Читать книгу Angels with Dirty Faces - Walidah Imarisha - Страница 10

Kakamia created a piece of art, a bio/prose/poem hybrid, “Frayed Subconscious.” A handkerchief, stained in paint, kisses and rips of ink. He told me it was part of the evidence against him, and it was. Perhaps it was not evidence from his legal trial, but it was evidence by the state, brought against him at the time of his birth, and at the time of his indictment. The poetic vulnerable masculinity of the piece was part of the mounting case that would eventually sentence him to life in poverty: a life in racism, a life spent more behind prison walls than outside of them.

“This handkerchief was the last piece of freedom,” the art piece reads. “It held the forensics to convict and heard the whispers of innocence to acquit a sixteen-year-old accused hit man. It traveled through county jails, courthouses, and state prisons. It consoled the fears of California’s most infamous criminals and masterminds, and has soaked up the blood of prison riot victims.”

Poetry can exquisitely change lives. It can sustain life in the worst of circumstances. And all poetry is a lie. Facts are not poetic enough to reveal the rhythm of a human heart. We thank poetry for its inaccuracies—imperfect cracks on the face of beauty through which the light is able to shine through—word to poet Leonard Cohen.

So when Kakamia told me he met Mac—whom he called his godfather— in New York, through his uncle who had connections to the Westies and numbers rackets, I understood the need to create ties and community. When Kakamia said he would leave his Crown Heights, Brooklyn neighborhood to run errands for his uncle, I understood the desire in him to be tied to something more powerful, more terrifying, than his own thin brown body.

I asked Mac about my brother the first time I met him.

“Great kid,” he replied, beaming. “He’s got a good heart, Kakamia does.”

Kakamia was a man of a thousand names as well. Names are a precious and powerful part of your identity. Knowing a name means you have a piece of that person. He had his birth name, signifying the child who continued getting up, mouth tasting like dirt and metal, when life knocked him to the ground. A prison ID number, an absence of self so a system can get on with its business of making commodities out of human beings without guilt. He was known as “New York” to people a continent away, where a Puerto Rican was a novelty item. “New York” shared in the cool of power, tinged with danger, that the city embodied. He was Kakamia Jahad Imarisha to those who wanted to see the man he so desperately tried to be, the man that, most of the time, he succeeded in being.

“Have you seen his art?” Mac continued. “Phenomenal, just amazing. I wish I could draw like that, I’m telling you.”

“Was he always like that?” I asked tentatively, eggshells crunching under my voice. “Was he like that in New York?”

“Oh I didn’t know him in New York. I only met him when I came out here. But we’ve known each other a long time out here. He’s a really good kid, not like some of these knuckle heads around here.”

I have come to learn everything I need of the truth I have now. It lives in my brother’s eyes, in his strong talented hands flaked by sun and harsh soap. I gather pieces of my brother’s truth and string them like beads to create a necklace, a talisman of protection.

* * *

I know prison is harsh, brutal, soul-crushing, and above all monotonous. The sheer boredom of being trapped with the same people every day, of having limited options—do I watch TV, listen to music, work out, write a letter, read a book, then do it all again tomorrow?

A prisoner told me upon his release, “It’s not the guards that got to me—I learned to shut myself off from them. It wasn’t the other inmates; most of them were cool and you learn early how to avoid the ones who aren’t. What got me lying in my bunk at night—staring at the ceiling scrawled with drawings and messages from past prisoners—was knowing that I had to get up and do the same thing every day, for 2,237 days. That’s when I felt myself slipping away: when I thought of it like that.”

* * *

I know the name Kakamia chose for himself, because I am the one who picked the name for him. I know what a sacred gift that is. A new name reshapes who you are and who you are to become.

I was given my name by my mother’s boyfriend at the time, a Black prisoner in California as well, in a relationship that consisted almost wholly of written correspondence with an occasional phone call thrown in. It was not the first, nor the last, relationship my mother would have with someone incarcerated. My mother has never been overtly political (except in her very vocal patriotic support of the U.S. military, in which most of our family is or was enlisted) but has always worked to support the voices of those who were marginalized and oppressed. Perhaps this is where I get my contradictions.

