflecting and setting intentions and re-committing to choosing faith over mere hope. I'm re-declaring my belief that everything I want I will have. That what I choose is available to me, somehow. That every dose or deluge of grief I encounter is simply poetry to beautify my journey.

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Egungun Festival, Madison, WI

April 2018

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New Orleans, Mardi Gras 2019

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Iceland

Jan 2019

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Sunrise in Paris

Aug 2018

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Lauren & Nate Engagement Photos

February 2017

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Reparations 101

Juneteenth 2020

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They say #chaisolation, we say it’s #adda regardless

April 30, 2020

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Oko Oba @ Dusk

Sept 2017

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Madison, WI April 2017

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Pleasures in Rebirth

When I first heard the theme for UW-Madison’s African Cultural Studies Department conference, I was impressed, and proud. Over the past year, in circles of black Americans and in queer black spaces, I’ve sat in the lamentation that most previous representation of ourselves had been of pain, and joined in the celebration of sudden complexity of representation, seen through the works of creators like Barry Jenkins, Donald Glover, Solange Knowles and more. These creators did not avoid pain, but they also refused to deny what pleasures exist in blackness, and for black people. They presented encompassing joy in the same breath as their calls to action, which is to represent blackness more authentically than a thousand slave films and slapstick minstrel comedies.

A conference on Pleasure and the Pleasurable in Africa and the African Diaspora, too, gives dimension to a study that does not often linger on the more positively encoded reflexive motivations that exist for Africans. Pain and fear define motivations of peoples and cultures, but so does pleasure, enjoyment, and a sense of morality.

This renaissance in black art and study reveals a bright passage through the current institutional state of blackness in America. My depression wanes slightly with each burst of black joy and vitality that I witness, just enough to survive this more brutal winter of American livelihood.

(note: I am one of the lucky ones, to come away scathed only by depression.)

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I can’t help but dwell on the idea that people are places. These days I feel like a world traveler.

As I dwell on new experiences, budding connections and which people count as home, I take equal time to reflect on those foul places I never intend on returning, and those other places to which I’ve preemptively destroyed the decaying bridge (whether I intend to reconstruct it or not).

If people are places, I am constantly exploring and re-exploring and creating new homes, and trying not to abandon any. I’m picking up emotional memories that tell more vivid stories of myself than of places visited. I am building a nostalgia for fleeting moments in cognitive time.

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Today, on Easter, I took a walk in a neighborhood I’ve known for over 15 years. It was a sunny, cloudless day, and I walked to the tune of the new Kendrick Lamar album DAMN. I stood under a water tower that represents the highest land point in the city, and I stood at the end of a driveway to a church with a steeple that I’ve never entered. Both seemed much less immense than my memory had led me to believe. I couldn’t tell you if I’m more different than these places in the time that has passed.

I walked as close as I could manage to the bridge that used to take me to the mall, to the movie theatre, to Walgreens, and to my former therapist. It was torn down earlier this year, and is currently being rebuilt. In the down-time I’ve been forced to find new paths, or to settle on new destinations.

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If people are places, the pleasure in travel is in the return home I am planting wherever the wind blows I am growing only where I find water