My mother’s boyfriend wrote to me after getting permission from her, wanting to introduce himself. We wrote to each other over several years, even after he and my mother were not together anymore. He was a Black father, filling the void of my own absentee father, whose yearly Christmas cards had long ago dried up by that point. My mother’s boyfriend was my mentor: my sensei in the ways of Blackness. He introduced me to deeper understandings of organizing in the U.S. by Black folks, and brought me the vastness of Africa. For once, I did not feel caught between two worlds, the white and the Black, as alien and foreign to both. For the first time, I felt I could claim my Blackness easily. There was a community waiting for me and finally I had found a guide to show me the way.

Even though my mother did not understand my need, she supported it as best she could. She felt my hunger for an identity I could carry comfortably in the crook of my arm, and she knew I would have to find that on my own. But while I searched history for my identity, a huge part of who I was stood in the kitchen on tired feet, cooking me dinner every night after working long hours, and praying quietly at night for me.

When I was fourteen years old, in honor of Kwanzaa, my mother’s boyfriend sent me my gift: a choice of three African names—a chance to be reborn. It was no contest for me. I slipped on Walidah Imarisha. Walidah means “newborn” in Arabic; Imarisha is “strength” in Swahili. I felt the name slide against my flesh like a second skin.

Like so many of us stolen children of Africa, searching for names and birthrights, I was trying to find something to make me into more than I was, to see what’s been inside of me all the time.

I have since learned the importance of names in prison, and of being able to choose what you answer to, in a place where you are a string of numbers barked at you all day long. One prisoner I wrote was incarcerated under the wrong name. He had someone else’s ID on him at the time of his arrest. That name (the false one on the ID) was the name under which he was arrested, tried, convicted, and held for fifteen years. He tried, every step of the way, to tell them who he really was. To this day, if you send a letter to his real name, instead of his alias, it will come back “No Such Inmate.” He has been stripped of the name his mother sang softly to him when he was a child.

So I took the responsibility and honor of renaming my brother seriously: as serious as the grave. I studied my Swahili name list, rolling words around in my mouth, reading and rereading definitions, and juxtaposing different combinations for the flavor of culture they brought.

Kakamia Jahad. The staccato of the hard consonants with the healing salve of rolling vowels. Kakamia: Swahili for “tireless,” never giving up, obstinate. Stubborn muthafucka. Jahad: derived from jihad: a word that strikes fear into Western populations. Misunderstood. It does not mean holy war. It means to struggle, to strive, to try one’s hardest to do what is correct.

Three years ago, Kakamia added my last name, Imarisha, to his. “It would be an honor to carry your last name, Wa. We’re family, after all, and this will show the world,” Kakamia’s voice crackled through the static of the prison phone line.

* * *

I know he moved to California, with his mother, his brothers and sisters—full siblings with different daddies, like my own. I know he was a manchild when he came to a state full of sun, where his mother hoped that the absence of concrete might help him grow straight and tall.

* * **

I know my brother’s body is landscaped with tattoos.

You can read his history, lived and reimagined, on his skin. He is a book written by an illegal prison ink gun made out of a hollowed-out broken pen tube, a needle pricked into one end. Blood clots around every word and image.

A grim reaper, scythe in hand, dominates his left arm. From his gang days he told me, when he was “Mr. Grim.” I have a picture of him at his junior prom. He is fifteen years old, body jutting out at all the awkward angles of that age, stuffed into a black tuxedo with a pink cummerbund and tie, to match his date’s Cinderella dress. His arms are wrapped around her, and his square jaw juts forward with a toothy grin. Her eyes dancing with a pink smile that matches the bows in her curly hair. I stare at this picture and wonder if the grim reaper is there as well, swathed in the pink cummerbund. Is he smiling for the picture too?

Bruce Lee is on his leg—“That’s one baaaaaad nigga!” Kakamia bellowed. He was completely unfazed when I reminded him Bruce, though amazing, was in fact Chinese, and also he should stop using the word “nigga” so much.

Another tattoo features an amateurish portrait of the rapper Da Brat, a now-forgotten splash in the pop culture pool. The original ink bled; the tattoo has faded over the twenty years it has lived on his skin. “Yeah, it’s gotten all fucked up… I’m gonna get that covered up; I just gotta come up with something,” he mused.

Like his life, he revises his tattoos, keeping the images and ink that still breathe true, and erasing facts that have turned into lies through the insistent passage of time.

Many of my brother’s tattoos have come after his incarceration. It is illegal for prisoners to tattoo themselves. I have met multiple men that have let my brother paint their flesh while on the inside. Some prison tats are crude and simplistic. Others, like Kakamia’s, are elegant and full of life. Kakamia brings the lightest part of him to his work, his imagination skimming their skin: sunlight on a warm lake.

Kakamia does his own tattoos when the only other tattoo artist he trusts gets sent to the hole. He feels the bite of the needle, creating hours of tedium where attention cannot wander, the stinging kiss a penance and a gift.

He bleeds for his art. He bleeds to remake himself.

The ink is created from a ballpoint pen if you want the quick and dirty way. The “professional” prison ink is composed of soot from burning toilet paper, wood, Styrofoam, and something like black chess pieces. These are mixed with rubbing alcohol and water; small stones are added in the mixing process. It is the introduction of extreme heat that pushes a metamorphosis to occur. This furtive prison cell chemistry experiment is more complex than any class tests I conducted in college courses.

The expanse of Kakamia’s skin has become crowded with the remains of things burnt. It is full body armor: arms to back, legs to tops of feet. Ivy curls around fingers, the eyes of a portrait of a political martyr stare out of the top of Kakamia’s skull. The martyr chose death over jail. When I die, I wear nothing but the tats on my back. From Kakamia’s poem “Last Stand.” The tat on his back screams, “Fuck the World” across his shoulder blades in Old English (malt) lettering.

Almost a decade ago, doctors cut out cancer that had settled near his heart, two inches under his right nipple. It had been growing in him for some time, they said—it was just now big enough to notice. They do not know how he got cancer. “The environment you grew up in probably contained toxins in large quantities,” the doctor said, telling him something he knew his entire life. His whole life has been carcinogenic.

His scar is camouflaged by the West African Adinkra symbol for eternal energy. Kakamia no longer hides his scars, but paints them brightly.

In the middle of his chest is a bullseye, and an edict: “No warning shots.”

Kakamia has the symbol for the revolutionary Puerto Rican indepentistas, Los Macheteros, swaddling his Adam’s apple. Their blood-red star has a machete through it, surrounded by an outline of the island of Puerto Rico.

“Cuz you know how your hermano get down!” he shouted joyfully the first time I saw it.

Kakamia and I share a tattoo—the Adinkra symbol for change and adaptability—his at the base of his neck, mine on my left shoulder. It was the first tattoo I ever got, a reminder to me not to fear what the future brings—that change is constant, and rigidity is the enemy. The tattoo is a reminder to Kakamia that such a thing as change exists beyond the same three walls and set of barred teeth greeting his eyes every day. As sci-fi writer Octavia Butler wrote, “God is change.”

I do not believe in god. I struggle to believe in change. When I got my tattoo I was terrified. I wasn’t scared of leaving permanent marks on my body—the multiple cigarette burns and shallow razor slashes on my forearms, breasts, and abdomen were evidence of that. When I pushed the smoldering mouth of the cigarette to my skin, it was power I smelled burning. That was pain I could control as a teenager: scars I chose to carry rather than those that had been forced upon me. I was scared of uncontrollable pain.

In the tattoo parlor, I shook in the chair. The woman, covered almost completely in dayglo tattoos and endless piercings, readied her instruments. My friend was there, holding my hand, breathing for me. I had planned the design small, slightly larger than a dime, stacking the odds in my favor of making it through.

“You ready?” the artist asked, needle already purring.

The first kiss was like the sensual gnawing of my first lover’s teeth on my skin.

“Is that it?” I asked her, incredulous.

“Yep, that’s as bad as it’s going to get,” she said over the hum of my identity being etched onto me. I started laughing.

Kakamia loves to tell the story of me laughing through my first tattoo. It proves how tough and baaaad his little sister is. Like Bruce Lee.

“Now we’re connected by ink.”

Kakamia has a portrait of me tattooed over his heart, two afro puffs perched like dark planets on the side of my head. I have seen a photograph of this tattoo. I am not allowed to see the tattoo itself, of course, because we only meet in visiting rooms, under the watchful eyes of guards.

I hate the picture of me he chose. Taken in my friend’s car when I was eighteen, I was preparing to step out into the rain, back into my apartment, into the relationship I wanted so desperately to escape—the one I finally did escape—with a bruised wrist and a fear of eyes watching me through windows. I turned to say goodbye and got a face full of flash. The picture is a torn girl trying to paste herself into a woman, all unfinished edges and messy wet glue.

I love living on my brother’s skin; I just wish it was a wholer me that resided there.

Kakamia’s name is a bracelet encompassing the span of my wrist. My third tattoo and my last. So far. A birthday surprise for Kakamia. After he immortalized me on his skin, every time we would talk, he would joke, “So when you getting my face tattooed on you? Only fair you know.”

I did not want his face frozen. It would be only one of the countless hims I have seen over the years. It would be a fact, and it would be a lie.

So I chose words, as I always have: the letters I gave him, strung together with poetry.

I ventured deep into North Philly to an art studio, up rickety, dusty stairs to a room plastered with pin-up girls on cars and death metal bands thrusting their manhood out. The artist was a dreadlocked Black man with heavy eyes, I hoped, from lack of sleep and not weed.

He tried to talk to me while I gritted my teeth, the needle digging into the delicate bone of my wrist until it felt like sawing tendons. My boyfriend Dovid was with me. We had broken apart but we were still pretending to be whole, not so much for outsiders—they could all clearly see our cracks—but for ourselves. He put his hands on my shoulder and I jumped, causing a tiny line coming down from the second “a.” Permanent. Like so many little mistakes.

On the next visit, I proudly rolled my sleeve back and held my illustrated wrist in front of Kakamia’s face. These were ties more than blood: ties of choice.

He dragged me by my arm, showing everyone in the visiting room—prisoner, visitor, and guard alike: “Look at that, that’s my name, fool! I told y’all my baby sister loves her big brother, didn’t I? Look at that, what did I tell you? That’s my name!”

My brother was a graffiti artist, which is to say an outlaw. If you could read the wild styles of his youth, you could speak the words of the kamikaze graffiti tattoos on his flesh. Growing up in New York, where graf artists hung out of windows to put their names in gravity-defying places, Kakamia has become his own blank wall, readied for bombing (the graffiti term for covering a wall that isn’t yours).

I can see him, tagging his name on walls, scaling fences into train yards to spend hours sucking in paint fumes, the only sounds the shhhh of the aerosol can, the rattle of the Krylon and your own hot breath in your ears. It is a way to leave your mark on the world: proof you were there. An undersized, skinny ghetto mule-atto mixed-up kid who never had enough money to get by. They can’t erase you. Even if they sand blast you off, you’ll come back. Immortality.

As he dragged me around and showed off my flesh, I was proud to realize I was his latest tag, his latest cry of resistance to a world intent on scrubbing him clean out of existence.

* * *

I know my brother sent me a clip from a paper several years ago of a high school senior—a promising star basketball player—who was killed in a car accident. My seventeen-year-old son, the words wept: Thearon. I had never heard of a son before. Kakamia’s brother had raised Thearon as his own son. I had never heard of a brother before.

Thearon had not seen Kakamia; he had only heard of him as an uncle gone bad, an example not to be followed. My complexly beautiful, wonderfully frustrating, and infinitely loving brother was reduced to a convict stereotype. His son was reduced to a grainy picture in a paper, a list of accolades, and overwhelming regret. Thearon had Kakamia’s wide jaw, his big forehead, and his clear eyes.

I know so many family members who have stood by their incarcerated loved one for decades. Unwaveringly sending much-needed packages, traveling hours for visits, accepting exorbitant collect phone calls. They redefine words like commitment, sacrifice, and love.

But sometimes blood family step back when the police knock at the door, or they wander during the trial, or they run after the sentence is handed down. They collapse under the biggest loss, already on the ropes from continual body blows. They drift through years that move so slowly behind bars, and so quickly out here. They run from the shame society force-feeds them, as if prison is a contagion, a plague; as if the whole family—the whole house—must be quarantined to stop the disease from spreading. They bear the tedium of not even being able to answer simple questions about their loved ones: “Where in California does your son live?” There is no way to answer this. No one truly “lives” in a prison; they are just there, marking time.

In other cases, birth families were never there to begin with, and this is part of the reason for the bars and the rage, which seem to go together for too many young people of color.

Family is a precious and scarce commodity in prison.

The next time I saw Kakamia, he had Thearon tattooed on his forearm in bold poignant strokes. I know he did it with his own hand, picking his scars to carry and his sins to atone for.

* * *

I know Kakamia thought he lost his mother while in prison. The smiling woman with Ireland at the corners of her lips and in her halo of dusty curls. The prison callously told him she died. Kakamia mourned for lost time and unspoken words.

He added her name to the tally of losses on his skin.

Then the impossible call came years later: she was actually alive. The prison had informed him incorrectly when she had a heart attack.

She told Kakamia when they did speak that she wasn’t able to write or visit him and let him know she was alive, because she had severely advanced arthritis. While this is true, I think a lifetime of tension, two decades of bars, and years of silence between them were also the cause.

Kakamia called me, in a hushed voice said, “My mom’s alive, Wa, she’s alive. These bastards have been lying to me all this time.”

I could imagine him touching the tattoo he had added of his mother’s name, written in the same urgent, heartrending strokes as Thearon, right above it.

It is an incredible story—an unbelievable story—only if you have not been in close contact with the prison system, and do not know the capriciousness, the callousness, and the incompetence with which things are run. I have seen a guard cut a visit short because he did not like the “aggressive” look the prisoner gave him when the guard walked by. Guards search cells for contraband, crumpling children’s pictures, ripping pages out of books, demolishing letters from loved ones, only to find nothing. I have seen a woman wait for two and a half hours to visit her husband, only to finally be told that he had been transferred to another facility inextricably, for no reason, the night before. She had driven six hours.

Prison is a site of pain, and unnecessary psychological games justified by the need to “keep the inmates on their toes, so they don’t know what’s going on.” It is like a vase, jarred by running careless hands, toppling to the floor and spraying a pattern of heartbreak underfoot.

* * *

I know Kakamia was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. I read his paperwork, read about the mother murdered, the father who miraculously survived, and the two older white co-defendants. I know when he was convicted, sentenced to fifteen to life. I know he has done ten more years than the minimum, which he was promised by his trial lawyer. I know the uncertainty of when, of if, is potentially fatal. There has been a countless string of parole hearings, all stamped denied. Not this time; try again in two years. Better luck next time, in three years. Fifteen to life is counted in decades, not years, months, or days.

When a friend of mine came home from prison, he told me that when he had a year left, he placed a deck of cards on his bunk. Every week, he would move one card over to a new pile. One week down, 51 more to go. For his last month and a half, he moved a card a day. For his last two days, it was a card an hour: anything to see time move, the end approaching, hope growing as the stack of cards shrinks.

Fifteen to life. No deck of cards. No countdown in my brother’s future.

Preparation for the parole hearings is always the same: gather letters and secure job offers, housing offers, and drug and alcohol support programs. Who do I know that would impress a parole board with their support? What can I say to make them see the man I know my brother to be? Every time, I go in search of the secret magic words. I spend hours drafting my letter to the parole board, a letter they probably never even read. The immense responsibility I put on myself is comforting; if I have the power to say the right thing to set him free, then I at least have some kind of power.

But the decision is the same. It is always the same. And it always feels worse than imagined.

The state of California passed new laws around parole. The longest denial they could give before was two years. Now the shortest denial they are allowed to give is three years. Prisoners are being denied parole and given 15 year hits, the slang for the time a prisoner has to wait until their next parole hearing. Hit: slang that is so true, it hurts. It is being told you will not even have a chance to walk outside of prison walls for a decade and a half, and that your dreams must be put on hold while graduations and births and deaths pass you by. It is a blow to the face and a punch to the gut.

It is a hit not just to the prisoner. We all take that hit: loved ones, family members, and communities that will eventually welcome back the vast majority of people in prison right now—ninety-five percent, says the Bureau of Justice. Many of these people will be permanently scarred black and blue from so many hits.